"Super-Puffs" may sound like a new breakfast cereal. But it's actually the nickname for a unique and rare class of young exoplanets that have the density of cotton candy. Nothing like them exists in our solar system.

The same technology that powers facial recognition and self-driving cars may soon help Maine's shellfish industry protect people from the dangerous effects of harmful algal blooms. A recent paper reports how researchers can use these deep learning algorithms to forecast shellfish toxicity, just like meteorologists forecast the weather.

A study out of the University of Florida offers a comparison between introduced species that attempt to outcompete native plants within an ecosystem and certain native plant species that mimic that behavior to create similar undesirable results. Lyn Gettys explored this phenomenon within aquatic ecosystems to reveal the consequences of excessive aquatic plant growth, regardless of the origin of...

The Earth's inner core is hot, under immense pressure and snow-capped, according to new research that could help scientists better understand forces that affect the entire planet.

Returning croplands to forests is a sustainability gold standard to mitigate climate change impacts and promote conservation. That is, new research shows, unless you're a poor farmer.

While many conservation plans focus on only environmental indicators for success, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)'s coral reef program is trying a relatively new approach: focusing on both social and ecological processes and outcomes to ensure a long-term future for coral reef systems, according to a newly published study.

New research by University of Alberta biologists uses a new approach to modelling the populations of six species of songbirds in Canada's boreal forest—and the results show that standard modeling methods may not be accurately capturing species distribution patterns.

There's an interesting fluid dynamics phenomenon that happens every morning in millions of cereal bowls. When there are just a few bits of cereal left floating on top of the milk, they tend to cluster together in the middle or around the edges of the bowl, rather than dispersing across the surface.

It's a familiar scene to anyone who's watched footage of brown bears catching sockeye salmon in Alaska: They're standing knee-deep in a rushing river, usually near a waterfall, and grabbing passing fish with their paws or jaws.

Drawing inspiration from nature, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemists have discovered an efficient way to wrangle long, snaking molecules to form large rings—rings that form the backbone of many pharmaceuticals but are difficult to produce in the lab.

When controlling mosquitoes that spread malaria, gene drives, which force genetic changes to proliferate in a population, are faster and more efficient than simply releasing mosquitoes that are immune to the parasite, according to a new study published December 19th in PLOS Genetics by Anthony James at University of California, Irvine and colleagues.

Microbial communities can be found everywhere—from lakes to the soil on the ground, they are omnipresent yet invisible to the naked eye. Within those environments there exist dynamic communities which fluctuate in response to environmental changes. One such example is the human gut microbiome, which is comprised of microbes that influence the overall landscape of the gut.

Combining image analysis with a three-dimensional microscopy technique allows researchers to quantify new or little-understood cell biology phenomena, according to a new study publishing December 19 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Mathieu Frechin of the Swiss company Nanolive and colleagues. The technique is likely to help explain little-understood aspects of the behavior of cell...

Words for emotions like "anger" and "fear" vary in meaning across language families. Researchers have now compared colexifications of emotion words—cases where one word signifies multiple semantically related concepts. By analyzing such words in 2,474 spoken languages, they found variation in emotion conceptualization and evidence of a universal structure in colexification networks.

Researchers have shown mechanical force can start chemical reactions, making them cheaper, more broadly applicable, and more environmentally friendly than conventional methods.

The smuggling of contraband, such as explosives and drugs, is a major threat in airport security. These risks have increased in modern times with the uptick in parcel delivery, but security inspection methods have not seen any significant improvements.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a faint but sprawling glow of high-energy light around a nearby pulsar. If visible to the human eye, this gamma-ray "halo" would appear about 40 times bigger in the sky than a full Moon. This structure may provide the solution to a long-standing mystery about the amount of antimatter in our neighborhood.

Traditional explanations for why some animals are monogamous and others are promiscuous or polygamous have focused on how the distribution and defensibility of resources (such as food, nest sites, or mates) determine whether, for example, one male can attract and defend multiple females.

Microorganisms play important roles in the health and protection of coral reefs, yet exploring these connections can be difficult due to the lack of unspoiled reef systems throughout the global ocean. A collaborative study led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas—Universidad de La Habana (CIM-UH) compared seawater from 25...

The synchronization of seed production by trees has garnered attention due to its importance in agriculture, forestry and ecosystem management. Acorns shed by oak trees, for example, are an important source of food for wildlife, while crop trees such as citrus and pistachio nuts contribute to both human nutrition and the economy. Both oaks and citrus trees show synchronization of seed production,...

Earlier this year, a remarkable new fossil specimen was unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China by area fossil hunters—possibly a huge ancient spider species, as yet unknown to science.

Leading a double life as both solids and liquids, liquid crystals occupy center stage for creating smaller, faster and more efficient technologies. Even at the level of single particles, liquid crystals can bend light and react to external forces, like electric fields or physical pushes and pulls. And so, a tiny quantity of liquid crystals is usually enough to achieve high performance in many...

A solar energy material that is remarkably durable and affordable is regrettably also unusable if it barely generates electricity, thus many researchers had abandoned emerging organic solar technologies. But lately, a shift in the underlying chemistry has boosted power output, and a new study has revealed counterintuitive tweaks making the new chemistry successful.

New research has found that positive community action can boost fish numbers in coral reefs and safeguard fish numbers there in the future.