A common insecticide that is a major hazard for honeybees is now effectively detected in honey thanks to a simple new method.

The 21st SpaceX cargo resupply mission that launches from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida carries a variety of critical research and technology demonstrations to the International Space Station.

Anthraquinones are a class of naturally occurring compounds prized for their medicinal properties, as well as for other applications, including ecologically friendly dyes. Despite wide interest, the mechanism by which plants produce them has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

When you think of swimming, you probably imagine pushing through the water—creating backwards thrust that pushes you forward. New research at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) suggests instead that many marine animals actually pull themselves through the water, a phenomenon dubbed "suction thrust."

Blending is a powerful strategy for improving the performance of electronics, coatings, separation membranes, and other functional materials. For example, high-efficiency solar cells and light-emitting diodes have been produced by optimizing mixtures of organic and inorganic components.

Nylon, rubber, silicone, Teflon, PVC—these are all examples of man-made polymers—long chains of repeated molecular units that we call monomers. While polymers also exist in nature (think wool, silk, or even hair), the invention of synthetic polymers, the most famous of which is plastic, revolutionized the industry. Light, stretchy, flexible, yet strong and resistant, synthetic polymers are one...

Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) embarked on an underwater journey to solve a mystery: Why did sponges of the Agelas oroides species, which used to be common in the shallow waters along the Mediterranean coast of Israel, disappear? Today, the species can be found in Israel mainly in deep habitats that exist at a depth of 100 meters (330 feet).

Young Brazilians are increasingly interested in biodiversity, conservation of the Amazon and science as they begin high school, but school students in the North region are more interested in learning about these subjects, and about local fauna and flora, than their peers in the Southeast.

More Americans than not believe that college athletes should be allowed to be paid more than what it costs them to go to school, a new national study of nearly 4,000 people suggests.

U.S. pollution regulations meant to protect humans from dirty air are also saving birds. So concludes a new continentwide study published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Study authors found that improved air quality under a federal program to reduce ozone pollution may have averted the loss of 1.5 billion birds during the past 40 years. That's nearly 20 percent of...

Developing safe and sustainable fuels for nuclear energy is an integral part of Los Alamos National Laboratory's energy security mission. Uranium dioxide, a radioactive actinide oxide, is the most widely used nuclear fuel in today's nuclear power plants. A new "combustion synthesis" process recently established for lanthanide metals—non-radioactive and positioned one row above actinides on the...

Metabolic robustness, the ability of a metabolic system to buffer changes in its environment, is not always a welcome feature for microbiologists: it interferes with metabolic engineering or prevents that antibiotics kill bacteria. Therefore it is important to understand the mechanisms that enable metabolic robustness. A massively parallel CRISPRi screen demonstrated that E. coli metabolism is...

Our lungs are exposed to a multitude of hazardous airborne particles on a daily basis. Nanoparticles, due to their small size, may reach the sensitive alveolar region of the human lung and trigger inflammation even after a single inhalation leading to severe diseases such as heart disease, brain damage and lung cancer for prolonged exposure. In manufacturing, toxic nanoparticles may be released...

A transmissible cancer in the Tasmanian devil has evolved over the past two decades, with some lineages spreading and replacing others, according to a new study in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Young Mi Kwon, Kevin Gori, and Elizabeth Murchison of the University of Cambridge (UK) and colleagues. The evolutionary dynamics of the cancer help explain how this Australian marsupial has become...

Dialling down the Sun's heat a notch by injecting billions of shiny sulphur dioxide particles into the stratosphere could curtail devastating drought across parts of Africa, new peer-reviewed research has reported.

On the way to a CO2-neutral economy, we need to perfect a whole range of technologies—including the electrochemical extraction of hydrogen from water, fuel cells, or carbon capture. All these technologies have one thing in common: they only work if suitable catalysts are used. For many years, researchers have therefore been investigating which materials are best suited for this purpose.

An international team of astronomers using Gemini North's GNIRS instrument have discovered that CK Vulpeculae, first seen as a bright new star in 1670, is approximately five times farther away than previously thought. This makes the 1670 explosion of CK Vulpeculae much more energetic than previously estimated and puts it into a mysterious class of objects that are too bright to be members of the...

What should we get for our kids this holiday? As children get older, giving them something they can experience (live through) instead of material things makes them happier, according to new research led by Lan Nguyen Chaplin, associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Over the past decade, the climate change research community developed a scenario framework that combines alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. An international team of researchers assessed how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces.

The correlation between the high concentration of fine particles and the severity of influenza waves is well known to epidemiologists. An interdisciplinary team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the ETH Zürich spin-off Meteodat investigated possible interactions between acutely elevated levels of fine particulate matter and the virulence of the coronavirus disease. Their results,...

On November 18 scientists from the US National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory predicted the arrival of a large sunspot just in time for Thanksgiving. Using a special technique called helioseismology, the team has been 'listening' to changing sound waves from the Sun's interior which beckon the arrival of a large sunspot. Recent changes in these sound waves pointed to the imminent...

We rely on water to quench our thirst and to irrigate bountiful farmland. But what do you do when that once pristine water is polluted with wastewater from abandoned copper mines?

Philadelphia. Las Vegas. Cleveland.

A majority of police detectives in England and Wales investigating financial crime do not have sufficient knowledge to build a successful case.