Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor in space.

Over the course of their journey from the open fields to the produce displays at grocery stores, fresh vegetables and fruits can sometimes become contaminated by microorganisms. These items can then spoil other produce, spreading the contamination further and increasing the number of food items that can cause illnesses.

In a study published in Nature Sustainability, an ecosystem scientist and an agricultural economist outline how to develop a more sustainable land management system through data collection and stakeholder buy-in.

Not long ago, the azure waters of the Caribbean contained healthy and pristine coral reef environments dominated by the reef-building corals that provide home to one-third of the biodiversity in the region.

Hurricanes moving slowly over an area can cause more damage than faster-moving storms, because the longer a storm lingers, the more time it has to pound an area with storm winds and drop huge volumes of rain, leading to flooding. The extraordinary damage caused by storms like Dorian (2019), Florence (2018) and Harvey (2017) prompted Princeton's Gan Zhang to wonder whether global climate change...

A team of biomaterials scientists and dentists at the UCLA School of Dentistry has developed a nanoparticle that, based on initial experiments in animals, could improve treatment for bone defects.

A new study shows that plant materials originating in Arctic sea ice are significantly incorporated into marine food webs that are used for subsistence in local communities of the greater Bering Strait region.

An enduring question in geology is when Earth's tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some researchers theorize it happened around four billion years ago, while others think it was closer to one billion.

Current marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean need to be at least doubled to adequately safeguard the biodiversity of the Antarctic, according to a new CU Boulder study published today, Earth Day, in the journal PLOS ONE.

Grown around the world, sweet potatoes are an important source of nutrition particularly in sub-Saharan African and Asian diets. Sweet potatoes are especially significant to sub-Saharan Africa as a source of Vitamin A, a nutrient commonly deficient in the region. While China currently produces the most sweet potatoes by country, sub-Saharan Africa has more land devoted to sweetpotatoes and...

Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study from Portland State's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC).

Researchers say a new discovery on a U.S. Army project for optoelectronic devices could help make optical fiber communications more energy efficient.

If you live in a small community where fishing is your primary source of income and nutrition, it's tough to hear you might have to slow, stop or change your activities to more sustainably manage your fish stocks.

Researchers from Duke University have devised a method for estimating the air quality over a small patch of land using nothing but satellite imagery and weather conditions. Such information could help researchers identify hidden hotspots of dangerous pollution, greatly improve studies of pollution on human health, or potentially tease out the effects of unpredictable events on air quality, such as...

Scientists have created a new database to help track the impacts of climate change on fish living in rivers, lakes and other inland waters throughout the world.

A newly discovered connection between control theory and network dynamical systems could help estimate the size of a network even when a small portion is accessible.

Two months after President Donald Trump took office, U.S. Steel dumped a plume of cancer-causing metal into a Lake Michigan tributary 20 miles away from a Chicago drinking water intake.

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world and consequently is being continuously developed to fulfill modern-day requirements. Efforts to improve concrete strength have led to reports of porosity-free concrete (PFC), the hardest concrete tested to date. Some of the basic properties of PFC have already been explored, and now a team including Kanazawa University has probed the...

Reef fish species uniquely respond to climate change, with some more vulnerable than others.

The common view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism's DNA. But Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, disagrees.

Scientists everywhere are banding together to fight the novel coronavirus, and they're already making progress. Computational chemists are focused on building computer models of the virus's parts, which could aid in developing new therapeutics. Now, organizations around the world are offering up their computing power to researchers to help provide rapid results, according to an article in Chemical...

In humans (as well as all other organisms) genes encode proteins, which in turn regulate all the different specific cellular functions of the body. The genetic information found in our DNA is first converted into messenger RNA (mRNA) by a process called transcription. The mRNA acts as a template as it is read by intracellular organelles called ribosomes, which then create (or translate) the...

From two seeds grew a thousand plants.

Over 6,000 languages are currently spoken worldwide, but a substantial minority—well over 5%—are in danger of dying out. It is perhaps surprising that this fraction is no higher, as most models have so far predicted that a minority language will be doomed to extinction once contacts with speakers of the majority language reach a certain level. Statistical physicists Jean-Marc Luck from...