A study provides new details about the collective motion of individual agents in a liquid-crystal-like system, which could help in better understanding bacterial colonies, structures and systems in the human body, and other forms of active matter.

Turtle ant soldiers and their oddly-shaped heads suggest that evolution is not always a one-way street toward increasing specialization.

Lyman-alpha blobs (LABs) are gigantic clouds of hydrogen gas that produce a special type of ultraviolet light known as Lyman-alpha emission. An extremely powerful energy source must produce this radiation, but scientists debate what that energy source is. A study of Lyman-alpha blob 6 (LAB-6) is the first LAB with strong evidence of an infalling gas feature. The findings suggest that star-forming...

Viruses have been well studied, but many mysteries linger. One such mystery is how a spherical virus circumvents energy barriers to form symmetric shells. A research team has made progress is solving this mystery. The team reports that an interplay of energies at the molecular level makes the formation of a shell possible.

Some species of fish, notably parrotfish and wrasses living on coral reefs, change their biological sex as they age, beginning life as females and later becoming functionally male. New work shows that this sequential hermaphroditism evolves when bigger males gain an advantage in reproductive success -- for example by defending a permanent mating territory.

Barth syndrome is a rare genetic disease in boys that can cause life-threatening heart failure and also weakens the skeletal muscles and the immune system. There is no specific treatment, but new research, involving new mouse models, shows the potential of a gene therapy approach in preventing and reversing cardiac dysfunction in Barth syndrome.

A clump of grass grows on an outcrop of shale 33,000 years ago. An ostrich pecks at the grass, and atoms taken up from the shale and into the grass become part of the eggshell the ostrich lays.

Scientists have succeeded in creating an ultrathin organic solar cell that is both highly efficient and durable. Using a simple post-annealing process, they created a flexible organic cell that degrades by less than 5% over 3,000 hours in atmospheric conditions and that simultaneously has an energy conversion ratio -- a key indicator of solar cell performance -- of 13%.

Our brains can predict the popularity of online videos, without us even knowing it.

Bulbs are doomsday preppers, storing up resources underground to ride out disaster. The bigger the bulb, the bigger the stockpile. So, how come their sizes vary so much?

A new study showed that the humans on teams that included a robot expressing vulnerability communicated more with each other and later reported having a more positive group experience than people teamed with silent robots or with robots that made neutral statements, like reciting the game's score.

Plastics are a victim of their own success, so inexpensive, easy to use and versatile that the world is awash in plastic waste. Now researchers have reported a new method of producing polyolefins -- made from hydrocarbons and the most common building block of plastics -- structured to address one of the biggest stumbling blocks to plastics recycling.

What we learn through our senses drives how knowledge is sorted in our brains, according to new research.

New international research has found a worrying change in the Indian Ocean's surface temperatures that puts southeast Australia on course for increasingly hot and dry conditions.

Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous. The new measurement informs models of how the Moon formed and how close to Earth it has been over the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth-Moon gravitational dance.

The wildflowers of Mount Rainier's subalpine meadows, which bloom once the winter snowpack melts, are a major draw for the more than 1 million visitors to this national park in Washington state each spring and summer. But by the end of this century, scientists expect that snow will melt months earlier due to climate change. New research shows that, under those conditions, many visitors would miss...

Though not as prevalent in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas. Occurring naturally as well as being manmade, methane is much shorter-lived than CO2, but it is fast acting and 20 to 80 times as effective at trapping heat. A little extra methane goes a long way.

A concept known as 'fragile topology' has been puzzling physicists ever since it emerged two years ago. Two teams of physicists have now developed a comprehensive theoretical and experimental framework to pin down the essence of the concept -- and establish ways how to potentially harness it in applications.

Being of an older age, showing signs of sepsis, and having blood clotting issues when admitted to hospital are key risk factors associated with higher risk of death from the new coronavirus (COVID-19), according to a new observational study of 191 patients with confirmed COVID-19 from two hospitals in Wuhan, China.

The ocean is getting too loud even for crabs. Normally, shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) can slowly change their shell color to blend in with the rocky shore, but recent findings show that prolonged exposure to the sounds of ships weakens their camouflaging powers and leaves them more open to attack. The work illustrates how human-made undersea noise can turn shore crabs into sitting ducks for...

Sea turtles around the world are threatened by marine plastic debris, mostly through ingestion and entanglement. Now, researchers have new evidence to explain why all that plastic is so dangerous for the turtles: they mistake the scent of stinky plastic for food.

Astronomers working on 'first light' results from a newly commissioned telescope in Chile made a chance discovery that led to the identification of a rare eclipsing binary brown dwarf system.

Researchers have developed a method for predicting circulatory failure in patients in intensive care units -- enabling clinicians to intervene at an early stage. Their approach uses machine learning methods to evaluate an extensive body of patient data.

New results from precision particle detectors at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) offer a fresh glimpse of the particle interactions that take place in the cores of neutron stars and give nuclear physicists a new way to search for violations of fundamental symmetries in the universe.