A weakened Tropical Storm Elsa dumped rain across Florida's northern Gulf Coast early Wednesday, sparing the state from significant damage as it churned toward Georgia with threats of flooding downpours and possibly tornadoes.

Although wastewater disposal has been the primary driving force behind increased earthquake activity in southern Kansas since 2013, a new study concludes that the disposal has not significantly changed the orientation of stress in the Earth's crust in the region.

The protein actin is ubiquitous and essential for life. In mammals, every cell expresses two of its forms, beta-actin and gamma-nonmuscle-actin. Despite having distinct roles, the two forms are nearly identical, sharing 99% of their amino acid sequence.

When you insist you're not racist, you may unwittingly be sending the opposite message.

When gravitational waves were first detected in 2015 by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they sent a ripple through the scientific community, as they confirmed another of Einstein's theories and marked the birth of gravitational wave astronomy. Five years later, numerous gravitational wave sources have been detected, including the first observation of two...

Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce solar radiation and stop the Greenland ice cap from melting. It's an interesting scenario, but not without risks. Climatologists from the University of Liège have looked into the matter and have tested one of the scenarios put forward using the MAR climate model developed at the University of Liège. The results are mixed and have been published in...

Bahamian mosquitofish in habitats fragmented by human activity are more willing to explore their environment, more stressed by change and have smaller brain regions associated with fear response than mosquitofish from unaffected habitats. The new study from North Carolina State University shows that these fish have adapted quickly in specific ways to human-driven change, and cautions that...

Very recently, researchers led by Markus Aspelmeyer at the University of Vienna and Lukas Novotny at ETH Zurich cooled a glass nanoparticle into the quantum regime for the first time. To do this, the particle is deprived of its kinetic energy with the help of lasers. What remains are movements, so-called quantum fluctuations, which no longer follow the laws of classical physics but those of...

Traditional crops are not a good match for all farmland, such as parts of the North Carolina Piedmont region.

A new study demonstrates that lobsters can detect low-frequency sound and suggests that anthropogenic noise could affect lobsters. The study comes out at a time when the construction of more offshore wind farms, with their associated underwater pile driving noise, is being considered in New England.

"Equal pay for equal work," a motto touted by many people, turns out to be relevant to the plant world as well. According to new research by Stanford University ecologists, plants allocate resources to their microbial partners in proportion to how much they benefit from that partnership.

From above, the Antarctic Ice Sheet might look like a calm, perpetual ice blanket that has covered Antarctica for millions of years. But the ice sheet can be thousands of meters deep at its thickest, and it hides hundreds of meltwater lakes where its base meets the continent's bedrock. Deep below the surface, some of these lakes fill and drain continuously through a system of waterways that...

Miniaturization is rapidly reshaping the field of biochemistry, with emerging technologies such as microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" devices taking the world by storm. Chemical reactions that were normally conducted in flasks and tubes can now be carried out within tiny water droplets not larger than a few millionths of a liter. Particularly, in droplet-array sandwiching techniques, such tiny...

To create high-resolution, 3D images of tissues such as the brain, researchers often use two-photon microscopy, which involves aiming a high-intensity laser at the specimen to induce fluorescence excitation. However, scanning deep within the brain can be difficult because light scatters off of tissues as it goes deeper, making images blurry.

A thin shell of soft polymer can help keep knotty ceramic structures from shattering, according to materials scientists at Rice University.

Sudanese Islamic burial sites are distributed according to large-scale environmental factors and small-scale social factors, creating a galaxy-like distribution pattern, according to a study published July 7, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Stefano Costanzo of the University of Naples "L'Orientale" in Italy and colleagues.

Increased acidity in the atmosphere is disrupting the ecological balance of the oceans, according to new research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

A group of songbirds recently turned up dead in Nottingham, Chester County, Pennsylvania.

The UAE's Nora al-Matrooshi is the first Arab woman to start training to be an astronaut, one of two Emiratis picked from thousands of applicants as the Gulf nation looks to the stars.

Sheep graze through the tall prairie grass, their bleats breaking the quiet as butterflies and insects flit through the native flowers.

As the Pacific Northwest sweltered through a record-breaking heat wave last week, many residents here in America's least air-conditioned city sought relief under the shade of cedars and maples in city parks. But in some areas of Seattle, that shelter was hard to come by.

High up in the mountains of San Diego County, there are meadows with creeks and streams where some of San Diego's rarest butterflies flutter from flower to flower.

A team of researchers from Uppsala University, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Toronto has found that there are benefits for female seed beetles mating with males with extra-long spiny genitalia. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study of the mating habits of the beetles and what they learned about them.

Human pollution is often evident from oil slicks and plastic drifting on shore, but many of the drugs humans consume also end up washing out into the water, and current effluent treatment isn't equipped to deal with them. Drugs such as fluoxetine—also known as Prozac—creeping into waterways can embolden fish and alter their behavior, but pharmaceutical pollution doesn't end with prescribed...