Thick smoke blanketed large areas of central and northern California on Friday as more people fled some of the biggest fires in the state's history which have raged largely uncontrolled through the week.

University of Central Florida researchers are making the cutting-edge field of attosecond science more accessible to researchers from all disciplines.

The eastern Arctic Ocean's winter ice grew less than half as much as normal during the past decade, due to the growing influence of heat from the ocean's interior, researchers have found.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided forecasters with a nighttime view of Tropical Depression 13 early on Aug. 21. By 11 a.m. EDT, it had strengthened into Tropical Storm Laura.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the closest images yet of the sky's latest visitor to make the headlines, comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, after it passed by the Sun. The new images of the comet were taken on 8 August and feature the visitor's coma, the fine shell that surrounds its nucleus, and its dusty output.

A new bioluminescent reporter that tracks DNA double stranded break (DSB) repair in cells has been developed by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The international team's novel bioluminescent repair reporter (BLRR)-based system can be used to monitor DNA repair pathways directly in animals as well as cell lines. No such system previously...

Striking images of the California wildfires are seen in these nighttime satellite images taken by the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite on Aug. 20, 2020. At approximately 3:01 am PDT, NOAA-NASA's Suomi NPP was almost directly overhead and imaged the regionusing different bands on its VIIRS (Visible infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instrument. Large fires are easily visible in this image. Suomi NPP's...

A new study shows nutrients can aggravate the already negative effects of climate change on corals to trigger mass coral bleaching.

Inserting genetic material into the body to treat diseases caused by gene mutations can work, scientists say—but getting those materials to the right place safely is tricky.

In a first-ever study using ozone data collected by commercial aircraft, researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder found that levels of the pollutant in the lowest part of Earth's atmosphere have increased across the Northern Hemisphere over the past 20 years. That's even as tighter controls on emissions of ozone...

NASA's Terra satellite gathered infrared data on Tropical Depression 14 as it moves through the Caribbean Sea. Infrared data was used to find the location of the strongest storms.

When it comes to climate change, University of Wisconsin-Madison forest and wildlife ecology Professor Ben Zuckerberg says birds are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. They are both responsive and sensitive to changes in the environment, including the extreme weather events associated with a warming planet.

By creating conditions akin to the center of the Earth inside a laboratory chamber, researchers have improved the estimate of the age of our planet's solid inner core, putting it at 1 billion to 1.3 billion years old.

Europa's outer icy shell has completely reoriented itself in one of the last geologic events recorded on its young surface. Europa's poles are not where they used to be. Cracks in the surface of Jupiter's icy moon indicate its shell of ice rotated by 70 degrees sometime in the last several million years. In addition to supporting prior evidence for the existence of a subsurface ocean, it also...

Using Apertif (APERture Tile In Focus), searching at a radio frequency of 1.4 GHz, researchers have found an intra-hour variable (IHV) source, described in the paper "Extreme intra-hour variability of the radio source J1402+5347 discovered with Apertif." IHVs are very compact radio sources that twinkle on timescales of minutes and are among the rarest objects in the sky. For the past 30 to 40...

An interactive video game created by researchers and students in the EPFL College of Humanities (CDH) and UNIL Gamelab, in collaboration with the Initiative for Media Innovation (IMI) and Le Temps, allows users to explore a series of digital narratives that bear witness to the period of pandemic-induced isolation.

Black holes are at the center of almost all galaxies that have been studied so far. They have an unimaginably large mass and therefore attract matter, gas and even light. But they can also emit matter in the form of plasma jets—a kind of plasma beam that is ejected from the center of the galaxy with tremendous energy. A plasma jet can extend several hundred thousand light years far into space.

Regardless of what makes up the innards of a quantum computer, its speedy calculations all boil down to sequences of simple instructions applied to qubits—the basic units of information inside a quantum computer.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said Turkey had made a historic discovery of gas in the Black Sea, but would still speed up contentious exploration in the Mediterranean that has pitted it against Greece and the EU.

Nighttime imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite found the center of now Tropical Storm Genevieve moving along the coast of the Baja California, Mexico peninsula and further away from land. The storm is weakening rapidly from several factors. It is expected to be a remnant low-pressure area by Saturday, Aug. 21.

A team of scientists at the Nagoya University Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM) have developed a method for visualizing microtubule dynamics and cell membrane protein endocytosis in living plant cells, an important step forward in plant cell biology.

A research group composed of Professor Takayuki Shibata and his colleagues at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology has applied a microfluidic chip technology to develop a multiplex genetic diagnostic device for the early detection and prevention of crop diseases. The group conducted a gene amplification experiment using four kinds of cucumber viruses on the...

Chess requires playing ability and strategic thinking; in roulette, chance determines victory or defeat, gain or loss. But what about skat and poker? Are they games of chance or games of skill in game theory? This classification also determines whether play may involve money. Prof. Dr. Jörg Oechssler and his team of economists at Heidelberg University studied this question, developing a rating...

In the first comprehensive study of the link between rising sea levels and inland water tables along the California coast, researchers found an increased threat to populated areas already at risk from rising water tables, and the possibility of flooding in unexpected inland areas.