Seed dispersal through wind, water or animals is a crucial process for forest renewal and biodiversity preservation. In the Atlantic Forest, a new study showed that the amount of forest in the landscape surrounding an area and the amount of rain are the main factors responsible
Wildfires are burning in North America and Europe. Deadly heat waves have parked over cities and the world's oceans are the hottest ever recorded for this time of year. A strengthening El Niño is forecast to be off-the-charts, spiking global temperatures and warping weather all
The power of social influence could be key to changing attitudes and behaviors around climate change, according to a new study by researchers at the Center for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). The team examined the role of social influence in accelerating
The last time you had a cold sore, you might have fretted about how long it would hang around. Perhaps you avoided reflective surfaces. It's unlikely you worried about dying from it.
Vegetable oils serve as critical feedstocks for biofuels and bioproducts by providing energy-dense hydrocarbon molecules. Some plants have evolved divergent enzyme sets to produce high-value unusual fatty acids with novel chain lengths or functional groups.
The value of basic science in insect biology is no more evident than when a crisis arises involving a devastating insect pest like the New World screwworm, says University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum. In a 2016 essay in the journal Science, Berenbaum wrote
Economics shapes many aspects of our daily lives, from the prices we pay to the policies governments adopt. Yet many of the ideas taught as universal principles of economics emerged from a narrow historical context and have rarely been examined through a decolonial lens.
People who experience greater hardship throughout their lives may become more susceptible to conspiracy theories when those experiences lead them to see the world as fundamentally unfair, according to new research.
A trove of recent articles bemoan the collapse in recreational reading among younger Americans, with COVID-related reading declines, artificial intelligence and social media often described as causes.
East Africa's shrinking mountain glaciers on three peaks in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania will soon be no more. The 2025 State of the Climate in Africa report (page 13) estimates that the ice areas on Mount Kenya, the continent's second-highest peak, have shrunk 96% in the past
Bull sharks have a slight preference for spending time with their relatives, new research shows.
A research team led by professor Yousung Jung from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University College of Engineering has developed a new catalyst design principle that suppresses the hydrogen evolution reaction, which interferes with
The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.
University of Queensland research has shown microbes could give Australian-grown chocolate an edge in the global market. Working with growers in Far North Queensland, scientists found the cocoa fermentation process may have a bigger influence on the flavor of chocolate than the
A cat-training program for children with developmental disabilities fostered healthy behaviors in children, strengthened relationships between children and their family cats and improved cats' social behavior, a new study published in the journal Animals has found.
Groundwater pumped to irrigate cannabis crops in California's Emerald Triangle can cause some streams that normally run year-round to dry up entirely during summer, say researchers from Simon Fraser University, the University of California, Berkeley and the United States
A study published in the Journal of Political Economy provides the first causal evidence that improving sleep can directly enhance academic performance.
"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" turns organic web production into a superpower. In the 2026 film, Tom Holland's character, Peter Parker, begins producing webbing inside his body and shooting it from his wrists, rather than firing synthetic web fluid from the wrist-mounted
One of the most famous and intriguing results of quantum mechanics is the finding that fundamental particles, such as electrons, cannot be pinned down to one single location. Instead, a particle is described by its "wavefunction," which allows researchers to derive probability
Nearly two centuries of maize-based agriculture in the U.S. Midwest has halved soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks compared with tallgrass prairies native to the region. Replacing annual maize/soy cropping with perennial bioenergy grasses may partially reverse these resulting SOC
A research team led by Professor Dong-Yeun Koh of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, in collaboration with Professor T. Alan Hatton's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developed an electrochemical dissolved ocean carbon removal
Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are often described as a "fifth state of matter": a quantum state in which many particles lose their individual identities and behave as one collective object. For more than 60 years, researchers have sought to create such condensates from
More than a year after the Palisades and Eaton fires, many residents are still asking: Is my yard contaminated? What about the beach? And what should I do if there is contamination?
Wastewater treatment is a critical issue for global environmental protection and public health. Researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have recently achieved a major breakthrough with the discovery of a novel oxidant-free electrocatalytic
YCNCC Science Communications Fellow Samantha Tracy recently sat down with Wong to discuss the influence of soil fertility on tropical forests and their responses to global change. The study is published in the journal New Phytologist.
Using continuous imagery from NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, scientists predicted the near-Earth arrival of a solar eruption to within 30 minutes in an initial proof-of-concept test. The results, presented Tuesday at the Committee on
Australia's unique animal species are in sharp decline, with more than 40 mammal extinctions over the past 238 years. This atrocious mammal conservation record is the worst in the world.
