When you're as rare and vulnerable as a black toad, you can't afford to be coy about romance.

When wildfires ripped through Oregon last Labor Day, they burned huge swaths of forest, including 63,000 acres of smaller, private lands.

A Denali glacier suddenly moving at a speedier clip is intriguing scientists, increasing the risk of nearby flooding and potentially closing off some climbing routes on the mountain this season.

Energy flows through a system of atoms or molecules by a series of processes such as transfers, emissions, or decay. You can visualize some of these details like passing a ball (the energy) to someone else (another particle), except the pass happens quicker than the blink of an eye, so fast that the details about the exchange are not well understood. Imagine the same exchange happening in a busy...

When winter storms threaten to make travel dangerous, people often turn to salt, spreading it liberally over highways, streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. Road salt is an important tool for safety, because many thousands of people die or are injured every year due to weather related accidents. But a new study led by Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland warns that introducing salt...

Nitrogen is an element basic for life—plants need it, animals need it, it's in our DNA—but when there's too much nitrogen in the environment, things can go haywire. On Cape Cod, excess nitrogen in estuaries and salt marshes can lead to algal blooms, fish kills, and degradation of the environment.

Researchers have genetically engineered a probiotic yeast to produce beta-carotene in the guts of laboratory mice. The advance demonstrates the utility of work the researchers have done to detail how a suite of genetic engineering tools can be used to modify the yeast.

Increasing diversity remains a key priority at universities, especially in the wake of mass demonstrations in support of racial equality in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Many universities are guided by the motivation that diversity enhances student learning, a rationale supported by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Really big systems, like ocean currents and weather, work on really big scales. And so too does your plastic waste, according to new research from Janice Brahney from the Department of Watershed Sciences. The plastic straw you discarded in 1980 hasn't disappeared; it has fragmented into pieces too small to see, and is cycling through the atmosphere, infiltrating soil, ocean waters and air....

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have discovered three liquid phases in aerosol particles, changing our understanding of air pollutants in the Earth's atmosphere.

A new species of marsupial frog has been discovered in Peru's Amazon jungle, the state service for natural protected areas said on Monday.

Researchers have developed a head-mounted miniature microscope that can be used to image activity from the entire outer part of the brain, or cortex, in freely behaving mice. When combined with implantable see-through skulls, the new microscope can capture the brain activity of mice for more than 300 days.

Light can be used to operate quantum information processing systems, e.g. quantum computers, quickly and efficiently. Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Chimie ParisTech/CNRS have now significantly advanced the development of molecule-based materials suitable for use as light-addressable fundamental quantum units. As they report in the journal Nature Communications, they...

Researchers have used a technique similar to MRI to follow the movement of individual atoms in real time as they cluster together to form two-dimensional materials, which are a single atomic layer thick.

In the earliest stage of life, animals undergo some of their most spectacular physical transformations. Once merely blobs of dividing cells, they begin to rearrange themselves into their more characteristic forms, be they fish, birds or humans. Understanding how cells act together to build tissues has been a fundamental problem in physics and biology.

What exactly happens when the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell? In an article published in Nature, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry paints a comprehensive picture of the viral infection process. For the first time, the interaction between the coronavirus and a cell is documented at five distinct proteomics levels during viral...

Histones are tiny proteins that bind to DNA and hold information that can help turn on or off individual genes. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a technique that makes it possible to examine how different versions of histones bind to the genome in tens of thousands of individual cells at the same time. The technique was applied to the mouse brain and can be used to study...

Deep in a Jamaican cave is a treasure trove of bat poop, deposited in sequential layers by generations of bats over 4,300 years.

The harmfulness of pesticides to beneficial organisms is one of the most serious concerns in agriculture. Therefore scientists are eagerly looking for new, more environmentally friendly and species-specific solutions. Researchers at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Ghent and the University of Maastricht took a long step forward in this regard.

Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, together with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and National University of Singapore (NUS) have found a method to quantify the distribution of compositional fluctuations in the indium...

A new 160-million-year-old arboreal pterosaur species, dubbed 'Monkeydactyl', has the oldest true opposed thumb—a novel structure previously not known in pterosaurs.

A recent study finds U.S. companies that have a substantial number of employees in foreign jurisdictions with lower tax rates are more likely than their peers to "artificially" locate earnings in those jurisdictions—and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is less likely to challenge these complex tax-planning activities.

Origami may sound more like art than science, but a complex folding pathway that proteins use to determine their shape has been harnessed by molecular biologists, enabling them to build some of the most complex synthetic protein nanostructures to date.

Squirrels and other tree-dwelling rodents evolved to have bigger brains than their burrowing cousins, a study suggests.