UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that while the global outbreak of coronavirus may have caused a temporary drop in emissions that cause global warming, it would not end the problem and might even divert attention from the fight.

Researchers have found that injecting pellets of hydrogen ice rather than puffing hydrogen gas improves fusion performance at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, which General Atomics operates for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The studies by physicists based at DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) compared the two methods, looking ahead...

Scientists at The University of New Mexico have found that the Earth and Moon have distinct oxygen compositions and are not identical in oxygen as previously thought according to a new study released today in Nature Geoscience.

While domestication of plants has yielded bigger crops, the process has often had a negative effect on plant microbiomes, making domesticated plants more dependent on fertilizer and other soil amendments than their wild relatives.

Northwestern University researchers discovered a new way to significantly reduce frost formation on any surface. The finding could help decrease the amount of energy needed for de-frosting and could potentially result in fewer canceled flights, which can be grounded by even the slightest layer of frost.

Enzymes are nature's powerhouses. Found in the cells of all animals, plants, and every other living organism, they accelerate the chemical reactions that trigger thousands of biological functions—from forming neurons to digesting food.

A computational approach inspired by the growth patterns of a bright yellow slime mold has enabled a team of astronomers and computer scientists at UC Santa Cruz to trace the filaments of the cosmic web that connects galaxies throughout the universe.

Set against a piece of black construction paper, the wings of the male cattleheart butterfly look even blacker than black.

New research has shown that large ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs can collapse at a significantly faster rate than previously understood. The findings suggest that ecosystems the size of the Amazon forests could collapse in only 49 years and the Caribbean coral reefs in just 15 years.

The fear of earthquakes is one of the main reasons for reservations about geothermal energy. In order to get hot water from the depths, crevices in the rock underground often have to be created. This is done by injecting large quantities of water under high pressure. The problem is that such hydraulic stimulation is accompanied by vibrations underground, known as 'induced seismicity.' A new study...

From the headphones we use to listen to our favorite songs or podcasts, to sonic camouflage employed by submarines, how we transmit and experience sound is an essential part of how we engage with our surrounding world. Acoustic metamaterials are materials designed to control, direct and manipulate soundwaves as they pass through different mediums. As such, they can be designed and inserted into a...

More than half of the world's population faces a looming threat to the quality and availability of their drinking water because climate change and urbanisation are expected to cause an increase in groundwater organic carbon, a new UNSW study has found.

Efforts to create synthetic replacements for palm oil are still likely to take several years, so immediate attention should be focused on making the existing production process more sustainable, researchers at the University of Bath's Centre for Integrated Bioprocessing Research (CIBR) and Centre for Sustainable Circular Technologies (CSCT) have found.

For more than a decade, two-dimensional nanomaterials, such as graphene, have been touted as the key to making better microchips, batteries, antennas and many other devices. But a significant challenge of using these atom-thin building materials for the technology of the future is ensuring that they can be produced in bulk quantities without losing their quality. For one of the most promising new...

The economic and ecological impact of nature on humans have long been established with prevalent environmental issues such as climate change and over-exploitation of natural resources being the first to cross one's mind. On the other hand, much less attention has been paid to the cultural and social values nature brings to humans. Even though natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef and the...

Cattle feeders choose distillers grains in feedlot diets as an inexpensive alternative to corn and soybean meal. But until now, no one had studied the effects of the common feed ingredient on bull development and fertility. With bull fertility to blame for a significant portion of reproductive failures in cow-calf operations, University of Illinois researchers decided it was worth a look.

Silicon is abundant in nature with high theoretical capacity (4200 mAh g-1), making it an ideal anode material for improving the energy density of dual-ion batteries (DIBs). However, its application in DIBs has been restricted by the large volume expansion problem (>300%).

On the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), a project named "Gully Land Consolidation" (GLC) has been implemented in rural watersheds to offset the farmland loss induced by "Grain for Green Program". Its main goal includes reshaping creek valleys by incising foot slopes, filling stream channels and ditches, constructing drainage canals, dams and reservoirs, and creating flat farmlands.

A canine study carried out at the University of Helsinki has described a gene variant in the regulatory region of the retina resulting in the abnormal function of retinal genes and, eventually, in the loss of vision in dogs. The study can benefit the diagnostics and treatment of retinitis pigmentosa, a disease suffered by two million human beings globally.

Meltwater pulses (MWPs) known as abrupt sea-level rise due to injection of melt water are of particular interests to scientists to investigate the interactions between climatic, oceanic and glacial systems. Eustatic sea-level rise will inevitably affect cities especially those on coastal plains of low elevation like Hong Kong. A recent study published in Quaternary Science Reviews presented...

Land surface processes and summer cloud-precipitation characteristics in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) can impact downstream weather and climate changes. They are also the key to understand Asian monsoon system and atmospheric circulation changes in the Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists watched the formation of a self-emergent machine as stem cell-derived neurons grew toward muscle cells in a biohybrid machine, with neural networks firing in synchronous bursting patterns. The awe-inspiring experiment left them with big questions about the mechanisms behind this growth and a proven method of capturing data for continued study of bioactuators.

Stanford University researchers created an inverse design codebase called SPINS that can help researchers explore different design methodologies to find fabricable optical and nanophotonic structures.

Rwanda, land of a thousand invisible hills. It's an overcast morning in Kigali, capital of Africa's most densely populated country. The sound of a bamboo broom scraping the tarmac accompanies a solitary sweeper engaged in the Sisyphean task of keeping the hotel frontage spick and span. Overhead, a black kite looms into view. Then another, then a third, swooping down like dementors out of the mist....