Isolated at home? Then train like an astronaut.

After nearly two decades, the Sun has set for NASA's SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE), a mission that continued and advanced the agency's 40-year record of measuring solar irradiance and studying its influence on Earth's climate.

The current pace of climate change exceeds historical events by 1-2 orders of magnitude, which will make it hard for organisms and ecosystems to adapt. For a long time, it has been assumed that adaptation was only possible by changes in the genetic makeup—the DNA base sequence. Recently, another information level of DNA, namely epigenetics, has come into focus.

A research group coordinated by physicists of the University of Trento was able to probe internal stress in colloidal glasses, a crucial step to controlling the mechanical properties of glasses. Their work opens the way to new types of glass for new applications. The study was published in Science Advances.

Polymers that are good conductors of electricity could be useful in biomedical devices, to help with sensing or electrostimulation, for example. But there has been a sticking point preventing their widespread use: their inability to adhere to a surface such as a sensor or microchip, and stay put despite moisture from the body.

Today, when new drugs are designed with the help of supercomputers, and electronic devices operate on a nanoscale, it is very important for scientists to understand how neighboring molecules behave towards each other. For this purpose, they need to know the sizes of atoms with the highest degree of precision. Modern quantum chemistry methods can be of help here, but the answers they offer are...

Former Tropical Cyclone Herold is now a fading area of low-pressure in the Southern Indian Ocean and NASA's Aqua satellite provided forecasters with a visible image.

The growing threat of drought and rising water demand have made accurate forecasts of crop water use critical for farmland water management and sustainability.

Egyptian blue is one of the oldest manmade colour pigments. It adorns, for instance, the crown of the world famous bust of Nefertiti. But the pigment can do even more. An international research team led by Dr. Sebastian Kruss from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Göttingen has produced a new nanomaterial based on the Egyptian blue pigment, which is ideally suited for...

The mammoth bailout sums unleashed to combat the 2008 financial crisis fuelled populist backlashes in many countries as taxpayers were handed a whopping bill.

Similarly to how a picked lock gives away that someone has broken into a building, the stiffening of a structure surrounding cells in the human body can indicate that cancer is invading other tissue.

Lasers are becoming one of the dominant tools in current manufacturing industry. Much effort has been devoted to improving processing accuracy, and spatial resolutions as low as micrometers have been achieved in laser cutting, welding, marking and stereolithography in an atmospheric environment. The femtosecond laser (fs-laser) is a particularly promising approach from this point of view, in...

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the integration of active nanowires with on-chip planar waveguides for on-chip light sources. Towards this goal, scientists in China demonstrated a highly compact on-chip single-mode cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanowire laser, by integrating a free-standing CdS nanowire onto a silicon nitride (SiN) photonic chip. The on-chip integration scheme will...

Dirac semimetals are critical states of topologically distinct phases. Such gapless topological states have been accomplished by a band-inversion mechanism, in which the Dirac points can be annihilated pairwise by perturbations without changing the symmetry of the system. Here, scientists in China report an experimental observation of Dirac points that are enforced completely by the crystal...

The one thing about species that most people probably remember from high school science class is that when it comes to sex, they generally stick to their own kind. Hybrids happen, but they are usually thought to be accidental, and the results typically have drawbacks—think of how a horse crossed with a donkey results in a sterile mule.

Some around the world predict that the COVID-19 will heal divisions and narrow inequalities. A pandemic, they claim, can remind us of our common humanity and the need to discard prejudices. It can also highlight inequalities and injustices and prompt people in power to deal with them.

People with a master's degree or doctorate can bank on a much higher starting salary than those with the same major but only a bachelor's degree. That's according to a recent survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Bats are famous for their sonar-based navigation. They use their extremely sensitive hearing for orientation, emitting ultrasound noises and receiving an image of their surroundings based on the echo. Seba's short-tailed bat (Carollia perspicillata), for example, finds the fruits that are its preferred food using this echolocation system. At the same time, bats also use their voices in a somewhat...

As millions of families hunker down amid the coronavirus crisis, the sudden reality of schooling from home risks widening the education gap between those with the means and support to keep up with lessons, and those who risk falling behind.

A team of DESY scientists has built a miniature double particle accelerator that can recycle some of the laser energy fed into the system to boost the energy of the accelerated electrons a second time. The device uses narrowband terahertz radiation which lies between infrared and radio frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum, and a single accelerating tube is just 1.5 centimetres long and 0.79...

Many millions of homeowners use feeders to attract birds. But a two-year study featured in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management suggests there may be one unintended consequence to this popular hobby. Bird feed mixtures may be helping to spread troublesome weeds that threaten agricultural crops.

Optical gain is a prerequisite for signal amplification in an optical amplifier or laser. It typically requires high levels of current injection in conventional semiconductors. By exploring an intricate balance and conversion of excitons and trions in atomically-thin two-dimensional materials, the authors found a new gain mechanism that requires input power several orders of magnitude lower than...

An artifact-free computational approach to extract the phase of light from noisy intensity signals improves imaging of transparent objects, such as biological cells, under low light conditions. The procedure separates intensity signals into high- and low-frequency spectral channels. Deep neural networks are trained to operate on these two frequency bands, before a final algorithm recombines them...

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, it is abundantly clear that the global economy is entering a recession – the first we've seen since 2008.