Firefighters battling wildfires in the western United States use a variety of suppression tactics to get the flames under control. Prescribed burns, or controlled fires intentionally set to clear shrubs and forest litter before a wildfire ever ignites, can make fire suppression operations almost three times as effective in limiting wildfire severity, according to a new study by researchers from...

Hundreds of millions of people live on river deltas around the world, making them central to rich diversity in culture and thriving economies. As deltas face environmental degradation and ongoing climate change, governments have sought ever more drastic measures to prevent flooding and protect society and its infrastructure. But, these policies can harm the natural environment and lead to loss of...

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist and collaborators have demonstrated the first-ever "defect microscope" that can track how populations of defects deep inside macroscopic materials move collectively.

The American West is baking, burning and drying in intertwined extreme weather. Four sets of numbers explain how bad it is now, while several others explain why it got this bad.

Urea is a critical element found in everything from fertilizers to skin care products. Large-scale production of urea, which is naturally a product of human urine, is a massive undertaking, making up about 2% of global energy use and emissions today.

T lymphocytes, or T cells, are immune cells with diverse roles in building the body's immunity. How does one particular cell type fight against a host of different pathogens? The key to this adaptability is in alternative splicing, wherein the cell produces multiple forms of proteins for identifying different types of invading viruses and microbes, as well as destroying cancer cells. So, it is not...

Undeniably the shark movie to end all shark movies, the 1975 blockbuster "Jaws" not only smashed box office expectations, but forever changed the way we felt about going into the water—and how we think about sharks.

A new study from the University of Missouri found the unanticipated transitions to virtual schooling due to COVID-19 exposed the lack of digital resources among Black families in the United States, including access to Wi-Fi and technological savviness. As two-thirds of the country's Black children are born into single-parent households, the findings help explain the extensive stress virtual...

The Sunshine City and its sparkling waterfront parks have become the center of Tampa Bay's Red Tide crisis.

On June 7, 2021, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter's ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter, racing over its roiling atmosphere from pole to pole in less than three hours. Using the spacecraft's JunoCam imager, the mission team has put together an animation to provide a "starship captain"...

A new study on the effects of Airbnb listings on Boston neighborhoods suggests that the prevalence of listings may hamper local social dynamics that prevent crime. However, tourists themselves do not appear to generate or attract higher levels of crime. Babak Heydari, Daniel T. O'Brien, and Laiyang Ke of Northeastern University in Boston, MA, U.S. present these findings in the open-access journal...

A novel analysis of 3 years of conversations at a software engineering organization suggests a strong relationship between communication and productivity. Arindam Dutta of Arizona State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 14, 2021.

Domestic dogs show many adaptations to living closely with humans, but they do not seem to reciprocate food-giving according to a study, publishing July 14 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, led by Jim McGetrick and colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria.

Facebook posts by members of the U.S. Congress reveal the depth of the partisan divide over the COVID-19 pandemic, new research shows.

New research, led by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, illustrates the disparity between the narrow origins and far-reaching impacts of greenhouse emissions responsible for disrupting the global climate system. Published in Science Advances today, the study was built upon the most comprehensive accounting of global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. It reveals that the regions generating the...

A team of international researchers, led by the University of Bologna, has discovered the fossilized remains of methane-cycling microbes that lived in a hydrothermal system beneath the seafloor 3.42 billion years ago.

Climate change and deforestation have flipped a large swathe of the Amazon basin from absorbing to emitting planet-warming CO2, a transformation that could turn humanity's greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming into a foe, researchers reported on Wednesday.

Ligands are much like nanosized barnacles, binding to many kinds of surfaces. This form of adsorption is crucial for a range of chemical processes, from purification and catalysis to the design of nanomaterials.

While several biology techniques have undergone significant technical advances that have allowed their high-throughput implementation, assessing the resistance levels of plant varieties to microbial pathogens remains an arduous and time-consuming task. In response to this, Pujara and collaborators took advantage of the naturally occurring luminescence of a deep-sea shrimp to engineer a...

Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States has determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming. They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.

When we opened a box supplied by museum curators, our research team audibly gasped. Inside was a huge Australian magpie nest from 2018.

What the fruit fly is to zoologists, the thale cress is to botanists. The widespread herb with the botanical name Arabidopsis thaliana serves them as a model organism from which knowledge can be gained for other plants. It is therefore extremely well researched—also genetically. For example, it is now known that the genetic material of Arabidopsis thaliana (its genome) comprises around 125...

Super-thin carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes may not be best for separating industrially important chemical mixtures. However, ensuring the CMS film thickness is just right could enable more energy-efficient purification of chemical products, KAUST researchers have shown.

Scientists seeking to bring to Earth the fusion energy that drives the sun and stars use radio frequency (RF) waves—the same waves that bring radio and television into homes—to heat and drive current in the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Scientists now have developed a path-setting way to measure the waves that could be used to validate predictions of their impact, setting the stage for...