Temperatures in Montreal on Wednesday reached an all-time high for the month of May as a heatwave swept through parts of Canada, Environment Canada said.

As chromosomes go, X and Y make an unlikely pair. The X is large and contains thousands of genes critical for life. The Y, by contrast, is little more than a nub. Its main purpose is to provide the instructions for initiating male development and making sperm. Yet these two very different chromosomes must work together if they are to meet and pair up properly during meiosis—the special form of...

Small-scale gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon poses a health hazard not only to the miners and communities near where mercury is used to extract gold from ore, but also to downstream communities hundreds of kilometers away where people eat mercury-contaminated river fish as part of their diet.

Researchers have developed a new way to build power efficient and programmable integrated switching units on a silicon photonics chip. The new technology is poised to reduce production costs by allowing a generic optical circuit to be fabricated in bulk and then later programmed for specific applications such as communications systems, LIDAR circuits or computing applications.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are finding that planets have a tough time forming in the rough-and-tumble central region of the massive, crowded star cluster Westerlund 2. Located 20,000 light-years away, Westerlund 2 is a unique laboratory to study stellar evolutionary processes because it's relatively nearby, quite young, and contains a large stellar population.

Although non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become powerful voices in world environmental politics, little is known of the global picture of this sector. A new study shows that environmental groups are increasingly focused on advocacy in climate change politics and environmental justice. How they do their work is largely determined by regional disparities in human and financial resources.

For the last eight years, the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) Consortium (and its predecessor, the Exome Aggregation Consortium, or ExAC), has been working with geneticists around the world to compile and study more than 125,000 exomes and 15,000 whole genomes from populations around the world.

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in collaboration with Medterra CBD conducted the first scientific studies to assess the potential therapeutic effects of cannabidiol (CBD) for arthritic pain in dogs, and the results could lead the way to studying its effect in humans. Researchers focused first on these animals because their condition closely mimics the characteristics of...

Climate change has contributed to the increase in the number of wildfires across the globe especially in the Arctic where forest fires, along with increased permafrost thaw, can dramatically shift stream chemistry and potentially harm both ecosystems and humans. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that some of the aftereffects of a burn, like decreased carbon and increased...

Oregon State University researchers who recently discovered a population of blue whales in New Zealand are learning more about the links between the whales, their prey and ocean conditions that are changing as the planet warms.

Ongoing environmental changes are transforming forests worldwide, resulting in shorter and younger trees with broad impacts on global ecosystems, scientists say.

The strongest permanent magnets today contain a mix of the elements neodymium and iron. However, neodymium on its own does not behave like any known magnet, confounding researchers for more than a half-century. Physicists at Radboud University and Uppsala University have shown that neodymium behaves like a self-induced spin glass, meaning that it is composed of a rippled sea of many tiny whirling...

Many proteins are useful as drugs for disorders such as diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. Synthesizing artificial versions of these proteins is a time-consuming process that requires genetically engineering microbes or other cells to produce the desired protein.

The ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic coastline retreated at speeds of up to 50 metres per day at the end of the last Ice Age, far more rapid than the satellite-derived retreat rates observed today, new research has found.

An Irish mathematician, Dr. Martin Kerin, from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics at NUI Galway, has had a research article published in the Annals of Mathematics, widely regarded as the top journal for pure mathematics in the world. The article, written in collaboration with Professor Sebastian Goette of the University of Freiburg and Professor Krishnan Shankar of the...

A Northwestern University-led team has developed a highly porous smart sponge that selectively soaks up oil in water.

NASA's GPM core satellite analyzed rainfall generated from post-tropical cyclone Bertha as it continues to move toward the Great Lakes.

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park is tied to the recovery of tall willows in the park, according to a new Oregon State University-led study.

Many people are wondering if that bad cold they had back in February or March was actually the new coronavirus.

After a severe drought gripped the Prairie Pothole Region of the U.S. and Canada in the 1980s, populations of almost all dabbling duck species that breed there have recovered. But not northern pintails. Now, a new study by a team of researchers suggests why—they have been caught in an ecological trap.

Capable school graduates sometimes choose low-ranking universities which do not match their abilities. According to the findings of HSE University researchers, up to one-quarter of school graduates in Moscow enroll in low-quality universities despite scoring highly on their USE (Unified State Exam, the final school exam and a standard university admission mechanism in Russia). This academic...

Polish scientists working in Poland, France and the USA explained the mysterious β-delayed proton decay of the neutron halo ground state of 11Be. Studies within the SMEC model suggest the existence of collective resonance, carrying many characteristics of a nearby proton-decay channel, which explains this puzzling decay. It was argued that the appearance of such near-threshold resonant states is...

A study of the methodology for credibility assessment of historical global LUCC datasets has been published in Science China Earth Sciences. The corresponding author is professor Fang Xiuqi of Beijing Normal University.

The first ever specimen of a pterodactyl, more commonly found in China and Brazil, has been found in the United Kingdom.