The link between on-road traffic and air pollution is well-known, as are the negative health impacts of pollution exposure. However, the many factors that may influence commuters' exposure to pollutants—such as frequency, time, and duration of commute—and the overall impact of commuting remains a matter of on-going scientific discovery.

By uprooting carbon trapped in soil, wild pigs are releasing around 4.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually across the globe, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars.

What's a hungry marine microbe to do when the pickings are slim? It must capture nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, or iron—to survive, yet in vast expanses of the ocean, nutrients are extremely scarce. And the stakes are high: Marine microbial communities drive many of the elemental cycles that sustain all life on Earth.

Politicians may have good reason to turn to angry rhetoric, according to research led by political scientists from Colorado—the strategy seems to work, at least in the short term.

The nation's largest wildfire torched more dry forest in Oregon and forced the evacuation of a wildlife research station Monday as firefighters had to retreat from the flames for the ninth consecutive day due to erratic and dangerous fire behavior.

New research has found marine seismic surveys used in oil and gas exploration are not impacting the abundance or behavior of commercially valuable fishes in the tropical shelf environment in north-western Australia.

Throughout history, people of different cultures and stages of evolution have found ways to adapt, with varying success, to the gradual warming of the environment they live in. But can the past inform the future, now that climate change is happening faster than ever before?

A new approach to analyze satellite measurements of Earth's cloud cover reveals that clouds are very likely to enhance global heating.

A major drought and forest fires in the Amazon rainforest killed billions of trees and plants and turned one of the world's largest carbon sinks into one of its biggest polluters.

One of the topics investigated in recent physics studies is strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SF-QED). So far, this area has rarely been explored before, mainly because the experimental observation of SF-QED processes would require extremely high light intensities (>1025W/cm2), over three orders of magnitude higher than those attained using the most intense PetaWatt (PW)-class lasers available...

A suite of International Space Station scientific experiments soon journey back to Earth aboard the 22nd SpaceX commercial resupply services mission for NASA. Scientists on the ground look forward to having their experiments back within hours, an advantage that could provide better results. Dragon undocks from the space station July 7.

For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source—splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance.

Flavor is the name of the game for scientists who want to optimize food for consumption in ways that improve nutrition or combat obesity.

Analysis of children and young people's proximity to woodlands has shown links with better cognitive development and a lower risk of emotional and behavioral problems, in research led by UCL and Imperial College London scientists that could influence planning decisions in urban areas.

For dairy cows, the transition period—the time between a cow giving birth and beginning to produce milk—brings the greatest possibility of health problems. The current widespread belief is that the effects of excess nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA) in the bloodstream and the ensuing hyperketonemia during this period, coupled with low levels of available calcium, are largely responsible for...

The Giant Galapagos tortoises which live in contact with human farming and tourism activities, or in urbanized zones, have more bacterial resistance to antibiotics than those that live in more isolated ecosystems.

A serendipitous flythrough of the tail of a disintegrated comet has offered scientists a unique opportunity to study these remarkable structures, in new research presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California.

A new Tel Aviv University study found that, like humans, bats living in Tel Aviv enjoy the wide variety and abundance of food that the city has to offer, in contrast to rural bats living in Beit Guvrin, who are content eating only one type of food. The study was led by research student Katya Egert-Berg, under the guidance of Prof. Yossi Yovel, head of Tel Aviv University's Sagol School of...

The final stage of cataclysmic explosions of dying massive stars, called supernovae, could pack an up to six times bigger punch on the surrounding interstellar gas with the help of cosmic rays, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford. The work will be presented by Ph.D. student Francisco Rodríguez Montero today (19 July) at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting...

Chemical synapses transmit information within the nervous system. When a presynaptic cell is electrically excited, synaptic vesicles fuse with the presynaptic membrane causing messenger substances within the vesicles to be released into the synaptic cleft. These then bind to receptors in the postsynaptic cell where they trigger an electrical signal once again. The temporal and spatial sequence of...

Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel method for producing new antibiotics to combat resistant bacteria. Through an approach that would target bacteria with an antibiotic that is masked by a prodrug, which the bacteria would themselves remove, the researchers identified a method that would allow for development of new, effective antibiotics that could...

This summer, if you see a butterfly with wings that are blue on top with orange spots underneath, you may have crossed paths with a male European Common Blue (or Polyommatus icarus), a newly introduced species in Canada.

Living organisms are often exposed to stress stimuli generated either by external or internal factors, and they need to respond accordingly. At a cellular level, stress usually triggers the activation of survival pathways that contribute to the recovery of cell homeostasis. However, when stress is too high, a process of cell death is initiated that eliminates the damaged cell.