After proving powered, controlled flight is possible on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has new orders: scout ahead of the Perseverance rover to assist in its search for past signs of microbial life.

SpaceX this weekend will attempt the first U.S. splashdown of returning astronauts in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot in 1968.

Researchers from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology in collaboration with scientists at Oxford University have published a paper in Cell reporting the function of LanCL proteins. These proteins are found in eukaryotic cells but their function was previously unknown. The study is the first step towards understanding the importance of these ubiquitous proteins.

The microscopic structures and properties of materials are intimately linked, and customizing them is a challenge. Rice University engineers are determined to simplify the process through machine learning.

Passed in 2018, the First Step Act sought to address re-entry challenges for inmates in the federal prison system. The legislation called for developing an assessment tool to identify inmates for release who had the lowest likelihood of recidivism. A new study assessed how the tool was developed and is used, finding that a greater proportion of inmates could reduce their risk and become eligible...

Global sea level rise associated with the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been significantly underestimated in previous studies, meaning sea level in a warming world will be greater than anticipated, according to a new study from Harvard researchers.

An international research group led by Prof. Wang Bo and Prof. Shi Gongle from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has collected approximately 25,000 fossil-containing amber samples and about 5,000 fossil plants in Zhangpu County, Fujian Province, southeast China from 2010 to 2019.

The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a stunning report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world's largest tropical forest to help absorb manmade carbon pollution.

NASA has a long tradition of unexpected discoveries, and the space program's TESS mission is no different. SMU astrophysicist and her team have discovered a particularly bright gamma-ray burst using a NASA telescope designed to find exoplanets—those occurring outside our solar system—particularly those that might be able to support life.

From the Pacific Northwest to the Rocky Mountains, summers in the West are marked by wildfires and smoke. New research from the University of Utah ties the worsening trend of extreme poor air quality events in Western regions to wildfire activity, with growing trends of smoke impacting air quality clear into September. The work is published in Environmental Research Letters.

Histology is the study of biological tissues at a microscopic level. Also called microscopic anatomy, histology is widely used to provide diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. For example, tissue samples obtained during surgery might help to determine whether further surgical action is needed, and further surgery may be avoided if a diagnosis can be rapidly obtained during an operation.

The detection of the axion would mark a key episode in the history of science. This hypothetical particle could resolve two fundamental problems of Modern Physics at the same time: the problema of Charge and Parity in the strong interaction, and the mystery of dark matter. However, in spite of the high scientific interest in finding it, the search at high radio frequency—above 6 GHz—has been...

A research team at the University of Cologne has discovered previously undescribed bacteria in amoebae that are related to Legionella and may even cause disease. The researchers from Professor Dr. Michael Bonkowski's working group at the Institute of Zoology have named one of the newly discovered bacteria 'Pokemonas' because they live in spherical amoebae, comparable to Pokémon in the video game,...

Chemical organization in reaction-diffusion systems offer a strategy to generate materials with ordered morphologies and architecture. Periodic structures can be formed using molecules or nanoparticles. An emerging frontier in materials science aims to combine nanoparticles and molecules. In a new report on Science Advances, Amanda J. Ackroyd and a team of scientists in chemistry, physics and...

Methane is not the most abundant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, but it is among the most potent. Roughly a quarter of global methane emissions come from natural sources, and freshwater ecosystems are the largest source of atmospheric methane. Most of the data on methane dynamics in aquatic ecosystems come from boreal and temperate environments. Less is known about the fate of methane in...

A dynamo mechanism could explain the incredibly strong magnetic fields in white dwarf stars according to an international team of scientists, including a University of Warwick astronomer.

Tungsten has the highest melting point of all metals, 3,422 degrees Celsius. This makes the material ideal for use at high temperatures in e.g. space rocket nozzles, heating elements of high-temperature furnaces, or the fusion reactor. However, the metal is highly brittle and, hence, difficult to process. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed an innovative approach...

According to classical electromagnetism, a charged particle moving in an external magnetic field experiences a force that makes the particle's path circular. This basic law of physics are exploited in designing cyclotrons that work as particle accelerators. When nanometer-size metal particles are placed in a magnetic field, the field induces a circulating electron current inside the particle. The...

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have developed an ultrasonic imaging system, which can be deployed on the tip of a hair-thin optical fiber, and will be insertable into the human body to visualize cell abnormalities in 3D.

The guilty verdicts delivered against Derek Chauvin on April 20, 2021, represented a landmark moment—but courtroom justice cannot deliver the sweeping changes most Americans feel are needed to improve policing in the U.S.

Advanced X-ray techniques have revealed new structural details about the specific arrangement of atoms in conjugated polymers, an important class of materials that are used in LEDs, organic solar cells, transistors, sensors and thermoelectric power devices.

An article published in the journal Nature Geoscience has highlighted the shocking under-representation of students from ethnic minority backgrounds in the Geosciences.

One tends to think of mountain glaciers as slow moving, their gradual passage down a mountainside visible only through a long series of satellite imagery or years of time-lapse photography. However, new research shows that glacier flow can be much more dramatic, ranging from about 10 meters a day to speeds that are more like that of avalanches, with obvious potential dire consequences for those...

Palmer amaranth is a hard-to-control noxious weed that can significantly reduce crop yields. It was first introduced in Minnesota in 2016 through contaminated seed mixes used for conservation plantings.