The theoretical notion of a 'quantum heat engine' has been around for several decades. It was first introduced around sixty years ago by Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, two physicists at Bell Labs who drew an analogy between three-level masers and thermal machines.

The American coot is a somewhat drab water bird with gray and black feathers and a white beak, common in wetlands throughout North America. Coot chicks, however, sport outrageously bright orange and red feathers, skin, and beaks. A new study explains how the bright coloring of coot chicks fits in with the reproductive strategy of their less colorful parents.

Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment.

Research on fossilized fish from the late Devonian period, roughly 375 million years ago, details the evolution of fins as they began to transition into limbs fit for walking on land.

When Nalini Nadkarni was a kid, she'd run home from school, climb into one of the eight maple trees in her parents' backyard and spend an afternoon there with an apple and a book.

A growing number of Chinese scientists working in the United States and other parts of the world are returning to their homeland, enhancing China's research productivity.

For the past few months Hasan Zaidi's phone has been ringing nonstop with calls from desperate residents in Pakistan hoping to get their hands on his newly invented air purifier as smog blankets the country.

Dense fog and hazardous air pollution blanketed northern India and disrupted hundreds of flights on Monday, as harsh winter weather sent temperatures plunging to near-record lows.

Not too long ago Coral Ben-Aharon, a 15-year-old sophomore at Granada Hills Charter High School, didn't bother to use her school's recycling bins—and didn't know how plastic waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

Gadgets that resemble little black hats are showing up on the heads of alligators in South Carolina.

Congress is demanding that the Department of Energy investigate an aging, cracking U.S. nuclear waste dump threatened by climate change and rising seas in the Marshall Islands.

Citrus greening disease, or Huanglongbing (HLB), is deadly, incurable, and the most significant threat to the citrus industry. Most HLB research focuses on the tree canopy, but scientists in California studied the impact of HLB on root systems. They recently published the first study to report on the response of two different varieties of citrus to the causal bacterium, 'Candidatus Liberibacter...

A new study recently conducted by astronomers has investigated the Melotte 105 open cluster with the aim on uncovering its fundamental properties. The research, presented in a paper published December 18 on arXiv.org, provides more accurate measurements of the cluster's distance, age and metallicity.

A team of scientists from the Research Center "Fundamental Problems of Thermophysics and Mechanics," of Samara Polytech is engaged in the construction of new mathematical models and the search for methods for their study in relation to a wide range of local nonequilibrium transport processes in various physical systems. An innovative approach developed not so long ago is based on a modern version...

One of the wonders of cell biology is its symmetry. Mammalian cells have one nucleus and one cell membrane, and most humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Trillions of mammalian cells achieve this uniformity—but some consistently break this mold to fulfill unique functions. Now, a team of Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have found how these outliers take shape.

The North Atlantic Current transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe, providing much of north-western Europe with a relatively mild climate. However, scientists suspect that meltwater from Greenland and excessive rainfall could interfere with this ocean current. Simulations by scientists from the University of Groningen and Utrecht University showed that it is unlikely that the...

A metabolite in plants that regulates the growth of anchor roots—vital for sustaining water and nutrient uptake in plants—has been identified and may have useful applications in agriculture.

Researchers at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have demonstrated how bacteria coordinate cell division with the replication of their genetic material. In an interdisciplinary study they explain why the current concept of the bacterial cell cycle has to be rewritten. The results were published in eLife.

Two-dimensional solar materials may offer a way to extract more energy from sunlight. By tuning the structure of a 2-D perovskite solar material, researchers from KAUST and the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown they can prolong the lifetime of highly energetic hot carriers generated by light striking the material. The approach could offer a way to capture solar energy more efficiently.

This year was the hottest ever registered in Russia, the country's weather chief said on Monday, as climate change pushes global temperatures to record highs.

Due to the advantages such as large specific surface area, adjustable pore size and tunable functionality, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have shown great application potential in the fields of gas adsorption and separation, catalysis, sensing and biomedicine. However, most metal-organic frameworks have pore sizes below 2 nm and are typical microporous structures, which limits pore structure and...

Tropical Cyclone Calvinia formed on Dec. 29 and by the next day, its clouds from a band of thunderstorms on its western side had blanketed the island of Mauritius in the Southern Indian Ocean.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over the Southern Pacific Ocean on Dec. 30 and found that Tropical Storm Sarai continued to move further away from Fiji and toward Tonga.

Holding particular biological resources, the Tibetan Plateau is a unique geologic-geographic-biotic interactive unit and hence plays an important role in the global biodiversity domain. The Tibetan Plateau has undergone vigorous environmental changes since the Cenozoic, and played roles as switching from "a paradise of tropical animals and plants" to "the cradle of Ice Age mammalian fauna."