Scientists from Rice University in the U.S. have developed a way to precisely tune the temperature inside a trapped-ion simulator. The breakthrough means they will be able to run quantum simulations at precise temperatures that better reflect real-world conditions.
Sudden, hard-to-explain market gyrations involving billions of dollars are often triggered by a lack of transparency, new academic research suggests.
Deep in the forests of North Sumatra, Indonesia, lives the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), the world's rarest great ape. Fewer than 800 individuals remain, confined to the Batang Toru ecosystem, a landscape that is also home to other rare species like Sumatran tigers,
A new study from the University of Kansas complicates the picture of primates living in North America some 55 million years ago during the Eocene, a warm period that allowed mammals to diversify quickly.
A research team led by Kazuyoshi Murata has discovered that virus-like particles (VLPs) of human norovirus genotype GII.3 are not structurally rigid, but can adopt two distinct conformational states, similar to those previously reported for murine norovirus.
Some speed-reading advocates claim that with proper training (outlined in many popular books and YouTube videos) or the use of special apps, it's possible to increase your reading rate to 1,000 words per minute or more.
For more than 60 years, evolutionary biologists have debated whether a unique genetic system found in ants, bees and wasps helps explain one of nature's most remarkable innovations: eusociality, a form of social organization in which colonies divide reproductive labor between
Even when the lights go out and nuclear reactors are turned off, the story inside the reactor core still has a great deal to tell. Radioactive, long-lived fission products continue to decay for months or even years, producing a faint flux of a specific type of particle known as
Snakes are seemingly simple in structure: a head attached to a long, unremarkable noodle. They do have some pretty cool features at the front end, with venomous fangs and the ability to stretch their mouths and swallow large prey whole, but their bodies are not just the simple
Not as scary as a great white shark, but the science is fascinating The post These Ancient Sea Worms Have “Biometal” Jaws appeared first on Nautilus .
After tropical cyclones, communities are often left in upheaval. Those that had few resources to begin with tend to be especially vulnerable to external stresses, and people often experience homelessness, health problems and other forms of insecurity as a result. But once the
A flowering plant has been confirmed as a new carnivorous lineage, according to research published in Nature Communications. The findings show that Saxifraga candelabrum can attract, trap, digest and absorb nitrogen from insects, supporting a prediction made by Charles Darwin
Deeply rooted perennial plants may help build soil carbon (C) stocks, but most research has focused on shallow soils, resulting in gaps in our understanding of how the balance between decomposition and C inputs shifts and drives soil C accumulation with depth. To address this
When academic research has explored the impact of school summer vacations, it has often focused on the costs to parents and children's learning and health.
Some mosquitoes really are picky eaters. They will not just stick their proboscis into any old human. We know this anecdotally, with some people claiming they are always bitten while others are completely ignored, though we don't really know why.
The space around Earth is becoming increasingly crowded, with thousands of satellites and pieces of debris now sharing low Earth orbit. Even above this region—at altitudes of several hundred kilometers—the extremely thin upper atmosphere can slow satellites, making accurate
Our DNA is often pictured as a simple spiral, like a piece of rope held taut. But inside cells, it folds into a complex three-dimensional structure, with 2 meters (6.6 feet) of DNA scrunched like a headphone wire in a pocket. This bundled architecture plays a crucial role in
Researchers find that soil aging of polyethylene microplastics has only a limited effect on their interactions with organic contaminants. Scientists have long worried that aging microplastics in soil could become increasingly effective at interacting with organic contaminants.
In a new study by the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), researchers evaluated oil sorghum lines in Nebraska and Illinois over two years to quantify genotype-by-environment effects on agronomic performance and triacylglycerol accumulation. The
Researchers at the 4th Physics Institute of the University of Stuttgart and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Milan have demonstrated a new mechanism for directing light in a naturally hyperbolic van der Waals material without conventional nanofabricated waveguides.
For most of the year, the Barnes Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic lies quiet under a blanket of snow. By summer, that snow melts back, and the ice cap transforms in texture, its bare ice dotted with turquoise ponds and its surface threaded with meltwater channels. In summer 2026,
When Northeastern University industrial engineering student Sierre Ternoey started her research position in Aachen, Germany, she was challenged to fix an issue that frustrates chemical engineers worldwide.
A diamond-based quantum sensor inserted into a living cell can provide previously unseen levels of detail about how life works and how diseases form. "Think of it as an EKG for a single cell—a way to capture everything happening inside at once, in real time," said University of
