Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro authorized the army Thursday to fight Amazon wildfires and deforestation, amid warnings the world's biggest rainforest is disappearing even faster than during record devastation last year.

Researchers will soon have access to the full genomic sequences for 23 marine mammal species preserved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), thanks to an ongoing collaboration between NIST and a scientific consortium called the DNA Zoo.

The forest of the Sierra Nevada mountains is an important resource for the surrounding communities in Nevada and California. Thinning the forest by removing trees by hand or using heavy machinery is one of the few tools available to manage forests. However, finding the best way to thin forests by removing select trees to maximize the forest's benefits for water quantity, water quality, wildfire...

Already known for their shape-shifting abilities, stem cells can now add "death-defying" to their list of remarkable qualities.

As the world economy is falling into one of the biggest contractions of the last decades, a new study of economic recession patterns finds that the likelihood of a downturn was high even before the onset of the Coronavirus crisis.

Recently, Prof. Yang Xueming from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Yang Tiangang from the Southern University of Science and Technology discussed significant advances in the study of quantum resonances in atomic and molecular collisions at near absolute zero temperature. Their article was published in Science on May 7.

Restoration ecologist Karen Holl has a simple message for anyone who thinks planting 1 trillion trees will reverse the damage of climate change.

For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating strong coupling between quantum systems over a great distance. They accomplished this with a novel method in which a laser loop connects the systems, enabling nearly lossless exchange of information and strong interaction between them. In the journal Science, physicists from the University of Basel and University of Hanover reported that...

Insect experts say people should calm down about the big bug with the nickname "murder hornet"—unless you are a beekeeper or a honeybee.

Traffic pollution for most parts of the UK is plummeting thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown but more urban ozone—a dangerous air pollutant which can cause airway inflammation in humans—is probably being generated, say experts from The University of Manchester.

Scientists in Australia and Europe have taken an important step towards removing 'hot' electrons from the data chips that are a driving force in global telecommunications.

For Dr. Fabian Dembski, who works at the intersection of architecture, city planning, and computational science, cities are more than just the places we live. They function like living organisms, growing and changing over time. From this perspective, decisions made in city planning can either improve or degrade the health of urban spaces.

Why did the gecko climb the skyscraper? Because it could; its toes stick to about anything. For a few years, engineers have known the secrets of gecko stickiness and emulated it in strips of rubbery materials useful for picking up and releasing objects, but simple mass production for everyday use has been out of reach until now.

Within the last decades, new genetic engineering tools for manipulating genetic material in plants, animals and microorganisms are getting large attention from the international community, bringing new challenges and possibilities. While genetically modified organisms (GMO) have been known and used for quite a while now, gene drive organisms (GDO) are yet at the consideration and evaluation stage.

Over the past quarter-century, changes in Antarctic sea-ice cover have had profound impacts on life on the ocean floor. As biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute report in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications, between 1988 and 2014, total benthic biomass on the continental shelf of the northeast Weddell Sea declined by two thirds. In addition, the composition of the benthos...

Tel Aviv University (TAU) researchers have developed a safe and accurate 3-D imaging method to identify sperm cells moving at a high speed.

Rice University researchers have found evidence of piezoelectricity in lab-grown, two-dimensional flakes of molybdenum dioxide.

NASA has selected a new pathfinding CubeSat mission to gather data not collected since the agency flew the Dynamics Explorer in the early 1980s.

Plastic may be an indispensable part of our daily lives, but its robustness and abundance have led to its overuse, putting a huge burden on the environment. Large emissions of plastic waste result in its accumulation in water bodies: in fact, recent studies have estimated about 0.27 million tons of plastic floating in the world's oceans. Because plastic does not decompose in water, it is a serious...

Selective powder sintering for 3-D printing has recently become an increasingly affordable solution for manufacturing made-to-order elements of almost any shape or geometry. This technique involves heating a bed of powder (such as polyamide, PA12) to just below its melting point, using an IR light source to selectively melt a cross section of the powder, then adding more powder and repeating to...

A research group led by Associate Professor Tachikawa Takashi of Kobe University's Molecular Photoscience Research Center has succeeded in developing a strategy that greatly increases the amount of hydrogen produced from sunlight and water using hematite photocatalysts.

From sustainable energy to quantum computers: high-temperature superconductors have the potential to revolutionize today's technologies. Despite intensive research, however, we still lack the necessary basic understanding to develop these complex materials for widespread application. "Higgs spectroscopy" could bring about a watershed as it reveals the dynamics of paired electrons in...

Researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), belonging to the Nanophotonics Technology Center, have taken a new step in designing omnidirectional invisible materials. At their laboratories, they have discovered a new fundamental symmetry in the laws of electromagnetism, acoustics and elasticity: A temporal supersymmetry. This finding has been published in Nature Communications.

From compact biosensors and spectrometers to invisible devices and quantum computers, applications related to integrated photonics are increasingly sought after. As in optical fibres, guiding light in integrated photonic circuits is achieved by a local increase of the refractive index (RI) of the material. Ultrafast laser writing is the only technology that allows three-dimensional RI modification...