Japan's space industry opened potentially an udder-ly new chapter on Thursday with a start-up testing a prototype rocket engine that runs on fuel derived purely from a plentiful local source: cow dung.

Bill Eisenman has always fished. "Growing up, we ate whatever we caught—catfish, carp, freshwater drum," he said. "That was the only real source of fish in our diet as a family, and we ate a lot of it."

Two Florida manatees whose living conditions at a Miami aquarium sparked online outrage have been escorted across the state by a caravan of wildlife officials to their new home at ZooTampa.

Former PM also angrily denies comments he made about letting Covid ‘rip’ meant he had been uncaringCovid inquiry live – latest updatesBoris Johnson assumed that Rishi Sunak’s flagship “eat out to help out” hospitality scheme had been cleared by government scientists and was surprised to learn later it was not, the former prime minister has told the inquiry into Covid.In evidence that...

A lucrative underground trade risks undermining research, creating new pandemics and pushing a recently abundant species to the brinkIn 2019, Jonah Sacha, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, received a delivery of 20 monkeys from Mauritius. As part of his research into stem-cell transplants as an HIV treatment, he performs tests on long-tailed macaques.The captive-bred monkeys...

Designing new compounds or alloys whose surfaces can be used as catalysts in chemical reactions can be a complex process relying heavily on the intuition of experienced chemists. A team of researchers at MIT has devised a new approach using machine learning, that removes the need for intuition and provides more detailed information than conventional methods can practically achieve.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world? The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don’t cut your own bangs in high school, seriously). But we can think bigger. What about winding the...

After a few years of hard work, a team of post-secondary students have put together a miniature cube satellite, which will be launched into...

The outcome of the most important climate negotiations in years could rest on the ambiguity surrounding one linchpin term, according to experts: "unabated fossil fuels".

The link between climate change and war has been a running theme at COP28, highlighting how many countries suffer from both deadly conflict and environmental disasters.

As Hurricane Larry lashed Newfoundland in 2021, university students from Halifax headed to a rural area in its track to find out whether the ocean might whip microplastics up into the atmosphere then transport them by air to otherwise pristine...

US researchers say findings may also enable doctors to predict progression of Alzheimer’s diseaseUsing a blood test to determine the biological age of a person’s organs could help treat them before they get sick, as well as predicting the progression of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have suggested.A study by academics in the US found people whose organs were ageing...

Madeleine Finlay hears from biodiversity and environment reporter Patrick Greenfield who is reporting for the Guardian from Cop28 in Dubai. He describes the rollercoaster first week of highs and lows, which saw a landmark agreement on loss and damage and a tetchy press conference from summit President Sultan Al Jaber. He also sets out what’s still on the table as the second week of negotiations...

Extreme weather and a range of economic hurdles are affecting the region's flourishing apple trade.

Problems such as back pain, incontinence and depression cause widespread suffering but are underrecognised, global review findsMore than 40 million women a year experience lasting health issues after childbirth, a global review has found, prompting calls for greater recognition of common postnatal problems.The sweeping analysis of maternal health worldwide shows a very high burden of long-term...

The new director of the National Institutes of Health said today her highest priority is making NIH-funded clinical research more inclusive and more accessible to the public. “Equity will guide my approach to leading NIH,” Monica Bertagnolli told reporters in her first news conference, a 40-minute Zoom call. But Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who became head of NIH last month,...

Nun cho ga, the baby wooly mammoth whose extraordinarily preserved remains caused a sensation after they were dug up by a miner near Dawson City, Yukon, last year, could soon be heading to Ottawa — at least for a...

The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) is launching a new series today examining its own complicity in perpetuating slavery and its legacy in the United States. In doing so, the 211-year-old journal joins several other publications and medical organizations that have, in recent years, interrogated harmful aspects of their own histories. In...

As light filtered into a cave in southeastern China, an eight-eyed creature moved around underneath a rock. Despite its small size, the animal caught the attention of nearby scientists. It turned out to be a new species.

One of the most enduring, basic questions of life is: How does it happen? For instance, in human development, how do cells self-organize into skin, muscles or bones? How do they form a brain, a finger, a spine?

Our sun actively produces solar flares that can impact Earth, with the strongest flares having the capacity to cause blackouts and disrupt communications—potentially on a global scale. While solar flares can be powerful, they are insignificant compared to the thousands of "super flares" observed by NASA's Kepler and TESS missions. "Super flares" are produced by stars that are 100–10,000 times...

Although volcanoes have been extensively studied, unraveling the mysteries of the underlying magma transport proves to be a challenging pursuit. Grant Block, a graduate student in The University of New Mexico's Department of Physics & Astronomy, recently conducted a thorough study of the Socorro Magma Body (SMB) in Socorro, N.M., which provides a window into magmatic processes important in...

Stressful childhoods can affect an individual's adult years and influence future generations. Scientists at the University of California, Davis, found a similar pattern holds true for red abalone exposed as babies, and again as adults, to the stress of ocean acidification.

The lack of alcohol in nonalcoholic or low-alcohol beer—particularly during manufacturing, storage and pouring—may prompt conditions ripe for foodborne pathogen growth, according to a new Cornell study.

The ocean is a critical life-support system for our planet through its role in global climate regulation. It absorbs most of the carbon emissions and heat trapped in the atmosphere, which result from human activities. Over the years, this has led to ocean warming (OW), ocean acidification (OA), and ocean deoxygenation (OD). Moreover, increased anthropogenic nitrogen deposition (AND) has largely...

A new study by UCL researchers shows how it's possible to phase out fossil fuels without sacrificing electoral popularity—even in coal mining regions.

A federal agency wants changes in how container ships are anchored off Southern California as well as new safety measures for vessels near offshore pipelines to help prevent or minimize ruptures like the one that spilled 25,000 gallons of crude oil off Huntington Beach.

The field of epigenetics focuses on alterations in gene function that are inherited without changes in the DNA sequence, including histone modifications, post-translational modifications of amino acids, and covalent modifications of DNA bases. These alteration pathways modulate the transformation of genotypes into specific phenotypes.

Terrorist attacks and mass shootings are devastating for the people and communities they affect. These events impact our society in many ways, including perhaps unexpectedly, by changing how big companies calculate and report their earnings.

A new study led by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, has revealed white shark gender is determined by X and Y sex chromosomes.

COP28 is approaching the end of the first week and the kings, presidents and prime ministers have flown off. Now, hundreds of seasoned climate diplomats must get down to the tough job of negotiating a text that everyone can agree on. Adnan Amin, who as chief executive officer of COP28 is one of Sultan Al-Jaber's most senior lieutenants, said in an interview there are several areas that are likely...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to enlist shooters to kill more than 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in the Pacific Northwest to preserve habitat for northern spotted owls, a protected species.

A team of sustainability scientists recently announced that they have developed a community-based framework, founded on extensive local and traditional knowledge, to help assess and respond to the kinds of ecological threats that are widely dispersed across a varied landscape and whose solutions are not immediately obvious. The framework, which was developed to address watershed issues in...