Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed Tuesday that the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter will peak emissions in 2030 and go carbon neutral by 2060, in what environmentalists hailed as a major step forward.

Researchers suggest employees should take a cue from Jimmy Fallon's Thank You Notes segment on The Tonight Show to improve workplace behavior. A recent University of Central Florida study suggests employees who keep a gratitude journal exhibit less rude behavior and mistreatment of others in the workplace.

Wave scattering appears practically everywhere in everyday life—from conversations across rooms, to ocean waves breaking on a shore, from colorful sunsets, to radar waves reflecting from aircraft. Scattering phenomena also appear in realms as diverse as quantum mechanics and gravitation. According to Pavel Ginzburg, professor at Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering, these...

Quantum mechanics does not only describe how the world works on its smallest scales, but also affects the motion of macroscopic objects. An international research team, including four scientists from the MPI for Gravitational Physics (Albert-Einstein-Institut/AEI) and Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany, has shown how they can influence the motion of mirrors, each weighing more than 40 kg, in...

Millions of ibis and birds of prey mummies, sacrificed to the Egyptian gods Horus, Ra or Thoth, have been discovered in the necropolises of the Nile Valley. Such a quantity of mummified birds raises the question of their origin: Were they bred, like cats, or were they hunted? Scientists from the CNRS, the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the C2RMF have carried out extensive geochemical...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new method of 3-D-printing gels and other soft materials. Published in a new paper, it has the potential to create complex structures with nanometer-scale precision. Because many gels are compatible with living cells, the new method could jump-start the production of soft tiny medical devices such as drug...

As Arctic summers warm, Earth's northern landscapes are changing. Using satellite images to track global tundra ecosystems over decades, a new study found the region has become greener, as warmer air and soil temperatures lead to increased plant growth.

In addition to being the last horizon for adventurers and spiritual seekers, the Himalaya region is a prime location for understanding geological processes. It hosts world-class mineral deposits of copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver, as well as rarer elements like lithium, antimony and chrome, that are essential to modern technology. The uplift of the Tibetan plateau even affects global climate...

Left or right. Among other uses, these terms can generally identify most Americans' political beliefs—liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. When these views are at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, they are known as political polarization. With the gap between these political ideologies in American politics growing wider, experts argue that the gap between both sides is...

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has a challenging road ahead: After having to make it through the harrowing entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission on Feb. 18, 2021, it will begin searching for traces of microscopic life from billions of years back. That's why it's packing PIXL, a precision X-ray device powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is too distant for us to visit in person, but we can still explore it. Telescopes give us a chance to see what the Galactic Center looks like in different types of light. By translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images, astronomers create visual representations that would otherwise be...

Carnegie Mellon University's Maysam Chamanzar and his team have invented an optical platform that will likely become the new standard in optical biointerfaces. He's labeled this new field of optical technology "Parylene photonics," demonstrated in a recent paper in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering.

Solar flares are violent explosions on the sun that fling out high-energy charged particles, sometimes toward Earth, where they disrupt communications and endanger satellites and astronauts.

U.S. cellphone data analysis finds "hotspots" where COVID-19 social distancing levels are low, as well as revealing how demographics and governmental restrictions interact. Rajesh Narayanan and colleagues at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 22.

Most wild animals show a suite of predator avoidance behaviors such as vigilance, freezing, and fleeing. But these are quickly reduced after the animals come into contact with humans through captivity, domestication, or urbanization, according to a study led by Benjamin Geffroy from MARBEC (Institute of Marine Biodiversity, Exploitation and Conservation), publishing September 22nd in the...

Although Twitter is best known for its role in political and cultural discourse, it has also become an increasingly vital tool for scientific communication. The record of social media engagement by laypeople is decoded by a new study publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology, where researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, show that Twitter users can be...

Cheating mitochondria may take advantage of cellular mechanisms for coping with food scarcity in a simple worm to persist, even though this can reduce the worm's wellbeing.

Birds tweet, squawk, chirp, hoot, cluck, and screech to communicate with each other. Some birds have found another way to talk, though: they make sounds by fluttering their feathers or smacking their wings together really fast. Scientists just discovered another species that makes sounds with its feathers, a bird from the American tropics called the Fork-tailed Flycatcher. And by analyzing...

NASA's Terra satellite obtained visible imagery of Tropical Storm Dolphin as it continued moving north though the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on a track toward east central Japan.

Interactions between individuals of the same species shape many aspects of their biology, including their social behavior. Social genetic effects occur when the phenotype of an individual, defined as a set of their observable characteristics, is affected by the genetic features of others from the same species. These effects are common and imply consequences for the evolutionary history or health...

Mushroom-munching bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have introduced scientists to a new species of truffle.

Researchers from the OU Institute for Environmental Genomics and Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology lead a study that aims to better understand ecological community assembly mechanisms in response to climate warming.

Tropical Storm Paulette just reformed in the central North Atlantic Ocean today, Sept. 22. Using a NASA satellite rainfall product that incorporates data from satellites and observations, NASA estimated Paulette's rainfall rates.

The field of structural biology has made enormous strides, peering into the activities of nature at the tiniest scale. Such investigations are critical for charting the behavior of important macromolecules and understanding their essential role in living organisms.