A rescue team helped free a young humpback whale that was tangled in fishing gear south of San Francisco days after a fisherman first spotted it, a conservation group said Tuesday.

Many microbes wear beautifully patterned crystalline shells, which protect them from a harsh world and can even help them reel in food. Studies at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have revealed this food-reeling process and shown how shells assemble themselves from protein building blocks.

It starts off small, just a skin blemish. The most common moles stay just that way—harmless clusters of skin cells called melanocytes, which give us pigment. In rare cases, what begins as a mole can turn into melanoma, the most serious type of human skin cancer because it can spread throughout the body.

Soil moisture is easy to see when your favorite Little Leaguer slides into second base the day after a big summer storm. The mud splattered on that little hustler's uniform tells the story.

Scientists have captured the birth of a high-speed ice feature for the first time on top of a Russian glacier.

The office holiday party loses its luster in light of new study findings from researchers at Penn State and Ohio State demonstrating that incidences of unwanted sexual attention are increased at these and other "fun" work events. This sexual harassment may be reduced, however, when these events are held during normal office hours, when attendance is optional and when employees are allowed to bring...

Particles can sometimes act like waves, and photons (particles of light) are no exception. Just as waves create an interference pattern, like ripples on a pond, so do photons. Physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have achieved a major new feat—creating a bizarre "quantum" interference between two photons of markedly different colors,...

The NREL scientists, along with colleagues at Yale University, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are part of the Department of Energy's Co-Optimization of Fuels & Engines (Co-Optima) initiative. Co-Optima's research focuses on improving fuel economy and vehicle performance while also reducing emissions.

The U.S. economy may be expanding, but it's taking the low road to growth that undermines wellbeing and may cause economic challenges in the future, according a new study published online in the Cambridge Journal of Economics that centers on the way different countries have responded to the growth of women in the labor force.

Infrared cameras detect people and other objects by the heat they emit. Now, researchers have discovered the uncanny ability of a material to hide a target by masking its telltale heat properties.

On a recent late fall afternoon at Kyles Ford, the white branches of sycamore trees overhung the banks of the Clinch River, leaves slowly turning yellow. Green walnuts covered the ground. The shallow water ran fast and cold over the rocky bottom, but it was littered with the white shells of dead mussels.

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) achieved a technological breakthrough for solar cells previously thought impossible.

A new fluorescent tool for detecting reactive oxygen species based on a chemical found in mushrooms has been developed by scientists at the University of Bath.

Natural gas has become the largest fuel source for generating electricity in the United States, accounting for a third of production and consumption of energy. However, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of natural gas have not been considered comprehensively. A new study estimated the cumulative effects of the shale gas boom in the Appalachian basin in the early 2000s on air quality,...

Wetsuit still zipped up to his neck from an earlier dive, Ross Cunning stands amid dozens of chunks of coral in the saltwater live well on board the Coral Reef II, the research vessel owned by his employer, Chicago's Shedd Aquarium.

Major oil corporations tend to spend the most money on advertising and promotional campaigns at moments when they face negative media coverage and/or the threat of increased federal regulation, a new study finds.

Waters off the California coast are acidifying twice as fast as the global average, scientists found, threatening major fisheries and sounding the alarm that the ocean can absorb only so much more of the world's carbon emissions.

Pet owners are increasingly treating their "fur-babies" like members of the family. In response, some pet food companies are developing diets that more closely resemble human food, incorporating human-grade meat and vegetable ingredients that pass USDA quality inspections. Until now, little research had been done on these foods. A new study from the University of Illinois shows these diets are not...

On 17 December 2019 the names of 112 sets of exoplanets and host stars named in the IAU100 NameExoWorlds campaigns were announced at a press conference in Paris (France). Within the framework of the International Astronomical Union's 100th anniversary commemorations (IAU100) in 2019, 112 countries organised national campaigns that stimulated the direct participation of over 780 000 people...

Archaeologists with the University of Cincinnati have discovered two Bronze Age tombs containing a trove of engraved jewelry and artifacts that promise to unlock secrets about life in ancient Greece.

Large carnivores (e.g. bears, big cats, wolves and elephant seals) and zoos should be utilised as powerful catalysts for public engagement with nature and pro-environmental behaviour, suggests a paper published in the scholarly open-access journal Nature Conservation by an international multidisciplinary team, led by Dr. Adriana Consorte-McCrea, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.

Nearly 50 years after a mysterious spear-shaped stone was found 30 miles east of Charlotte, N.C., archaeologists have a theory that likely dates the "unusual artifact" to between 3,000 and 1,000 BC.

An international meeting in Madrid that was supposed to finalize rules arising from the groundbreaking 2015 Paris agreement on climate change went into extra time over the weekend—two days longer than scheduled, in fact. But the delegates may as well have gone home early, given how disappointingly little was accomplished.

As the holiday season approaches, people in the northern hemisphere will gather indoors to stay warm. In keeping with the season, astronomers have studied two groups of galaxies that are rushing together and producing their own warmth.