Chameleons are famous for their color-changing abilities. Depending on their body temperature or mood, their nervous system directs skin tissue that contains nanocrystals to expand or contract, changing how the nanocrystals reflect light and turning the reptile's skin a rainbow of colors.

With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers have discovered two highly unusual brown dwarfs, balls of gas that are not massive enough to power themselves the way stars do.

Venice's long awaited flood defence system designed to protect the lagoon city from damaging waters during high tides on Friday survived a first test of its 78 barriers.

Beaches closed in Delaware and shore town streets flooded in New Jersey as the fast-moving Tropical Storm Fay churned up the East Coast on a path expected to soak the New York City region.

Leading firearm violence prevention researchers are first to use data to show differences in gun culture across the country, identifying gun cultures around recreation, self-defense, and politics.

New research explores how lower-latitude oceans drive complex changes in the Arctic Ocean, pushing the region into a new reality distinct from the 20th-century norm.

Venus flytraps catch spiders and insects by snapping their trap leaves. This mechanism is activated when unsuspecting prey touch highly sensitive trigger hairs twice within 30 seconds. A study led by researchers at the University of Zurich has now shown that a single slow touch also triggers trap closure—probably to catch slow-moving larvae and snails.

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon increased by a record 25 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2020, official data released Friday showed, increasing pressure on President Jair Bolsonaro to abandon his plans to develop the region.

A team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that Pittsburgh's air pollution levels decreased during the stay-at-home order—but the overall impact remains small.

New ground-breaking research from the University of Surrey could change the way scientists understand and describe lasers—establishing a new relationship between classical and quantum physics.

A Montana State University professor's research on plant chemistry in the Northern Great Plains and Northern Rockies has been published in Global Change Biology, a prominent journal that promotes exploration of the connections between biological processes and environmental change.

NASA's Aqua satellite revealed better organization and colder cloud top temperatures in Tropical Storm Cristina, indications that the storm was strengthening.

NASA used satellite data to create an animation of Fay's development and progression over the past few days, showing how the storm organized into a tropical storm. Additionally, NASA's Aqua satellite used infrared light to find the location of the strongest storms in Tropical Storm Fay occurring in the northeastern quadrant of the storm, mostly over the Atlantic Ocean.

Dull. Slow. Unchanging. Like watching paint dry. 

A team of scientists at the University of Vermont have invented a new tool—they call it a "nanocage"—that can catch and straighten out molecule-sized tangles of polymers.

The colossus iceberg that split from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf on 12 July 2017 is now in the open waters of the South Atlantic near the South Orkney Islands, about 1,050 km from its birthplace. Having lost two chunks of ice, this record berg is a little less huge than it once was—and now that it is in rougher waters, it may break up further.

The GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment-Follow-On) satellites launched in May 2018 are able to quantify the water mass deficit in Central Europe. Relative to long-term climate development, the water mass deficits during the two consecutive summer droughts of 2018 and 2019 amounted to 112 Gt in 2018 and even 145 Gt in 2019, according to a research team from the German Research Centre...

A newly discovered comet is streaking past Earth, providing a stunning nighttime show after buzzing the sun and expanding its tail.

Findings from a research conducted by researchers from the University of Birmingham and University of East Anglia find that poorer children continue to experience educational disadvantages compared to children from wealthier households, with girls being more adversely affected than boys.

Collective behavior researchers have applied a new tool for analyzing the movement of football players that goes beyond looking at individual athletes to capturing how the team operates as a whole. The tool, which comes from statistical physics but has never been used for sports analysis, finds clear differences in collective dynamics between winning and losing teams and can even predict the...

Frankie lives in a six-bedroom house on the outskirts of Leeds. She is her own landlord, but doesn't own the house. Instead she is part of a co-operative housing group: together, they have been able to buy the house and then rent it at an affordable price back to themselves as tenants.

The fundamental process that arguably forms the backbone of life on earth is photosynthesis; every organism is directly or indirectly dependent on this process. On paper, the process is simple: plants (and other organisms that have chloroplasts, the structures where photosynthesis takes place, and give the characteristic green color to leaves) convert solar energy into chemical energy that helps...

In a pioneer study published in Cell Host & Microbe, Researchers at Osaka City University and The Institute for Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, reported intestinal bacterial and viral metagenome information from the fecal samples of 101 healthy Japanese individuals. This analysis, leveraging host bacteria-phage associations, detected phage-derived antibacterial enzymes that control...

Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) have discovered a novel chemical compound that has the potential to become a new drug for the treatment of core symptoms of brain disorders like Down syndrome and autism. These results were obtained in preclinical models where the new compound ameliorated difficulties in cognitive tasks, as well as social...