Species typically evolve over the course of eons, but researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a way to do it in less than a year. A team of scientists led by Mike Smanski, Ph.D., in the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) has generated speciation events in fruit flies so that engineered strains can reproduce normally with each other, but mating with unmodified flies results in...

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided forecasters with a visible image of the latest tropical cyclone in the North Atlantic hurricane season. Tropical Storm Rene was bringing tropical-storm force winds and rain to the Cabo Verde Islands.

Researchers have developed a tiny fiber optic force sensor that can measure extremely slight forces exerted by small objects. The new light-based sensor overcomes the limitations of force sensors based on micro-electro-mechanical sensors (MEMS) and could be useful for applications from medical systems to manufacturing.

New studies of a rare type of meteorite show that material from close to the Sun reached the outer solar system even as the planet Jupiter cleared a gap in the disk of dust and gas from which the planets formed. The results, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to an emerging understanding of how our Solar System formed and how planets form around other...

As the second major heat wave in weeks bears down on Southern California, experts and authorities are warning the public to take seriously the health dangers of extreme temperatures that are only getting worse due to climate change.

Scientists have detected signs of a frog listed extinct and not seen since 1968, using an innovative technique to locate declining and missing species in two regions of Brazil.

Formerly a typhoon, Tropical Storm Haishen made landfall in South Korea on Monday, Sept. 2 and continued moving north toward China. NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared view of Haishen as a typhoon before landfall and a visible image after landfall as an extra-tropical storm.

If you're looking for an unconventional approach to doing business, select a CEO with an uncommon name, according to new research co-authored by an expert at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business.

Farmers and fruit growers are reporting that climate change is leading to increased ozone concentrations on the soil surface in their fields and orchards—an exposure that can cause irreversible plant damage, reduce crop yields and threaten the food supply, say materials chemists led by Trisha Andrew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Do the societal benefits of national monuments on US public lands outweigh the opportunity cost of forgone development and resource extraction? The answer is "yes," according to a new study by Resources for the Future researcher Margaret Walls.

For the first time, researchers have detected protease activity with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) performed using a tiny waveguide. The work paves the way to real-time, label-free lab-on-a-chip protease monitoring, which could offer a high-throughput approach to screen for new drugs that inhibit proteases involved in disease.

A couple of years ago my wife and I visited the Bonny Doon Vineyard near Santa Cruz to sample the offerings of winemaking savant Randall Grahm. While we were there, Grahm told us something I haven't been able to forget. It wasn't nearly as foggy along Monterey Bay as it used to be, he said, and that was worrisome for winemakers.

As millions of American youngsters start the school year with online classes at home because of the coronavirus, they are running into technical glitches and other headaches that have thrust many a harried parent into the role of teacher's aide and tech support person.

Helicopters rescued more people from wildfires Tuesday as flames chewed through bone-dry California after a scorching Labor Day weekend that saw a dramatic airlift of more than 200 people and ended with the state's largest utility turning off power to 172,000 customers to try to prevent more blazes.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not just an undesirable greenhouse gas, it is also an interesting source of raw materials that are valuable and can be recycled sustainably. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Spanish researchers have now introduced a novel catalytic process for converting CO2 into valuable chemical intermediates in the form of cyclic carbonates.

Robust and widespread antibody testing has emerged as a key strategy in the fight against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. However current testing methods are too inaccurate or too expensive to be feasible on a global scale. But now, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed a rapid, reliable and low-cost...

Though the Summer Olympics were postponed, there's at least one place to see agile hurdlers go for the gold.

Storm surges sometimes can increase coastal sea levels 10 feet or more, jeopardizing communities and businesses along the water, but new research from the University of Central Florida shows there may be a way to predict periods when it's more likely that such events occur.

The first day of California's lightning siege, thunderstorms rolled across the Mojave National Preserve, slicing the afternoon sky with dry strikes.

Panthasaurus maleriensis lived about 225 million years ago in what is now India. It is an ancestor of today's amphibians and has been considered the most puzzling representative of the Metoposauridae. Paleontologists from the universities of Bonn (Germany) and Opole (Poland) examined the fossil's bone tissue and compared it with other representatives of the family also dating from the Triassic....

In photosynthesis, solar energy is converted into chemical energy, which is then used in nature to produce organic molecules from carbon dioxide. In plants, algae and cyanobacteria, the key photosynthesis reactions take place in two complex structures known as photosystems. These are located in a special membrane system, the thylakoids.

August 2020 will go down as the fourth-warmest on record worldwide, with above average summertime heat in the U.S. and Mexico tempered slightly by below average temperatures in parts of the Southern Hemisphere.

Crews at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the first 3,200-megapixel digital photos—the largest ever taken in a single shot—with an extraordinary array of imaging sensors that will become the heart and soul of the future camera of Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Hollow multishelled structures (HoMSs), with relatively isolated cavities and hierarchal pores in the shells, are structurally similar to cells. They can be used as a carrier for antibacterial agents.