Engineers at Caltech have shown that atoms in optical cavities—tiny boxes for light—could be foundational to the creation of a quantum internet. Their work was published on March 30 by the journal Nature.

In the U.S., those who consume alcohol and drive are often subjected to roadside stops, breathalyzer tests and stiff penalties if their blood alcohol content exceeds certain limits. Currently, no such test exists for cannabis intoxication, although the substance is known to impair driving, among other activities. Scientists now report that they are one step closer to a convenient saliva test for...

Tropical forests are heavily fragmented as they are cleared for agricultural expansion and logging. Forest fragmentation leads to declines in carbon storage beyond just those trees that are cleared—the remaining forest at the edge of each clearing experiences environmental alterations such as increased sunlight and decreased soil moisture that can impact growing conditions for trees. These "edge...

The machine learning techniques scientists use to predict outcomes from large datasets may fall short when it comes to projecting the outcomes of people's lives, according to a mass study led by researchers at Princeton University in a collaboration with researchers across many institutions, including Virginia Tech.

Women have made progress in earning college degrees as well as in pay and in occupations once largely dominated by men since 1970—but the pace of gains in many areas linked to professional advancement has slowed in recent decades and stalled in others, finds a new five-decade analysis.

A new study led by the University of Kent has found evidence that human ancestors as recent as two million years ago may have regularly climbed trees.

Charlotte Pearson's eyes scanned a palm-sized chunk of ancient tree. They settled on a ring that looked "unusually light," and she made a note without giving it a second thought. Three years later, and armed with new methodology and technology, she discovered that the light ring might mark the year that the Thera volcano on the Greek island of Santorini erupted over the ancient Minoan...

Fair or not, airplanes have a reputation for germs. However, there are ways to minimize the risks.

Students struggling to get online in a rural South Carolina county received a boost last week with the arrival of six buses equipped with Wi-Fi, some of the hundreds the state has rolled out since schools were closed by the coronavirus outbreak.

What do chocolate, migratory birds, flood control and pandas have in common? Many countries benefit from ecosystem services provided outside their nations. This can happen through economic relationships, biological and geographical conditions, but we hardly know how and where these ecosystem service flows occur. Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the German...

We live in a time of unprecedented access to information. And in this era of sheltering-in-place around the nation and the globe, the desire for news may be higher than ever—at least for some people. But do we really want all this information, all the time? Some may indeed prefer to think happier thoughts and maintain an (overly) optimistic outlook about the health threat we face. On the other...

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg Institute of Stem Cell Technology and Experimental Medicine (HI-STEM) and the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg have identified a new control mechanism that enables stem cells to adapt their activity in emergency situations. For this purpose, the stem cells simultaneously modify the blueprints for hundreds of proteins...

Researchers led by biomedical engineers at Tufts University invented a microfluidic chip containing cardiac cells that is capable of mimicking hypoxic conditions following a heart attack—specifically when an artery is blocked in the heart and then unblocked after treatment. The chip contains multiplexed arrays of electronic sensors placed outside and inside the cells that can detect the rise and...

Water ice is one of the most abundant solid substances in nature and hydrated protons on ice surfaces critically influence physical and chemical properties of ice. Hydrated protons are easily doped into the hydrogen-bond (HB) networks when acidic impurities are present. In contrast, in pure water molecular systems, they are generated solely by the thermal ionization of water molecules (H2O⇆H+hyd...

There's a price to pay when you get your news and political information from the same place you find funny memes and cat pictures, new research suggests.

A team of researchers from China, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands has found a way to use chemical boundary engineering to create steel that is strong and flexible without the need for high carbon content. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their technique and how well it worked when tested.

Ornithologists and physicists from St Petersburg University have conducted an interdisciplinary study together with colleagues from Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Biological Station Rybachy of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They have created a micro device, weighing less than a gram, which...

In recent years, brown fat has garnered increasing attention as the so-called good fat that can protect against obesity and associated health risks, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Brown fat is located in small pockets throughout the body and helps maintain body temperature in cold environments. It gets its color from high amounts of iron-containing mitochondria, unlike the standard...

Globally, there is a growing concern regarding the presence of trace emerging contaminants such as retinoids and oestrogenic endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in aquatic environments. Retinoids such as retinoic acids and their metabolites, which are the derivatives of vitamin A, can cause abnormal morphological development in amphibians, fish, and snails at elevated levels. Oestrogenic EDCs...

Nearly a millennium and a half ago, red light streaked across the night sky over Japan. Witnesses compared it to the tail of a pheasant—it appeared as a fan of beautiful red feathers stretched across the sky. Since the event, scientists have studied the witness accounts written in the year 620 A.D. and speculated about what the cosmic phenomenon could have actually been. Now, researchers from...

Sometimes referred to as the "the Methuselah of freshwater fish," sturgeons and their close relatives are very old from an evolutionary point of view. Fossils indicate that sturgeons date back 250 million years and have changed very little during this period, at least as far as their external appearance is concerned. So it is not surprising that Charles Darwin coined the term "living fossils" for...

An industrial process that currently consumes vast amounts of energy in petrochemical plants around the globe could be replaced by an alternative process so efficient that it requires no heating or elevated pressure.

In Jessica Barnes' palm is an ancient, coin-sized mosaic of glass, minerals and rocks as thick as a strand of wool fiber. It is a slice of Martian meteorite, known as Northwest Africa 7034 or Black Beauty, that was formed when a huge impact cemented together various pieces of Martian crust.

While they can't pick out precise numbers, animals can comprehend that more is, well, more. From birds to bees and wolves to frogs, animals use numbers to hunt, find a mate, return to their home, and more—and researchers believe that this ability to process and represent numbers, known as numerical competence, plays an important role in how animals make these decisions and influences an animal's...