Enough water will come from the ground as a byproduct of oil production from unconventional reservoirs during the coming decades to theoretically counter the need to use fresh water for hydraulic fracturing operations in many of the nation's large oil-producing areas. But while other industries, such as agriculture, might want to recycle some of that water for their own needs, water quality issues...

The massive Colorado River, which provides water for seven US states, has seen its flow reduced by 20 percent over the course of a century—and more than half of that loss is due to climate change, according to new research published Thursday.

It's not easy to do pregnancy tests on whales. You can't just ask a wild ocean animal that's the size of a school bus to pee on a little stick. For decades, the only way scientists could count pregnant females was by sight and best guesses based on visual characteristics. For the last several years, researchers have relied on hormone tests of blubber collected via darts, but the results were often...

Surprising new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled "brim" of the Sombrero galaxy's disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble's sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero's vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy's central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are...

For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer...

Permafrost in the soil and methane hydrates deep in the ocean are large reservoirs of ancient carbon. As soil and ocean temperatures rise, the reservoirs have the potential to break down, releasing enormous quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. But would this methane actually make it to the atmosphere?

Two-dimensional materials from layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but making/manufacturing them has been limited by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Columbia University researchers report today in Science that they have invented a new...

How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it?

All animal cells have an organelle called a centrosome, which is essential to the organization of their cell skeleton. The centrosome plays fundamental roles, especially during cell division, where it allows equal sharing of genetic information between two daughter cells. When the cells stop dividing, the centrioles, cylindrical structures composed of microtubules at the base of the centrosome,...

Femtosecond laser machining has emerged as an attractive technology enabling applications ranging from eye surgery to direct writing on the bulk of transparent materials. Scientists from the University of Southampton, UK, demonstrated a new regime of ultrafast laser writing in silica glass, which produces anisotropic nanostructures and related birefrigence with negligible transmission loss. The...

Otago scientists studying sperm whales off the coast of Kaikōura have discovered earthquakes affect their ability to find food for at least a year.

Cells are small factories that constantly produce protein and RNA molecules by decoding the genetic information stored in the DNA of their chromosomes. The first phase of this decoding, the transcription process, 'transcribes' the DNA code into RNA molecules. In humans, and most other organisms, all cells of the body carry the full genetic information of the entire organism, with each individual...

A signal originally detected by the Kepler spacecraft has been validated as an exoplanet using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), an astronomical spectrograph built by a Penn State team and recently installed on the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. The HPF provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby low-mass stars, and...

How an electron behaves in an atom, or how it moves in a solid, can be predicted precisely with the equations of quantum mechanics. These theoretical calculations agree fully with the results obtained from experiments. But complex quantum systems, which contain many electrons or elementary particles—such as molecules, solids or atomic nuclei—can currently not be described exactly, even with...

Computational biologists at Carnegie Mellon University have taken an algorithm used to study social networks, such as Facebook communities, and adapted it to identify how DNA and proteins are interconnected into communities within the cell nucleus.

In a new paper, climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution propose that massive amounts of melting sea ice in the Arctic drained into the North Atlantic and disrupted climate-steering currents, thus playing an important role in causing past abrupt climate change after the last Ice Age, from about 8,000 to 13,000 years ago. Details of how...

A team of researchers has verified that it is possible to engineer two-layered nanofibers consisting of an ordered row of alternating peptides, and has also determined what makes these peptides automatically assemble into this pattern. The fundamental discovery raises the possibility of creating tailored "ABAB" peptide nanofibers with a variety of biomedical applications.

Using a mixture of oil droplets and hydrogel, medical active agents can be not only precisely dosed, but also continuously administered over periods of up to several days. The active agents inside the droplets are released at a constant rate, decreasing the risk of over- or underdosage.

Researchers at the University of Toronto Engineering have developed a tiny "heater"—about the size of a pill—that could allow resource-limited regions around the world to test for infectious diseases without the need for specialized training or costly lab equipment.

New work shows how using next-generation DNA sequencing on ancient packrat middens—nests made out of plant material, fragments of insects, bones, fecal matter, and urine—could provide ecological snapshots of Earth's past. Published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the study may pave the way for scientists to better understand how plant communities—and possibly animals, bacteria,...

An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the Orion Clouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation.

The precursor of our planet, the proto-Earth, formed within a time span of approximately five million years, shows a new study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

There may be a solution on the horizon to combating superbug infections resistant to antibiotics. The tenacious bacteria and fungi sicken more than 2.8 million people and lead to more than 35,000 deaths in the United States each year.

Winter associations predict social and extra-pair mating patterns in blue tits. Researchers of the Max Planck Institutes for Ornithology in Seewiesen and for Animal Behavior in Radolfzell show in their new study that blue tits that often foraged together during winter were more likely to end up as breeding pairs or as extra-pair partners, whereby bonds between future breeding partners seem to...