The proliferation of pits and ponds created in recent years by miners digging for small deposits of alluvial gold in Peru's Amazon has dramatically altered the landscape and increased the risk of mercury exposure for indigenous communities and wildlife, a new study shows.

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Norway and one in the U.K., has unveiled their findings after collecting and studying a very large number of ancient arrows they found near a melting ice patch in Norway's Jotunheimen Mountains. In their paper published in the journal The Holocene, the group describes how they kept their research secret to avoid the possibility of...

Superconducting devices such as SQUIDS (Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device) can perform ultra-sensitive measurements of magnetic fields. Leiden physicsts invented a method to 3-D-print these and other superconducting devices in minutes.

Multi-kilowatt (kW) (≥3kW) level fiber lasers with high stability are significant in many applications, and Yb-doped fiber is the key device in such fiber lasers. The incredible advances of the past few decades in fiber fabrication technology have led to an exponential increase in the output power of continuous-wave (CW) fiber lasers. However, with further scaling the output power,...

International and Cypriot experts on Friday discussed a research project to test space equipment on the Mediterranean island before sending it to Mars to measure the age of its rocks, officials said.

A comet discovered last year is offering scientists new insights into how these objects "turn on" and evolve, as it actually transitions out of the Centaur population and into the Jupiter Family of Comets (JFCs), according to a paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Jordan Steckloff.

Black holes are thought to gobble up so much surrounding material that they put an end to the life of their host galaxy. In that process they create a highly energetic object called a quasar which was previously thought to halt star birth. Now researchers have found a galaxy that is surviving the ravenous forces of a quasar by continuing to birth new stars –about 100 Sun-sized stars a year.

Researchers have recently displayed the interaction of superconducting qubits; the basic unit of quantum information, with surface acoustic wave resonators; a surface-wave equivalent of the crystal resonator, in quantum physics. This phenomena opens a new field of research, defined as quantum acoustodynamics to allow the development of new types of quantum devices. The main challenge in this...

New research by scientists from Delft University of Technology and the University of Duisburg-Essen uses the motion of atomically thin graphene to identify noble gasses. These gasses are chemically passive and do not react with other materials, which makes it challenging to detect them. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

An international team of geologists, headed by members of the University of Bern, has shown for the first time that the Swiss Alps are being lifted faster than they are being lowered through erosion—and are thus growing even higher. To do this, the researchers quantified the erosion of the Alps with the help of isotopes measured in the sand of more than 350 rivers throughout the European Alps....

The Freigeist group at TU Dresden, led by chemist Dr. Juliane Simmchen, has studied an impressive behavior of synthetic microswimmers: as soon as the photocatalytic particles leave an illuminated zone, they flip independently and swim back into the light. This promising observation and its analysis was recently published in the scientific journal Soft Matter as an "Emerging Investigator" article.

Howling at the Moon Sunday night? Sunday night into Monday morning November 30th features not only the penultimate Full Moon for 2020, but the final lunar eclipse of the year, with a penumbral eclipse of the Moon.

Waste from the citrus industry can provide biogas and valuable products for a range of industries. This has been shown by Lukitawesa, who recently defended his doctoral thesis at the Department of Resource Recovery and Building Technology at the University of Borås.

Recently, researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have made progress in ultrafast dynamics of polymer solar cells (PSCs) with Soochow University.

The Danish Mayfly was selected Friday by an international group of entomologists and others as the Insect of the Year for 2021, but it won't have long to celebrate its 15 minutes of fame.

The idea that modern humans displaced Neanderthals because they were better protected against toxins from smoke is now under fire. An earlier study that put forward this suggestion has now been refuted by genetic research by scientists from Leiden and Wageningen. This new research was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution on 24 November.

Decades after two large earthquakes rocked the Mojave Desert in California, the discovery of new post-earthquake displacement features has prompted KAUST researchers to update the existing model for this earthquake-prone region. Their findings support a thin "crème brûlée" model in which the strength lies in the upper crust, while the lower crust exhibits more ductility over time than...

China will ban all waste imports from January 1, 2021, state media reported Friday, marking the culmination of a three-year phase-out of accepting overseas junk.

A team led by LMU's Veit Hornung has shown that a protein found in skin cells recognizes a specific nucleic acid intermediate that is formed during virus replication. This recognition process subsequently induces a potent inflammatory response.

New knowledge about the flowering mechanism of a popular cassava cultivar, gleaned by a RIKEN-led study, could help efforts to produce improved breeds of the crop.

Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But don't worry, this doesn't mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole. Instead the changes are results of a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15...

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have tested quantum mechanics to a completely new level of precision using hydrogen spectroscopy, and in doing so they came much closer to solving the well-known proton charge radius puzzle.

A team of researchers led by members of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) has analyzed previously collected data to infer the true nature of a compact object—found to be a rotating magnetar, a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field—orbiting within LS 5039, the brightest gamma-ray binary system in the Galaxy.

A team from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) and the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ), led by Professor Fateh Chebana, has recently developed a cold-health watch and warning system for cold waves, a first in the world. Their results were published in November 2020 in the journal Science of the Total Environment.