Fires have been breaking out at an unusual pace in Brazil this year, causing global alarm over deforestation in the Amazon region. The world's largest rainforest is often called the "lungs of the earth." Here's a look at what's happening:

This week, scientists from NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 mission joined their counterparts from the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission in an expedition to the Australian Outback, one of the most remote, arid regions on the planet. Both teams came to hone their research techniques before their missions launch to the Red Planet next summer in search of signs of past life on Mars.

Attorneys general from a dozen western states want the Trump administration to halt a proposal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that they say usurps states' authority over their own water.

Southern California developers have long sought relief from regulations protecting wildlife, and earlier this month the Trump administration obliged, formally moving to weaken the federal Endangered Species Act.

When it comes to global warming's one-two punch of inundation and drought, the presence of too much water has had the most impact on U.S. agriculture this year, with farmers across the Midwest swamped by flooding throughout the Mississippi Basin.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Most people will have seen at least one headline over the last couple of years describing animal attacks on humans. This needn't include the elephant from a Zimbabwe National Park that trampled a tourist or the Sumatran tiger that killed a keeper who entered his zoo enclosure in Birmingham. There are numerous examples of attacks by wild pets on their owners, often whom they have known for years.

How do cells generate and use energy? This question might seem simple, but the answer is far from simple. Furthermore, knowing how microbial cell factories consume energy and how proteins are allocated to do so is crucial when working with industrial fermentations.

Cooking organic aerosol (COA) is one of the most important primary sources of pollution in urban environments. There is growing evidence that exposure to cooking oil fumes is linked to lung cancer. Currently, the most effective method to identify and quantify COA is through positive matrix factorization of OA mass spectra from aerosol mass spectrometer measurements. However, for the widely used...

When energy is added to uranium under pressure, it creates a shock wave, and even a tiny sample will be vaporized like a small explosion. By using smaller, controlled explosions, physicists can test on a microscale in a safe laboratory environment what could previously be tested only in larger, more dangerous experiments with bombs.

The nanostructures from Katja Höflich's HZB team are shaped like corkscrews and made of silver. Mathematically, such a nano antenna can be regarded as an one-dimensional line that forms a helix, characterized by parameters such as diameter, length, number of turns per unit length, and handedness.

Steadily and relentlessly, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea has slipped past medicine's defenses, acquiring resistance to once-reliable drugs, including penicillin, tetracycline, and ciprofloxacin. These former stalwarts are no longer used to treat the sexually transmitted disease.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois and the Missouri University of Science and Technology modeled a method to manipulate nanoparticles as an alternative mode of propulsion for tiny spacecraft that require very small levels of thrust.

Recent statistics from The Education Policy Institute suggest it will take another 100 years to bridge the academic attainment gap between rich and poorer students in the UK. And according to the Sutton Trust, eight elite schools sent as many pupils to Oxbridge between 2015 and 2018 as three-quarters of all the state schools in the country.

An experiment from The Australian National University (ANU) using artificial trees has attracted birds and other wildlife never before seen in a damaged Canberra landscape—catching them on camera at the same time.

As the social and economic divides between groups grow ever wider, and social mobility declines, the bonds that tie people together, within families or communities, have weakened over time.

Syrian refugees are more satisfied with settlement services and their community when they spend their first year of settlement in a smaller city, according to a new University of Alberta study.

Logging in Melbourne's largest water catchment has led to a loss of water equivalent to the amount used by 250,000 people each year, new research from The Australian National University (ANU) shows.

Most birds remain the same color year-round, replacing their feathers only once a year.

Record fires are raging in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, with more than 2,500 fires currently burning. They are collectively emitting huge amounts of carbon, with smoke plumes visible thousands of kilometers away.

NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite collected this natural-color image using the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument on August 21, 2019. Smoke from the fires raging in in the Amazon basin has created a shroud that is clearly visible across much of the center of South America.

A team of researchers from several European countries and one from Chile has found evidence of three possibly habitable exoplanets circling the star GJ1061. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, and soon to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the group describes their study of the star system and what they found.

Teaching connected-style handwriting, otherwise known as cursive handwriting, has fallen out of fashion on many school curricula. Older generations have sometimes been shocked that some younger people today can't sign their names on official documents or even read a handwritten note.

Earth is seeing an unprecedented loss of species, which some ecologists are calling a sixth mass extinction. In May, a United Nations report warned that 1 million species are threatened by extinction. More recently, 571 plant species were declared extinct.