More than 70% of plant species that produce flowers depend on birds to disperse their seeds. Birds feed on fruit from a wide array of different plants, and bird-plant interactions configure a welter of complex networks.

An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said Wednesday.

Startups backed by venture capital—and their investors—often lose tax savings because they organize as corporations rather than limited liability companies, finds a UC Riverside-led study.

As wildfires and heatwaves stress the western United States, concern over drought is rising: Dry landscapes burn more readily, and rain can help quell fires already raging. But wildfire smoke may keep that essential rain from falling.

MIT engineers and colleagues report important new advances on a tunable metasurface, or flat optical device patterned with nanoscale structures, that they compare to a Swiss army knife while its passive predecessor can be thought of as just one tool, like a flat-bladed screwdriver. Key to the work is a transparent material discovered by the team that quickly and reversibly changes its atomic...

Physics researchers at the University of North Florida's Atomic LEGO Lab discovered a new electronic phenomenon they call "asymmetric ferroelectricity." The research led by Dr. Maitri Warusawithana, UNF physics assistant professor, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois and the Arizona State University, demonstrated this phenomenon for the first time in engineered...

Can you see NASA's newest rover in this picture from Jezero Crater?

A new UBC study on the impact of climate change on coral reefs is raising sticky questions about conservation.

Cornell researchers have identified a new way to measure DNA torsional stiffness—how much resistance the helix offers when twisted—information that can potentially shed light on how cells work.

Italy baked in sweltering temperatures that continued to drive deadly wildfires Wednesday, with Spain and Portugal bracing for the arrival of a dangerous heat wave that has grilled southeastern Europe and is starting to push west toward the Iberian peninsula.

Scientists on Italy's side of the Mont Blanc massif are constantly monitoring a melting glacier, where the risk of collapse due to rising temperatures threatens the valley below.

The wheat harvest on Marci Green's farm doesn't usually begin until late August, but a severe drought stunted this year's crop and her crews finished harvesting last week because she didn't want what had grown so far to shrivel and die in the heat.

Marine bacteria in the frigid waters of the Canadian Arctic are capable of biodegrading oil and diesel fuel, according to a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

"There are only two natural disasters that could impact the entire U.S.," according to Gabor Toth, professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. "One is a pandemic and the other is an extreme space weather event."

Sunflowers face the rising sun because increased morning warmth attracts more bees and also helps the plants reproduce more efficiently, according to a study by researchers at the University of California, Davis. The results were published Aug. 9 in New Phytologist.

The number of beavers in Scotland has more than doubled in the last three years, according to a new population survey.

The cabbage butterfly, voracious as a caterpillar, is every gardener's menace. Turns out, these lovely white or sulfur yellow butterflies started trying to take over the planet millions of years before humans ever set foot on it.

In a study released Wednesday, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the agency's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft to better understand movements of the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu through the year 2300, significantly reducing uncertainties related to its future orbit, and improving scientists'...

There are fewer than 500 Indian Ocean humpback dolphins (Sousa plumbea) remaining in South African waters. Science alone will not bring them back from the brink of extinction—we also need a multi-stakeholder Conservation Management Plan to boost their numbers.

A new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers at the University of Washington (UW), Burke Museum, and Stony Brook University, finds important clues on how bats and Piper (pepper) plants in Central America have co-evolved to help each other survive.

A study conducted in Hungarian schools showed that seating students next to each other boosted their tendency to become friends—both for pairs of similar students and pairs of students who differed in their educational achievement, gender, or ethnicity. Julia Rohrer of University of Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 11, 2021.

It is increasingly clear that the prolonged drought conditions, record-breaking heat, sustained wildfires, and frequent, more extreme storms experienced in recent years are a direct result of rising global temperatures brought on by humans' addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And a new MIT study on extreme climate events in Earth's ancient history suggests that today's planet may become...

Wildlife officials in Wisconsin met Wednesday to consider a 130-animal limit for the state's fall wolf hunt, saying they want to protect the population after hunters killed almost twice as many wolves as allotted during a rushed spring season.

Nearly 100,000 hectares of forestry and farmland have burned in less than two weeks in Greece in the worst wave of wildfires since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) said Wednesday.