The government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday submitted draft legislation that it said would allow the country to be carbon neutral by 2050, but his opponents dismissed the initiative as "smoke and mirrors."

The most experienced astronaut on SpaceX's newly launched crew said Thursday that riding a Dragon capsule to orbit is like being inside the actual mythical beast, and a lot more fun than NASA's shuttles or Russian flights.

Black, Hispanic, and Native American students and faculty are largely underrepresented in environmental engineering programs in the United States. A pathway for increasing diversity and community participation in the environmental engineering discipline is proposed in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Engineering Science.

A large-scale study of African elephant genetics in Tanzania reveals the history of elephant populations, how they interact, and what areas may be critical to conserve in order to preserve genetic diversity for species conservation. The study, by researchers at Penn State, appears online in the journal Ecology & Evolution and is the first to explore gene flow—a process vital to maintain...

New research from the University of Central Florida has identified physiological features that could make people super-spreaders of viruses such as COVID-19.

Researchers at the George Washington University have developed a new design of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) that demonstrates record-fast temporal bandwidth. This was possible by combining multiple transverse coupled cavities, which enhances optical feedback of the laser. VCSELs have emerged as a vital approach for realizing energy-efficient and high-speed optical interconnects...

Materials scientists at Duke University have devised a simplified method for calculating the attractive forces that cause nanoparticles to self-assemble into larger structures.

Rochester Institute of Technology students discovered lost text on 15th-century manuscript leaves using an imaging system they developed as freshmen. By using ultraviolet-fluorescence imaging, the students revealed that a manuscript leaf held in RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection was actually a palimpsest, a manuscript on parchment with multiple layers of writing.

Sparked by an image uploaded to Twitter, new research indicates that the light produced by black hole accretion may be bright enough to reflect off of dust, illuminating the host galaxy, and creating light and dark rays similar to the effect of crepuscular rays on Earth. The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Following a review of engineering assessments that found damage to the Arecibo Observatory cannot be stabilized without risk to construction workers and staff at the facility, the U.S. National Science Foundation will begin plans to decommission the 305-meter telescope, which for 57 years has served as a world-class resource for radio astronomy, planetary, solar system and geospace research.

When someone struggles to open a lock with a key that doesn't quite seem to work, sometimes jiggling the key a bit will help. Now, new research from MIT suggests that coronaviruses, including the one that causes COVID-19, may use a similar method to trick cells into letting the viruses inside. The findings could be useful for determining how dangerous different strains or mutations of...

Hydrogen produced by using solar energy could contribute to a climate neutral energy system of the future. But there are hurdles on the way from laboratory scale to large-scale implementation. A team at HZB has now presented a method to visualize convection in the electrolyte and to reliably simulate it in advance with a multiphysics model. The results can support the design and scaling up of this...

The last decade has been marked by a series of remarkable discoveries identifying how the universe is composed. It is understood that the mysterious substance dark matter makes up 85 % of the matter in the universe. Observable matter in the universe consists of ionized particles. Thus, a profound understanding of ionized matter and its interaction with light, could lead to a deeper understanding...

Astronomers using data from the ongoing VLA Sky Survey (VLASS) have found a number of distant galaxies with supermassive black holes at their cores that have launched powerful, radio-emitting jets of material within the past two decades or so. The scientists compared data from VLASS with data from an earlier survey that also used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array...

A new study suggests that the Texas Research Incentive Program (TRIP) has succeeded in boosting the amount of private donations to public universities, indicating that policymakers can effectively leverage public investment to spur private donations.

The African crested rat (Lophiomys imhausi) is hardly the continent's most fearsome-looking creature—the rabbit-sized rodent resembles a gray puffball crossed with a skunk—yet its fur is packed with a poison so lethal it can fell an elephant and just a few milligrams can kill a human. In a Journal of Mammology paper published today, the University of Utah, Smithsonian Conservation Biology...

A collaborative research team from the University of Oklahoma, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Merck & Co. published an opinion article in the journal, Nature Chemical Biology, that addresses the gap in the discovery of new antibiotics.

Transparent stretchable PVC film for use in packaging meat, fruit, cold cuts, and other foods, and to protect surfaces, can inactivate the novel coronavirus.

Researchers have developed an ultrathin pressure sensor that can be attached directly to the skin and measure how fingers interact with objects to produce useful data for medical and technological applications. The sensor has minimal effect on the users' sensitivity and ability to grip objects, and it is resistant to disruption from rubbing. The team also hopes their sensor can be used for the...

Water is a ubiquitous liquid with many highly unique properties. The way it responds to changes in pressure and temperature can be completely different from other liquids, and these properties are essential to many practical applications and particularly to life as we know it. What causes these anomalies has long been a source of scientific exploration, but now, an international team of...

By combing the ocean for antimicrobials, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a new antifungal compound that efficiently targets multi-drug-resistant strains of deadly fungi without toxic side effects in mice.

Researchers at North Carolina State University call for a coalition of biotech industry, government and non-government organizations, trade organizations, and academic experts to work together to provide basic information about gene-edited crops to lift the veil on how plants or plant products are modified and provide greater transparency on the presence and use of gene editing in food supplies.

Throwing and catching a ball is a familiar activity. But if the ball is replaced with something as tiny as a single molecule, is this task still possible? Can a single molecule be transferred to a specific, distant location, and then thrown back to the starting point? And how fast does it move? These questions were addressed by researchers from the University of Graz in collaboration with...

The medieval Belgian city of Bruges has rounded up dozens of the swans that glide through its picturesque canals to shelter them from the spread of bird flu.