In the molecular-level world of ion channels—passageways through membranes that carry signals in a cell's environment and allow it to respond—researchers have debated about the role of a small piece of the channel called a linker, says computational biophysicist Jianhan Chen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The costs of implementing food safety practices to prevent foodborne illnesses have been viewed as a threat to the financial well-being of small farms, which must pay a higher percentage of their annual sales than larger farms to meet safety standards.

The science community should withdraw from involvement in international tests such as PISA because they have forced schools to adopt "narrow" curricula and pedagogies, a study says.

Bats are often considered patient zero for many deadly viruses affecting humans, including Ebola, rabies, and, most recently, the SARS-CoV-2 strain of virus that causes coronavirus.

Microbial cells are found in abundance in marine sediments beneath the ocean and make up a significant amount of the total microbial biomass on the planet. Microbes found deeper in the ocean, such as in hydrocarbon seeps, are usually believed to have slow population turnover rates and low amounts of available energy, where the further down a microbe is found, the less energy it has available.

Move over, murder hornets. There's a new bee killer in town.

New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reveals how plants create the load-bearing structures that let them grow—much like how building crews frame a house.

For the first time in nearly 50 years, California condors have been spotted at Sequoia National Park, wildlife officials announced.

A new study by the Marine Laboratory at the University of Guam may help researchers predict coral bleaching months earlier than current tools, and, for the first time, may help predict invasion events of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish. The study was published on May 8 in Scientific Reports.

Warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean so far in 2020 have set the stage for an active hurricane season and elevated the risk of fires in the southern Amazon, according to scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine.

Aquaculture, the relatively young but fast-growing industry of farming of fish and other marine life, now produces around half of all seafood consumed by humans. A new paper from American University published today examines the economics of an aquaculture industry of the future that is simultaneously environmentally sustainable and nutritious for the nearly 1 billion people worldwide who depend on...

Researchers use a variety of modelling approaches to study form and function. By using a basic biomechanical model for studying body form and center of mass stability in ants, new research identifies the benefits of "simple models" and hope that it can be used for bio-inspired designs.

In topological materials, electrons can display behavior that is fundamentally differentfrom that in 'conventional' matter, and the magnitude of many such 'exotic' phenomena is directly proportional to an entity known as the Chern number. New experiments establish for the first time that the theoretically predicted maximum Chern number can be reached—and controlled—in a real material.

The evolution of human teeth began among ancient armored fishes more than 400 million years ago. In the scientific journal Science, an international team led by researchers from Uppsala University presents groundbreaking findings about these earliest jawed vertebrates. Using powerful X-ray imaging, they show that unique fossils found near Prague contain surprisingly modern-looking teeth.

When wild Egyptian fruit bats set out at night to forage in Israel's Hula Valley, they do so using advanced spatial memory and a flexible cognitive mapping of the fruit trees and other goals scattered in their foraging area. They seldom search randomly and their foraging patterns cannot be explained by simpler navigation mechanisms, a research team headed by Hebrew University of Jerusalem's...

Changes in a few small molecules involved in a cell's metabolism seem to indicate whether a restricted "life extension" diet will actually extend, shorten, or have no effect on lifespan, a study of fruit flies has found.

The first comprehensive study of the pandemic shows consumption losses amount to more than US$3.8 trillion, triggering full-time equivalent job losses of 147 million and the biggest-ever drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

A next-generation system for monitoring influenza outbreaks performs well overall, but reveals a critical lack of sufficient data to accurately monitor influenza in the most at-risk communities. Samuel V. Scarpino of Northeastern University in Boston, MA, and colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

Although U.S. court documents are publicly available online, they sit behind expensive paywalls inside a difficult-to-navigate database.

Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a surprising shift in the Arctic Ocean. Exploding blooms of phytoplankton, the tiny algae at the base of a food web topped by whales and polar bears, have drastically altered the Arctic's ability to transform atmospheric carbon into living matter. Over the past decade, the surge has replaced sea ice loss as the biggest driver of changes in uptake...

The CRISPR system is a powerful tool for the targeted editing of genomes, with significant therapeutic potential, but runs the risk of inappropriately editing "off-target" sites. However, a new study publishing July 9, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Feng Gu of Wenzhou Medical University, China, and colleagues, shows that mutating the enzyme at the heart of the CRISPR gene editing...

Although new 5G networks can offer much faster and more efficient wireless data transfer, the fiber optic networks currently used to connect wireless devices to the internet cannot easily support the increased load. A new study shows that a compression scheme for radio-over-fiber links could help solve this problem for a variety of 5G formats.

For the first time, researchers have shown that native 'ohi'a seedlings can survive for at least a year in areas that have active mortality from Rapid 'ohi'a Death, or ROD, a fungal disease that is devastating to this dominant and culturally important tree in Hawaiian forests. This information can be useful to land managers and homeowners as they prioritize conservation actions.

In 2019, the MAGIC telescopes detected the first Gamma Ray Burst at very high energies. This was the most intense gamma-radiation ever obtained from such a cosmic object. But the GRB data have more to offer: with further analyses, the MAGIC scientists could now confirm that the speed of light is constant in vacuum—and not dependent on energy. So, like many other tests, GRB data also corroborate...