SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the disease COVID-19, is infecting the world at a rapid rate. Understanding how this infection works at the molecular level could help experts discover ways to moderate or stop the spread.

More than a century has passed since the last scientific analyses of the famed "Lincoln County [Tennessee] process" was published, but the secrets of the famous Tennessee whiskey flavor are starting to unravel at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture. The latest research promises advancements in the field of flavor science as well as marketing.

Tugboats battled into the night Friday to stop a blazing oil tanker carrying 270,000 tonnes of crude from drifting towards the Sri Lankan coast.

New experimental evidence of a collective behavior of electrons to form "quasiparticles" called "anyons" has been reported by a team of scientists at Purdue University.

Just over half of young adult Americans live with their parents, an unprecedented proportion that is doubtless linked to the coronavirus but also reflects a deeper trend, researchers said Friday.

By shining white light on a glass slide stippled with millions of tiny titanium dioxide pillars, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators have reproduced with astonishing fidelity the luminous hues and subtle shadings of "Girl With a Pearl Earring," Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer's masterpiece. The approach has potential applications in...

Rock-melting forces occurring much deeper in the Earth than previously understood appear to drive tremors along a notorious segment of California's San Andreas Fault, according to new USC research that helps explain how quakes happen.

The future economy based on renewable and sustainable energy sources might utilize battery-powered cars, large-scale solar and wind farms, and energy reserves stored in batteries and chemical fuels. Although there are examples of sustainable energy sources in use already, scientific and engineering breakthroughs will determine the timeline for widespread adoption.

In a recent report, Xiaolei Peng and a team of scientists in materials science and engineering at the University of Texas, U.S., and the Tsinghua University, China, developed opto-thermoelectric microswimmers bioinspired by the motion behaviors of Escherichia coli (E. coli). They engineered the microswimmers using dielectric gold Janus particles driven by a self-sustained electric field arising...

Electric current is everywhere, from powering homes to controlling the plasma that fuels fusion reactions to possibly giving rise to vast cosmic magnetic fields. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found that electrical currents can form in ways not known before. The novel findings could give researchers greater ability to bring...

The hemoglobin in the red blood cells ensures that our body cells receive sufficient oxygen. When the blood pigment is broken down, heme is produced, which in turn can influence the protein cocktail in the blood. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now discovered in complex detective work that the activated protein C (APC) can be commandeered by heme. At the same time, APC can also reduce...

Materials scientists at Duke University have uncovered an atomic mechanism that makes certain thermoelectric materials incredibly efficient near high-temperature phase transitions. The information will help fill critical knowledge gaps in the computational modeling of such materials, potentially allowing researchers to discover new and better options for technologies that rely on transforming heat...

Although immune responses are generated by a complex, hierarchical arrangement of immune system organs, tissues, and components, the unit of the cell has a particularly large effect on disease progression and host survival. These cell-level defense mechanisms, known as cell-autonomous immunity, are among the most important determinants of human survival, and are millions to billions of years old,...

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the Philippine Sea on Sept. 4 and provided a visible image of Haishen that had strengthened into a super typhoon.

A polarized petahertz current is driven by an ultrashort laser in an organic superconductor. This is in contrast to the common sense belief which is justified by Ohm's law, i.e., a net current cannot be induced by an oscillating electric field of light. The current enhances near the superconducting transition temperature. The light-driven petahertz current opens a way to high-speed operation of...

Short-term flooding from extreme storm events poses a serious transportation challenge in U.S. cities. This problem—which is anticipated to grow over the next century with our global climate crisis—is often hardest on vulnerable populations, including low-income and minority neighborhoods. The latest report from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), led by Courtney...

If you have any children in your life, imagine for a moment that they don't look anything like their parents, they don't eat anything humans normally eat, and they're active only while adults sleep.

A team of international vets using tranquilliser darts, flatbreads and the soothing lyrics of Frank Sinatra conducted a medical examination Friday on Pakistan's only Asian elephant, ahead of his planned move to Cambodia.

A research collaboration based at Kumamoto University (Japan) has found that activation of PPARα, a fatty acid receptor that detects fatty acids in cells and regulates physiological functions, causes masculinization of Japanese rice fish (medaka). The discovery of this molecular mechanism is expected to advance the development of new sex control technologies.

Tropical Depression Omar is one stubborn storm. Since it developed early in the week, it was being affected by wind shear. That wind shear has not let up by the week's end, and NASA satellite imagery showed the bulk of storms were being pushed to the southeast of the center.

Quantum bits, or qubits, can hold quantum information much longer now thanks to efforts by an international research team. The researchers have increased the retention time, or coherence time, to 10 milliseconds—10,000 times longer than the previous record—by combining the orbital motion and spinning inside an atom. Such a boost in information retention has major implications for information...

Researchers have discovered how a protein in plant roots controls the uptake of minerals and water, a finding which could improve the tolerance of agricultural crops to climate change and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and the University of Virginia, USA, has studied the impact of high ozone air pollution on the chemical communication between flowers and pollinators. They showed that tobacco hawkmoths lost attraction to the scent of their preferred flowers when that scent had been altered by ozone. This oxidizing pollutant...

A collaboration of researchers based in Kumamoto University, Japan have discovered microdiamonds in the Nishisonogi metamorphic rock formation in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. Microdiamonds in metamorphic rocks are important minerals because they form in continental collision zones and show that the crust has penetrated deeper than 120 km below the surface. This is the second area in the world,...