La Nina—which often means a busier Atlantic hurricane season, a drier Southwest and perhaps a more fire-prone California—has popped up in the Pacific Ocean.

NASA on Thursday announced it was in the market for Moon rocks, and wants to pay companies to scoop out the dirt, take a photo, and then have it ready for collection by a future mission.

People are starting almost all the wildfires that threaten U.S. homes, according to an innovative new analysis combining housing and wildfire data. Through activities like debris burning, equipment use and arson, humans were responsible for igniting 97% of home-threatening wildfires, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team reported this week in the journal Fire.

A novel process to fabricate special optical fiber that is far simpler, faster and cheaper than the conventional method has been developed by Cristiano Cordeiro, a researcher and professor at the University of Campinas's Physics Institute (IFGW-Unicamp) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Cordeiro created the innovation during a research internship at the University of Adelaide in Australia,...

The search is on to discover new states of matter, and possibly new ways of encoding, manipulating, and transporting information. One goal is to harness materials' quantum properties for communications that go beyond what's possible with conventional electronics. Topological insulators—materials that act mostly as insulators but carry electric current across their surface—provide some...

It is established that matter can transition between different phases when certain parameters, such as temperature, are changed. Although phase transitions are common (like water turning into ice in a freezer), the dynamics that govern these processes are highly complex and constitute a prominent problem in the field of nonequilibrium physics.

Vehicles powered by polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are energy-efficient and eco-friendly, but despite increasing public interest in PEMFC-powered transportation, current performance of materials that are used in fuel cells limits their widespread commercialization.

For quantum optical technologies to become more practical, there is a need for large-scale integration of quantum photonic circuits on chips.

Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have found that something may be missing from the theories of how dark matter behaves. This missing ingredient may explain why researchers have uncovered an unexpected discrepancy between observations of the dark matter concentrations in a sample of massive galaxy...

Aerosols are tiny solid or liquid particles suspended in the air. They influence the climate by absorbing or scattering sunlight and serving as cloud condensation nuclei. Moreover, they can impact human well-being through adverse health effects of fine particulate matter.

The year 2020 will be remembered for being a very trying year and western wildfires have just added to the year's woes. So far in 2020, California has experienced 7,606 fires and those fires have consumed 2.3 million acres. Washington and Oregon have also been hard hit by wildfires. Over 300,000 acres are reported to be burning. Four towns in Oregon have been mostly destroyed by the wildfire...

NASA's Terra satellite obtained visible imagery of Tropical Storm Rene is it continued moving north though the central North Atlantic Ocean. Rene appeared more organized on satellite imagery as wind shear eased.

NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Tropical Storm Paulette in infrared imagery as it moved through the Central Atlantic Ocean. At NASA, the imagery was false-colored to show cloud-top temperature gradients and identify the locations of the strongest storms. The imagery also indicated Paulette was being affected by wind shear.

Jupiter's moons are hot.

Researchers from the University of Houston have demonstrated that an inexpensive and non-toxic nanofluid can be used to efficiently recover even heavy oil with high viscosity from reservoirs.

The ocean plays an invaluable role in capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, taking in somewhere between five to 12 gigatons (billion tons) annually. Due to limited research, scientists aren't sure exactly how much carbon is captured and stored—or sequestered—by the ocean each year or how increasing CO2 emissions will affect this process in the future.

Scientists from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, a National Institutes of Health-funded consortium including researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have completed a wide-ranging set of studies documenting how small changes in DNA sequence can impact gene expression across more than four dozen tissues in the human body.

The impacts of predator loss and climate change are combining to devastate living reefs that have defined Alaskan kelp forests for centuries, according to new research published in Science.

The creator of the Australian labradoodle set out to mix poodles and Labrador retrievers to develop a hypoallergic service dog. But, according to a new study by Elaine Ostrander at the National Institutes of Health, published September 10th in PLOS Genetics, the breed that developed from that cross is primarily poodle.

For the first time, climate scientists have compiled a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth's climate extending 66 million years into the past. The record reveals four distinctive climate states, which the researchers dubbed Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, and Icehouse.

Newly mated queens of the red fire ant select nest sites with a relatively low pathogen risk by detecting odors produced by soil bacteria that inhibit the growth of ant-infecting fungi, according to a study published September 10 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Daifeng Cheng and Yongyue Lu of South China Agricultural University, and colleagues. As noted by the authors, this is the...

One-hundred million light years away from Earth, an unusual supernova is exploding.

CU Boulder and Lockheed Martin will lead a new space mission to capture the first-ever closeup look at a mysterious class of solar system objects: binary asteroids.

Scientists have long debated the respiratory workings of sea scorpions, but a new discovery by a West Virginia University geologist concludes that these largely aquatic extinct arthropods breathed air on land.