NASA on Thursday awarded almost $1 billion in contracts to three space companies including those owned by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to develop lunar landers as the United States seeks to return human beings to the Moon.

Climate change creates extreme weather patterns that are especially challenging for people in developing countries and can severely impact agricultural yield and food security. International aid organizations have invested billions of dollars in promoting climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices, but the effects of those programs are rarely documented.

For many years, the conservation community has embraced the idea that improving connectivity, that is, creating corridors so species can follow their preferred climate, will benefit biodiversity, says Toni Lyn Morelli at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Climate Adaptation Science Center.

Hidden within countless materials are valuable properties that will enable the next generation of technologies, like quantum computing and improved solar cells.

Scientists in the University of Maryland (UMD)'s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) have reinvented a 26,000-year-old manufacturing process into an innovative approach to fabricating ceramic materials that has promising applications for solid-state batteries, fuel cells, 3-D printing technologies, and beyond.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have revealed new details that explain how a highly selective catalyst converts methane, the main component of natural gas, to methanol, an easy-to-transport liquid fuel and feedstock for making plastics, paints, and other commodity products. The findings could aid the design of even more...

An international research project has revealed the highest levels of microplastic ever recorded on the seafloor, with up to 1.9 million pieces in a thin layer covering just 1 square meter.

A discovery that long eluded physicists has been detected in a laboratory at Princeton. A team of physicists detected superconducting currents—the flow of electrons without wasting energy—along the exterior edge of a superconducting material. The finding was published in the May 1 issue of the journal Science.

Using the most advanced Earth-observing laser instrument NASA has ever flown in space, a team of scientists led by the University of Washington has made precise measurements of how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have changed over 16 years.

A new study by researchers from IIASA and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for the first time systematically explored and compared the use of the Human Life Indicator as a viable alternative to the conventional Human Development Index as a means of measuring progress in development.

By cosmic standards the sun is extraordinarily monotonous. This is the result of a study presented by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in the upcoming issue of Science. For the first time, the scientists compared the sun with hundreds of other stars with similar rotation periods. Most displayed much stronger variations. This raises the question whether the sun...

The weather forecast for the giant, super-hot Jupiter-size planet WASP-79b is steamy humidity, scattered clouds, iron rain, and yellow skies.

Buried a mile beneath Greenland's thick ice sheet is a network of canyons so deep and long that the largest of these has been called Greenland's "Grand Canyon." This megacanyon's shape suggests it was carved by running water prior to widespread glaciation, but exactly when and how the island's grandest canyon formed are topics of intense debate.

Because customers who shop online cannot try on their purchases, a third of all Internet sales get returned. But handling these returns is costly, giving retailers that have both physical stores and digital sales a clear advantage over retailers that operate only online. A new study examined the decisions around the pricing and return policies of a retailer with both stores and online sales to...

A bustling stellar nursery in the picturesque Orion Nebula will be a subject of study for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021. A team led by Mark McCaughrean, the Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist for Star Formation, will survey an inner region of the nebula called the Trapezium Cluster. This cluster is home to a thousand or so young stars, all crammed into a space only 4...

Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and other questionable business practices that ultimately harm stakeholders occur frequently, drawing vastly different reactions from investors.

An international team of researchers has outlined ways to manage different facets of life under the spread of the COVID-19 virus, ranging from how we can combat racially driven bias and fake news to how we can increase cooperation and better manage stress.

Many of the drugs and medicines that we rely on today are natural products taken from microbes like bacteria and fungi. Within these microbes, the drugs are made by tiny natural machines—mega-enzymes known as nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs). A research team led by McGill University has gained a better understanding of the structures of NRPSs and the processes by which they work. This...

Participatory Budgeting began in Brazil in 1988 and then, in 2011, New York City adopted the practice, giving citizens an opportunity to determine priorities for public spending in their communities.

The next generation of powerful Earth- and space-based telescopes will be able to hunt distant solar systems for evidence of life on Earth-like exoplanets—particularly those that chaperone burned-out stars known as white dwarfs.

While the capability for organisms to work together is by no means novel, humans possess an unparalleled capacity for cooperation that seems to contradict Darwinian evolutionary principles. Humans often exhibit traits—such as sympathy, loyalty, courage, and patriotism—that prioritize collective well-being over individual fitness, and often cooperation occurs among individuals with no shared...

As retrenchments continue to cloud the foreseeable future of businesses worldwide, new research from the University of South Australia, the University of Melbourne and RMIT indicates that some businesses will fare better than others—and it's all dependent on their type of human resource management system.

A paper published in Advanced Photonics "Enhanced light–matter interactions in dielectric nanostructures via machine-learning approach," suggests that machine-learning techniques can be used to enhance metasurfaces, optimizing them for nonlinear optics and optomechanics. The discovery has promising possibilities for the development of a wide range of photonic devices and applications including...

Researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) in collaboration with colleagues from Southern Federal University and Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT Madras) suggested using machine learning methods to predict the properties of artificial sapphire crystals—a unique material widely used in microelectronics, optics and electronics. The results of the study...