The songs of fin whales can be used for seismic imaging of the oceanic crust, providing scientists a novel alternative to conventional surveying, a new study published this week in Science shows.

As more male-dominated industries look for ways to hire women, new Cornell University research offers employers a simple solution—make your initial job candidate short list longer.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has far exceeded its planned mission duration, revealing that the Moon holds surprises: ice deposits that could be used to support future lunar exploration, the coldest places in the solar system in permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles, and that it is an active world that is shrinking, generating moonquakes and changing in front of...

A Southwest Research Institute scientist has updated Mars chronology models to find that terrains shaped by ancient water activity on the planet's surface may be hundreds of millions of years older than previously thought. This new chronology for Mars, based on the latest dynamical models for the formation and evolution of the solar system, is particularly significant as the days count down until...

Plastic, with its unabated global production, is a major and persistent contributor to environmental pollution. In fact, the accumulation of plastic debris in our environment is only expected to increase in the future. "Microplastics" (MP)—plastic debris

One thing that decades of social science research has made abundantly clear? Americans in urban areas live in neighborhoods deeply segregated by race—and they always have.

Women today represent two-thirds of all Canadian doctorates in archaeology, but only one-third of Canadian tenure-stream faculty. While men with Canadian Ph.D.s have done well in securing tenure-track jobs in Canada over the past 15 years, women have not, according to a new study from McGill University. The current COVID-19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate these existing inequalities.

New research shows that biodiversity is important not just at the traditional scale of short-term plot experiments—in which ecologists monitor the health of a single meadow, forest grove, or pond after manipulating its species counts—but when measured over decades and across regional landscapes as well. The findings can help guide conservation planning and enhance efforts to make human...

Researchers have mined and combined information from two databases to link pollen and key plant traits to generate confidence in the ability to reconstruct past ecosystem services.

Understanding how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions is crucial to developing effective strategies for protecting important agricultural crops from a changing climate. New research led by Carnegie's Zhiyong Wang, Shouling, Xu, and Yang Bi reveals an important process by which plants switch between amplified and dampened stress responses. Their work is published by Nature...

In a recent article in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, authors gathered previously published research to summarize current thinking on the feasibility and efficacy of using scent detection dogs to screen for the COVID-19 virus. The researchers report that sensitivity, specificity, and overall success rates reported by the canine scent detection studies are comparable or better than the...

Millions of tons of plastic waste find their way into the ocean every year. A team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam has investigated the role of regional ocean governance in the fight against marine plastic pollution, highlighting why regional marine governance should be further strengthened as negotiations for a new global agreement continue.

The presence of high salt and nitrogen concentrations in high-tunnel soils may make it more challenging to rebuild a healthy soil microbiome following a soil-clearing event, according to microbial ecologists in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Previous studies have shown people can identify the gender and race of a speaker based on the words chosen, but could a person identify something like political membership? A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found people are more successful at identifying language associated with Republican speech than Democratic speech patterns. The results are available in the February issue of...

Scientists have challenged our current understanding of how galaxies form by unveiling pictures of a young galaxy in the early life of the Universe which appears surprisingly mature.

The recent killings of Black Americans have reignited calls for policing reform, including proposals to diversify police departments, which have historically been made up of white, male officers. Yet, few studies have examined whether deploying minority and female officers actually changes police-civilian interactions or reduces instances of shootings and reported misconduct.

Sea salt embedded in the dusty surface of Mars and lofted into the planet's atmosphere has led to the discovery of hydrogen chloride—the first time the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has detected a new gas. The spacecraft is also providing new information about how Mars is losing its water.

Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, in which stars are packed closely together. They are also typically very old—the globular cluster that is the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the Universe itself. It resides 7800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. Because of its very dense nucleus, it is known as a core-collapsed...

The golden-mantled ground squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis) is a popular sight among tourists in the Rocky Mountains—the small rodent is a photogenic creature with a striped back and pudgy cheeks that store seeds and other food.

Following fierce criticism over its environmental and climate policies, the Brazilian government on Wednesday presented a controversial program for the preservation of nature reserves in the Amazon region.

Microscopic, and sometimes larger, particles of soot, smoke and dust that spew out of gas-guzzling factories, ships, cars and aircraft are responsible for 18% of total global deaths in 2018—that equals more than 8 million people, a new study found.

The PCR test is the most accurate tool to identify SARS-CoV-2. However, valid results are often available only after days. Moreover, the testing laboratory must be well equipped, have trained personnel and sufficient financial resources. All of this is usually a problem in Africa. A portable suitcase could help. In cooperation with several African universities, scientists at Leipzig University...

The European House Sparrow has a story to tell about survival in the modern world. In parts of its native range in Europe, House Sparrow numbers are down by nearly 60%. Their fate in the U.S. and Canada is less well known. A new study by Cornell Lab of Ornithology scientists aims to clarify the status of this non-native species, using 21 years of citizen science data from the Cornell Lab's Project...

In recent years, active, self-propelled particles have received growing interest amongst the scientific community. Examples of active particles and their systems are numerous and very diverse, ranging from bacterium films to flocks of birds or human crowds. These systems can demonstrate unusual behavior, which is challenging to understand or model.