What makes for an endangered species classification isn't always obvious.

America's prison populations are disproportionately filled with people of color, but prosecutors' biases toward defendants' race and class may not be the primary cause for those disparities, new research from the University of Arizona suggests.

In 2017, when the drought in Cape Town was at its worst in over a century, aid organisation Gift of the Givers made an urgent call to South Africans to help farmers; suicide rates, amongst both small- and large-scale farmers, had surged in the few months prior. This and other evidence paints a bleak future picture in the context of climate change, and southern Africa is one of the areas that will...

Packed with protein and calcium, mopane worms are a delicacy in Botswana, where they are stirred into chunky tomato and peanut stews.

Air France-KLM chief executive Ben Smith said Friday that imposing carbon taxes on ticket prices could prove counterproductive, hindering efforts by airlines to buy more fuel-efficient planes that could significantly reduce emissions.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Southern Pacific Ocean it gathered water vapor data that provided information about the intensity of Tropical Cyclone Tino.

Ever since it was proposed that atoms are building blocks of the world, scientists have been trying to understand how and why they bond to each other. Be it a molecule (which is a group of atoms joined together in a particular fashion), or a block of material or a whole living organism, ultimately, everything is controlled by the way atoms bond, and the way bonds break.

A variety of medical devices can be inserted into the gastrointestinal tract to treat, diagnose, or monitor GI disorders. Many of these have to be removed by endoscopic surgery once their job is done. However, MIT engineers have now come up with a way to trigger such devices to break down inside the body when they are exposed to light from an ingestible LED.

Specially designed vacuum suction units allow humans to climb walls. Scientists have developed a suction unit that can be used on rough surfaces, no matter how textured, and that has applications in the development of climbing robots and robotic arms with grasping capabilities.

Toward the end of 2017, a massive new region of magnetic field erupted on the Sun's surface next to an existing sunspot. The powerful collision of magnetic energy produced a series of potent solar flares, causing turbulent space weather conditions at Earth. These were the first flares to be captured, in their moment-by-moment progression, by NJIT's then recently opened Expanded Owens Valley Solar...

Organic molecules with atoms of the semi-metal boron are among the most important building blocks for synthesis products that are needed to produce drugs and agricultural chemicals. However, during the usual chemical reactions used in industry, the valuable boron unit, which can replace another atom in a molecule, is often lost. Chemists at the University of Münster have now succeeded in...

Nacre—the iridescent part of mollusk shells—is a poster child for biologically inspired design. Despite being made of brittle chalk, the intricately layered microstructure of nacre gives it a remarkable ability to resist the spread of cracks, a material property known as toughness.

Constraining the history of earthquakes produced by bedrock fracturing is important for predicting seismic activity and plate tectonic evolution. In a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports Jan 17, 2020, a team of researchers presents a new microscale technique to determine the age of crystals grown during repeated activation of natural rock fractures over a time range of...

Styrofoam or copper—both materials have very different properties with regard to their ability to conduct heat. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the University of Bayreuth have now jointly developed and characterized a novel, extremely thin and transparent material that has different thermal conduction properties depending on the direction. While...

Roughness, the presence of irregularities on a surface, is commonly associated with slower motion and stickiness. This is true at different length scales: at human size (1 meter), it takes longer to walk along a path that goes up and down, rather than walking on a flat road. At the size of smaller objects (1/100 - 1/1000 meter), Italians use pasta shapes with a rough surface, e.g. rigatoni, to...

In the north eastern Free State, a 60 km green corridor is being created that will link the upper Wilge Protected Environment to the Sneeuwberg.

"Save the rainforests" is a snappy slogan, but it doesn't tell the full story of how complicated it is to do just that. Before conservationists can even begin restoring habitats and advocating for laws that protect land from poachers and loggers, scientists need to figure out what's living, what's dying, and which patterns explain why. Tackling these questions—in other words, finding out what...

Research conducted at Swansea University and the University of Milan has shown that students who use digital technology excessively are less motivated to engage with their studies, and are more anxious about tests. This effect was made worse by the increased feelings of loneliness that use of digital technology produced.

Using DNA, small silica particles, and carbon nanotubes, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed novel programmable nanocomposites that can be tailored to various applications and programmed to degrade quickly and gently. For medical applications, they can create environments in which human stem cells can settle down and develop further. Additionally, they are suited...

University of Seville researchers, in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, have managed to create the first image of nanoparticles of stabilised gold with biodegradable and biocompatible systems that have been obtained with 3-D-printng techniques. The image chosen for this test was the logo of the University of Seville.

Sand crabs, a key species in beach ecosystems, were found to have increased adult mortality and decreased reproductive success when exposed to plastic microfibers, according to a new Portland State University study.

Assistant Professor Ohmura Shu and Professor Takahashi Akira of the Nagoya Institute of Technology and others have developed a charge model to describe photo-excited states of one-dimensional Mott insulators under the JST Strategic Basic Research Programs. They have also succeeded in constructing a many-body Wannier function as the localized basis state of the photo-excited states and calculating...

The U.N. and other international organizations agree that forest restoration is a critical part of the collective global effort to combat climate change, reduce extinctions, and improve the lives of people in rural communities. Dozens of nations have pledged to restore 230 million hectares of forest so far as part of projects such as the Bonn Challenge and REDD+. The Bonn Challenge goal is to...

Simple LEGO bricks can be assembled to more complicated structures, which can be further associated into a wide variety of complex architectures, from automobiles, rockets, and ships to gigantic castles and amusement parks. Such an event of multi-step assembly, so-called 'hierarchical self-assembly,' also happens in living organisms.