People from San Francisco to Seattle woke Wednesday to hazy clouds of smoke lingering in the air, darkening the sky to an eerie orange glow that kept street lights illuminated into midday, all thanks to dozens of wildfires throughout the West.

You know the type: Loud. Swaggering. Pushy. The alpha male clearly runs the show. Female alphas are often less conspicuous than their puffed up male counterparts, but holding the top spot still has its perks.

Explorer Christopher Columbus, long blamed for bringing syphilis to Europe from the New World, may have gotten a bad rap, new research suggests.

Six states in the U.S. West that rely on the Colorado River to sustain cities and farms rebuked a plan to build an underground pipeline that would transport billions of gallons of water through the desert to southwest Utah.

Tropical Storm Rene weakened to a tropical depression late on Sept. 8 but regained tropical storm status on Sept. 9. Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite captured Rene as it was twice transitioning.

Tropical Storm Paulette has run into wind shear that is pushing the bulk of clouds and showers away from its center of circulation, and that is apparent on infrared imagery from NASA.

Mechanical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a set of prototypes for manipulating particles and cells in a Petri dish using sound waves. The devices, known in the scientific community as "acoustic tweezers," are the first foray into making these types of tools, which have thus far been relegated to laboratories with specific equipment and expertise, available for use in a wide array...

An instrument error can lead to complete misidentification of certain crystals, reports a KAUST study that suggests researchers need to exercise caution when using electron microscopes to probe two-dimensional (2-D) semiconductors.

Latin America is more than twice as rich in plant species as tropical Africa and is home to a third of the world's biodiversity, a new paper published today in Science Advances confirms.

There they were, in all their weird quantum glory: ultracold lithium atoms in the optical trap operated by UC Santa Barbara undergraduate student Alec Cao and his colleagues in David Weld's atomic physics group. Held by lasers in a regular, lattice formation and "driven" by pulses of energy, these atoms were doing crazy things.

More than half of the U.S. workers seeking work say their job hunt is due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Climate change and the spread of infectious disease are seen as the top threats by the majority of people in 14 economically advanced nations surveyed by the Pew Research Center.

A new theory about the nature of dark matter helps explain why a pair of galaxies about 65 million light-years from Earth contains very little of the mysterious matter, according to a study led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside.

Structural disorder is vital for proteins' function in diverse biological processes. It is therefore highly desirable to be able to predict the degree of order and disorder from amino acid sequence. Researchers from Aarhus University have developed a prediction tool by using machine learning together with experimental NMR data for hundreds of proteins, which is envisaged to be useful for...

The world is getting closer to passing a temperature limit set by global leaders five years ago and may exceed it in the next decade or so, according to a new United Nations report.

In January 2019, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was orbiting asteroid Bennu when the spacecraft's cameras caught something unexpected: Thousands of tiny bits of material, some just the size of marbles, began to bounce off the surface of the asteroid—like a game of ping-pong in space. Since then, many such particle ejection events have been observed at Bennu's surface.

Interactive software that 'reads' and analyzes footprints left by black rhinoceroses can be used to monitor the movements of the animals in the wild, giving conservationists a new way to keep watch on the endangered species and help keep it safe from poachers, according to a Duke University-led study.

The management of fungal infections in plants and humans could be transformed by a breakthrough in understanding how fungi develop resistance to drugs.

Land development in New Jersey has slowed dramatically since the 2008 Great Recession, but it's unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to fight societal and housing inequality will affect future trends, according to a Rutgers co-authored report.

"Unprecedented" wildfires fueled by strong winds and searing temperatures were raging cross a wide swathe of California, Oregon and Washington on Wednesday, destroying scores of homes and businesses in the western US states and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate.

At a time when much of instruction is performed digitally and university lecture halls are often illuminated by a sea of laptops, it can be difficult to imagine that all instruction was recorded by pen and paper until about 20 years ago.

For the first time, scientists have viewed the deepest regions of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, discovered five undescribed species consisting of black corals and sponges, and recorded Australia's first observation of an extremely rare fish. They also took critical habitat samples that will lead to a greater understanding of the spatial relationships between seabed features and the animals...

The Nagoya University Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM) research team of Professor Cathleen Crudden, Designated Lecturer Masakazu Nambo, JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow Yuki Maekawa and Associate Professor Daisuke Yokogawa have developed a new synthesis method for the efficient production of fluorinated alkenes. This method offers a practical solution for the shortening of the...

It's 5 o'clock somewhere—and while here on Earth, "happy hour" is commonly associated with winding down and the optional cold beverage, that's when things get going on Bennu, the destination asteroid of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.