About 40% of the U.S. population lives in a coastal area and in Hawai'i, nearly everyone is vulnerable to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Don't fall for the premise that young people, otherwise known as "digital natives," are immune to misinformation.

Rocks from the Rio Grande continental rift have provided a rare snapshot of active geology deep inside Earth's crust, revealing new evidence for how continents remain stable over billions of years, according to a team of scientists.

Nearly every organism hosts a collection of symbiotic microbes—a microbiome. It is now recognized that microbiomes are major drivers of health in all animals, including humans, and that these symbiotic systems often exhibit strong daily rhythms.

Scientists at the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF) have released their findings on the state of coral reefs in Palau. Their research, based on extensive underwater surveys, found Palau's reefs had the highest live coral cover of all the reefs studied on the Global Reef Expedition, a scientific research mission to assess the health and resiliency of coral reefs around the world....

Texas has the most restrictive electoral environment in 2020, and Oregon has the least restrictive voting practices of the 50 states. This is based on a study of the relative "cost of voting" in each of the 50 states, as described in the peer-reviewed Election Law Journal.

For recreational fishing enthusiasts, the thrill of snagging their next catch comes with discovering what's hooked on the end of the line. In many freshwater streams and rivers—across the central and eastern parts of the U.S.—anglers are often catching a popular freshwater game fish: the smallmouth bass. Now, scientists have discovered a new level of biodiversity within that species.

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields lack diversity. It is an issue that a group of University of Minnesota-led biology education researchers is aiming to address through a targeted effort to bring diverse perspectives to the foreground.

Just like humans, microbes have equipped themselves with tools to recognize and defend themselves against viral invaders. In a continual evolutionary battle between virus and host, CRISPR-Cas act as a major driving force of strain diversity in host-virus systems.

Large swaths of single-celled eukaryotes, non-bacterial single-cell organisms like microalgae, fungi or mold, can control microbiomes (a collection of tiny microbes, mostly bacteria) by secreting unusual small molecules around their cells, maintaining host survival and ecological success, according to a new study by NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Assistant Professor of Biology Shady Amin.

Most people have seen or heard from a friend, neighbor or family member about a product or service they've used and how their experience was. It's called observational learning or word-of-mouth. These communications don't provide an unbiased assessment of true quality. Given this, businesses are faced with the difficult decision of determining when and how to spend their ad dollars. New research...

The sign of a healthy personal relationship is one that is equally mutual—where you get out just as much as you put in. Nature has its own version of a healthy relationship. Known as mutualisms, they are interactions between species that are mutually beneficial for each species. One example is the interaction between plants and pollinators, where your apple trees are pollinated and the honeybee...

As species across the world adjust where they live in response to climate change, they will come into competition with other species that could hamper their ability to keep up with the pace of this change, according to new University of Colorado Boulder-led research.

When the air outside is bad, office workers are more likely to order food delivery than go out for lunch, which in turn increases plastic waste from food packaging, according to a study by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

The wild horses roaming North Carolina's Outer Banks are being endangered by old fishing lines and hooks left on its popular beaches, according to the Corolla Wild Horse Fund.

The Polish-Israeli team from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and the Weizmann Institute of Science has made another significant achievement in fluorescent microscopy. In the pages of the Optica journal the team presented a new method of microscopy which, in theory, has no resolution limit. In practice, the team managed to demonstrate a fourfold improvement over the diffraction...

Sanctuary policies are at the center of the debate over immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. President Trump has called those policies "deadly" and claimed that they prevent the deportation of violent criminals and increase crime.

U.S. and Italian engineers have demonstrated the first nanophotonic platform capable of manipulating polarized light 1 trillion times per second.

Nokia says it has been tapped by NASA to build the first cellular communications network on the moon.

Life on Earth has a long, but also an extremely turbulent history. On more than one occasion, the majority of all species became extinct and an already highly developed biodiversity shrank to a minimum again, changing the course of evolution each time. The most extensive mass extinction took place about 252 million years ago. It marked the end of the Permian Epoch and the beginning of the Triassic...

Small farms in the developing world do not perform better than large ones if costs and labor are factored in rather than just crop production, says a new study.

The fight against bacterial infections, especially those caused by resistant pathogens, is in full swing with the search for new antibiotic agents. The aim is to identify substances that attack the pathogens in a truly novel way. The team at the Center for Systems-Based Antibiotic Research (Cesar) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) has described in two publications how assess if a new antibiotic...

Bacteria recently isolated from walnut (Juglans regia L.) buds in Portugal has been identified as a new species of Xanthomonas. Interestingly, this new species, named Xanthomonas euroxanthea, includes both pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains on walnut, constituting a unique model to address the emergence and evolution of pathogenicity in Xanthomonas. This discovery resulted from an international...

Trees planted in urban spaces provide a multitude of ecosystem services: they reduce air pollution and noise, provide habitat and shelter for other species, and reduce erosion during heavy rains. They also offer opportunities for relaxation, attenuate urban heat islands and contribute both to landscapes and a sense of place. At the same time, trees can be a source of allergens, generate...