Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behavior from a radio-loud magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the universe.

A U.S. billionaire who made a fortune in tech and fighter jets is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three people with him to circle the globe this year.

That dream house in southern France that so many fantasise about is going to become uncomfortably hot in coming decades, according to new climate change projections Monday by the country's national weather service.

A 15-year experiment on Arctic shrubs in Greenland lends new understanding to an enduring ecological puzzle: How do species with similar needs and life histories occur together at large scales while excluding each other at small scales? The answer to this question has important implications for how climate change might shift species' distributions across the globe.

New research from North Carolina State University reveals that probiotic Lactobacillus bacteria use enzymes situationally to manipulate bile acids and promote their own survival in the gut. These findings further elucidate the complicated relationship between bile acids and gut bacteria and could eventually enable researchers to design lactobacilli with therapeutic properties, thereby engineering...

Just as plants and animals on land are keenly attuned to the hours of sunlight in the day, life in the oceans follows the rhythms of the day, the seasons and even the moon. A University of Washington study finds the biological light switches that make this possible.

A previously unknown root trait allows some cereal plants to grow deeper roots capable of punching through dry, hard, compacted soils, according to Penn State researchers, who suggest that harnessing the inherited characteristic could lead to crops better able to deal with a changing climate.

Most snakes get from A to B by bending their bodies into S-shapes and slithering forward headfirst. A few species, however—found in the deserts of North America, Africa and the Middle East—have an odder way of getting around. Known as "sidewinders," these snakes lead with their mid-sections instead of their heads, slinking sideways across loose sand.

There are fossils, found in ancient marine sediments and made up of no more than a few magnetic nanoparticles, that can tell us a whole lot about the climate of the past, especially episodes of abrupt global warming. Now, researchers including doctoral student Courtney Wagner and associate professor Peter Lippert from the University of Utah, have found a way to glean the valuable information in...

Evidence of an impending breakup may exist in the small words used in everyday conversations months before either partner realizes where their relationship is heading, according to new psychology research.

The temperature of a planet is linked with the diversity of life that it can support. MIT geologists have now reconstructed a timeline of the Earth's temperature during the early Paleozoic era, between 510 and 440 million years ago—a pivotal period when animals became abundant in a previously microbe-dominated world.

New research out of the University of Chicago has found evidence that the lobe-finned fish species Tiktaalik roseae was capable of both biting and suction during feeding, similar to modern-day gars. These results, published on Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide evidence that bite-based feeding originally evolved in aquatic species and was later adapted for use...

Space tourism company Virgin Galactic said Monday it planned a new test flight for its SpaceShipTwo craft this month after an aborted test in early December.

The virtual conferencing that has replaced large, in-person gatherings in the age of COVID-19 represents a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, but those online meetings still come with their own environmental costs, new research from the University of Michigan shows.

Winter survival of honey bee colonies is strongly influenced by summer temperatures and precipitation in the prior year, according to Penn State researchers, who said their findings suggest that honey bees have a "goldilocks" preferred range of summer conditions outside of which their probability of surviving the winter falls.

A new kind of wearable health device would deliver real-time medical data to those with eye or mouth diseases, according to Huanyu 'Larry' Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM).

When it comes to saving endangered species of a certain size, conservationists often have to think outside the box.

Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said "What I cannot create, I do not understand." Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant...

In a new study, investigators report an optimized approach to using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for analyzing hydrogen isotopes. Their new findings could enable improved rapid identification and measurement of hydrogen and other light isotopes that are important in nuclear reactor materials and other applications.

Theoretical physicists of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz are working on a theory that goes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and can answer questions where the Standard Model has to pass—for example, with respect to the hierarchies of the masses of elementary particles or the existence of dark matter. The central element of the theory is an...

Army-funded researchers discovered how to make materials capable of self-propulsion, allowing materials to move without motors or hands.

Over the past century, a wide variety of models have emerged to explain the complex behaviors which unfold within atomic nuclei at low energies. However, these theories bring up deep philosophical questions regarding their scientific value. Indeed, traditional epistemological tools have been rather elaborated to account for a unified and stabilized theory rather than to apprehend a plurality of...

There is a considerable gap in our current understanding of gift-giving because much of what has been studied has focused on gift-giving as an affair between just two consumers—a single giver and a recipient. Little is known about the impact other gifts have on the recipient of the gifts, even though some of the most common occasions for giving a gift, such as birthdays, the winter holidays,...

When aboveground storage tanks fail during a storm and their toxic contents spread, the threat to human health can and probably will flow downwind of the immediate area.