In a recent test, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed its primary mirror into the same configuration it will have when in space.

A high-end race car engine needs all its components tuned and working together precisely to deliver top-quality performance. The same can be said about the processor inside a quantum computer, whose delicate bits must be adjusted in just the right way before it can perform a calculation. Who's the right mechanic for this quantum tuneup job? According to a team that includes scientists at the...

Astronomers have found the best evidence for the perpetrator of a cosmic homicide: a black hole of an elusive class known as "intermediate-mass," which betrayed its existence by tearing apart a wayward star that passed too close.

The world's most powerful earthquakes strike at subduction zones, areas where enormous amounts of stress build up as one tectonic plate dives beneath another. When suddenly released, this stress can cause devastating "megaquakes" like the 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku event, which killed nearly 16,000 people and crippled Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant. Now a study published in Geology...

Severe flooding throughout the Midwest—which triggered a delayed growing season for crops in the region—led to a reduction of 100 million metric tons of net carbon uptake during June and July of 2019, according to a new study.

The prehistoric shape is hard to make out as it moves slowly through the gloomy forest, so trackers listen for the rustle of scales against the leaves to pick up its trail.

Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is leaking from industry sites at rates equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of France and Germany combined, a new analysis using satellite data showed Tuesday.

Every picture tells a story... none more so than this detailed visualisation of a strain of the norovirus.

The temptation for businesses to use artificial intelligence and other technology to improve performance, drive down labor costs, and better the bottom line is understandable. But before pursuing automation that could put the jobs of human employees at risk, it is important that business owners take careful stock of their operations.

Some political movements, particularly those extremist in nature, are associated with belief in conspiracy theories. Antisemitic demagogues, for example, have long referred to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support their cause, in effect using for their purposes a conspiracy theory that is still widely believed although it has long been known that the text itself is a literary forgery....

NASA researchers have developed new satellite-based, weekly global maps of soil moisture and groundwater wetness conditions and one to three-month U.S. forecasts of each product. While maps of current dry/wet conditions for the United States have been available since 2012, this is the first time they have been available globally.

Organic soybean producers using no-till and reduced-tillage production methods that incorporate cover crops—strategies that protect soil health and water quality—can achieve similar yields at competitive costs compared to tillage-based production.

As gray whales began their northern migration along the Pacific Coast earlier this month—after a year of unusually heavy die-offs—scientists were poised to watch, ready to collect information that could help them learn what was killing them.

The volatility of the financial markets amid the COVID-19 pandemic has significant implications for taxpayer-supported pension systems nationally.

A new study from a University of Michigan researcher and colleagues at three institutions demonstrates the potential for using existing networks of buried optical fibers as an inexpensive observatory for monitoring and studying earthquakes.

Scientists have revealed intricate structural changes in plants, fungi and bacteria in response to light, according to a new study published today in the open-access journal eLife.

A research team at the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) developed a method to isolate and cryopreserve testicular cells. This will allow the safekeeping and biobanking of gametes and other cells of the male reproductive tract of threatened or endangered feline species. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Cryobiology.

An international team of researchers has found that neon inside a certain massive star can consume the electrons in the core, a process called electron capture, which causes the star to collapse into a neutron star and produce a supernova.

Skoltech scientists have developed highly sensitive sensors based on cobalt oxide nanoflakes which are capable of detecting various alcohols in the air. The new sensors can be used for both medical diagnostics and detection of toxic methanol in the air. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Dr. Soon Moon Jeong's research team in the Division of Energy Technology at DGIST has developed a new structure of luminescence technology. This will enable the production of light-emitting elements that overcome the limitations of existing methods, expecting to greatly improve the efficiency of light-emitting elements used in various ways such as billboards and banners.

Refreshable braille displays translate information from computer screens into raised characters, often along the bottom of a keyboard. But this technology can cost thousands of dollars and is limited, typically displaying a string of characters much shorter than most sentences. Researchers now report an improved material that could take these displays to the next level, allowing those who are...

Increasing numbers of bison in Yellowstone National Park in recent years have become a barrier to ecosystem recovery in the iconic Lamar Valley in the northern part of the park, according to a study by Oregon State University scientists.

The Ferguson Effect is the idea that increased public criticism and distrust of police following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, lowered police morale, which caused officers to withdraw from proactive policing and boosted the crime rate in major U.S. cities. A new longitudinal study examined whether this effect was real. The study, of law enforcement officers before and...

Entanglement, a powerful form of correlation among quantum systems, is an important resource for quantum computing. Researchers from the Quantum Optomechanics group at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, recently entangled two laser beams through bouncing them off the same mechanical resonator, a tensioned membrane. This provides a novel way of entangling disparate electromagnetic...