Each of our cells is surrounded by a complex membrane that functions as a biological border, letting ions and nutrients such as salt, potassium and sugar in and out. The guards are membrane proteins, which do the hard work of permitting or blocking the traffic of these molecules.

A low-pressure area that formed in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean several days ago has consolidated and organized into a tropical storm. NASA's Aqua satellite provided forecasters with a visible image of newly formed Tropical Storm Vongfong.

Engineers at Duke University have shown that nanosized silver cubes can make diagnostic tests that rely on fluorescence easier to read by making them more than 150 times brighter. Combined with an emerging point-of-care diagnostic platform already shown capable of detecting small traces of viruses and other biomarkers, the approach could allow such tests to become much cheaper and more widespread.

Ants use their numbers to overcome navigational challenges that are too large and disorienting to be tackled by any single individual, reports a new study in the open-access journal eLife.

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a powerful new computer program called Morpheus that can analyze astronomical image data pixel by pixel to identify and classify all of the galaxies and stars in large data sets from astronomy surveys.

Trained dogs can detect fire accelerants such as gasoline in quantities as small as one billionth of a teaspoon, according to new research by University of Alberta chemists. The study provides the lowest estimate of the limit of sensitivity of dogs' noses and has implications for arson investigations.

The rainforest fjords of Southeastern Alaska harbour one of the highest concentrations of lichen diversity found anywhere on Earth, according to a new study spearheaded by University of Alberta scientists.

What would you do if the person standing next to you suddenly screamed and ran away? Would you be able to carry on calmly with what you're doing, or would you panic? Unless you're James Bond, you're most likely to go for the second option: panic.

For the second year in a row, a team from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge and Los Alamos national laboratories led a demonstration hosted by EPB, a community-based utility and telecommunications company serving Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The sprawling 11,500-year-old stone Göbekli Tepe complex in southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, is the earliest known temple in human history and one of the most important discoveries of Neolithic research.

The novel fibres' latest advances, published this week in Nature Photonics, have underlined the technology's potential for next generation optical interferometric systems and sensors.

Exhaustive seismic data from repeating earthquakes and new data-processing methods have yielded the best evidence yet that the Earth's inner core is rotating—revealing a better understanding of the hotly debated processes that control the planet's magnetic field.

Earth may have been far more oxygen-rich early in its history than previously thought, setting the stage for the evolution of complex life, according to new research by scientists at the University of Alberta and the University of Tartu in Estonia. The study provides evidence for elevated oxygen levels 2 billion years ago and flies in the face of previously accepted models.

Nearly a quarter of Americans suffer from arthritis, most commonly due to the wear and tear of the cartilage that protects the joints. As we age, or get injured, we have no way to grow new cartilage. Unlike humans and other mammals, the skeletons of sharks, skates, and rays are made entirely of cartilage and they continue to grow that cartilage throughout adulthood.

Researchers from Lingnan University of Hong Kong published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the role that facial attractiveness has in social selling.

The ability to accurately detect changes in ecosystem biodiversity caused by human activity has long challenged environmental scientists and ecologists, but a new study, published in PNAS, has established new DNA-based methods that are effective for environmental assessment and monitoring.

The question of whether democracies behave differently from non-democracies is a central, and intense, debate in the field of international relations. Two intellectual traditions—liberalism and realism—dominate. Liberals argue that democracies do indeed behave differently, while realists insist that regime type and ideology are of little relevance in understanding foreign policy behavior.

Smartphones, laptops and smartwatches consume vast quantities of energy, yet only around half of this energy is actually used to power important functions. And with billions of these devices in use worldwide, a significant amount of energy goes to waste. Professor Adrian Ionescu and his team at EPFL's Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory (Nanolab) have launched a series of research projects in the...

David Storm, a research physicist, and Tyler Growden, an electrical engineer, both with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, developed a new gallium nitride-based electrical component called a resonant tunneling diode (RTD) with performance beyond the anticipated speed of 5G.

By disrupting the expression of a particular gene and observing how this change affects expression of other genes, researchers can learn about the cellular roles of the disrupted gene. New technologies such as Perturb-seq offer unprecedented detail and depth of insight from such genetic disruption studies, but technical and practical hurdles have limited use of Perturb-seq. A new study by...

Quantum physics deals with microscopic systems such as atoms and light particles. It is a theory that makes it possible to calculate the probabilities of the possible results of any measurement taken on these systems. However, what happens during the measurement was a mystery. A team of researchers from the University of Seville, the University of Stockholm (Sweden) and the University of Siegen...

Hydrogen flames can propagate even with very little fuel, within surprisingly narrow gaps and can extend breaking up into fractal patterns. That is the unexpected physical behavior of this gas when it burns, which has been detected by a scientific team led by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). These results can help to improve the safety of Hydrogen-powered devices.

The Super Steel project led by Professor Huang Mingxin at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), with collaborators at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), has made important breakthrough in its new super D&P steel (produced using a new deformed and partitioned method) to greatly enhance its fracture resistance while maintaining super strong in...

In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered two important functions of a protein called RTEL1 during cell division. The researchers hope that the new knowledge will help to find new cancer treatments.