Phosphate glass is a versatile compound that has generated interest for its use in fuel cells and as biomaterials for supplying therapeutic ions. P2O5—the compound that forms the structural network of phosphate glass—is made up of phosphorus, an element that can adopt many different bonding configurations in combination with oxygen.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are set to welcome a most unusual guest, as "the Blob" blasts off into orbit on Tuesday.

California's largest single wildfire in recorded history kept pushing through forestlands on Tuesday as fire crews tried to protect rural communities from flames that have destroyed hundreds of homes.

Volunteers and firefighters were working relentlessly Tuesday, often without masks or helmets, in a desperate bid to stop a violent blaze from reaching a key town on Greece's Evia island, one of hundreds of fires that have raged through the country.

A potential new treatment for mast cell cancers reduces the number of mast cells by "mutating" the messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can deliver instructions for manufacturing the gene responsible for cell proliferation. The method, known as frameshifting, changes the pre-mRNA so that the mature mRNA is degraded and any protein produced from its instructions is altered and inert. In a mouse model,...

Researchers who study crime are increasingly recognizing that context matters—that is, that actions, including crime, are shaped by the people and settings in which individuals offend. A new study examined whether others' deviant actions prompted individuals to opt out of offending or reverse their intentions to offend based on the size of the offending group. The study identified opt-out...

What are the causes, patterns and effects of disastrous river flood? An international group of researchers led by GFZ hydrologist Bruno Merz has investigated this question in a review article published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. The short answer: It's complicated. What is certain, however, is that there is an opposing trend of property damage and personal injury. Since...

The reefs at Palmyra Atoll, a small outlying atoll in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, have been undergoing a shift from stony corals to systems dominated by corallimorphs, marine invertebrates that share traits with both anemones and hard corals. A published study in Coral Reefs led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa marine biology researchers has discovered that although the invading corallimorph...

It is commonly thought that rodents are functionally blind when their surroundings are illuminated with light of longer wavelengths, which humans perceive as red. A new study, published in eLife by Nader Nikbakht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mathew Diamond of SISSA—Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati—challenges this assumption and shows that rats can...

Researchers have identified two sugar-binding proteins that impede the viral entry of circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants. The team, spearheaded by researchers at IMBA—Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences—may have found the "Achilles' heel" of the virus, with potential for pan-variant therapeutic interventions. The findings are now published in the EMBO Journal.

Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is one of the most distinctive and least studied aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system. A new study analyzed seven years of federal sentencing data to investigate the associations between life sentences in federal courts and race/ethnicity. The study found that Black and Hispanic offenders were more likely to be eligible for life sentences...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare genetic disease usually diagnosed in young boys, gradually weakens muscles across the body until the heart or lungs fail. Symptoms often show up by age 5; as the disease progresses, patients lose the ability to walk around age 12. Today, the average life expectancy for DMD patients hovers around 26.

Among our solar system's many moons, Saturn's Titan stands out—it's the only moon with a substantial atmosphere and liquid on the surface. It even has a weather system like Earth's, though it rains methane instead of water. Might it also host some kind of life?

Mount Etna's southeastern crater has grown in height after six months of activity, Italy's vulcano monitoring agency said Tuesday, making Europe's tallest active volcano taller than ever.

As the world's nations prepare to set new goals for protecting biodiversity, Yale researchers have identified where data gaps continue to limit effective conservation decisions.

A global catastrophe 66 million years ago led to the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs, and large marine reptiles like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. But what happened to the sharks? According to a study of sharks' teeth publishing August 10th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Mohamad Bazzi of Uppsala University and colleagues, shark-tooth diversity remained relatively constant across the...

From flash floods to forest fires, drought to "sea snot", Turkey is bearing the brunt of increasingly frequent disasters blamed on climate change, putting pressure on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to act.

Before last year, a one-credit technology course for students pursuing master's degrees in education at the University of Washington wasn't seen as the program's most relevant. Then COVID-19 hit, schools plunged into remote learning, and suddenly material from that course was being infused into others.

Cornell researchers are proposing a new way to modulate both the absorptive and the refractive qualities of metamaterials in real time, and their findings open intriguing new opportunities to control, in time and space, the propagation and scattering of waves for applications in various areas of wave physics and engineering.

A new study published in the journal Global Sustainability finds for the first time that over 160,000 miles of rivers are at risk of losing their free-flowing status due to the proposed construction of new hydropower dams. The total stretch of free-flowing rivers at risk is longer than six times the distance around the Earth. Iconic rivers such as the Amazon, Congo, and Salween are among those...

Black soldier fly larvae (BSF) can replace soybean meal (SBM) as protein source in the diet for growing pigs. That was discovered by a multidisciplinary research team of Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Leiden University, the Netherlands.

New data analysis techniques allow evidence of recent volcanism to be found in old Magellan spacecraft data. It is unclear if this activity is occurring today, or if it occurred within tens of million years, but geologically speaking, either case is recent. This adds to the growing body of evidence that volcanoes on Venus didn't go extinct as long ago as many had thought. This work was conducted...

Politicians are more likely to tweet about climate change if they are Democrats, represent wealthier districts and if their constituents are concerned about the climate, according to a new Cornell study. Meanwhile, communities most at risk from climate change are less likely to see their political leaders tweet about it, the multidisciplinary team of researchers said.

Droplet manipulation is kindling great interest in several fields, including technological applications and basic studies in dynamic systems. The Lab-on-a-chip and microfluidics community is particularly interested in the precise manipulation of small volumes of fluids, droplet microfluidics. A piece of research conducted by the UPV/EHU's Microfluidics Cluster  has found that a superparamagnetic...