Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being said, as well as what our relationship to that person may be—because, after all, we probably give the opinion of our best friend more weight than that of a complete stranger.

Expect a drier, warmer winter down south and a wetter winter up north, U.S. government forecasters said Thursday.

Global philanthropic spending to help halt climate change grew last year—but still remains less than 2% of all giving, according to a new report from the ClimateWorks Foundation.

A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability.

Fuel cells, due to their high efficiency and environment-friendly attributes in the process of electricity generation, are gaining popularity for Fuel Cell Vehicle (FCV) production, such as automobiles, forklifts, buses and airplanes. However, the costly nature of producing fuel cell catalysts precludes the mass-production and large-scale application of FCVs.

California's oil and gas regulator on Thursday proposed that the state ban new oil drilling within 3,200 feet of schools, homes and hospitals to protect public health in what would be the nation's largest buffer zone between oil wells and communities.

A critically endangered Sumatran orangutan in New Orleans is pregnant with twins, the zoo in New Orleans announced Thursday.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have shown that our ability to quickly assess threats in our environment comes from our perception of discrete linear features in a scene rather than details or objects within it.

National security officials warn that worsening heat waves, droughts and other climate-fueled hazards are likely to drive a surge in global migration in the coming decades, increasing political instability among the United States' allies and strengthening its adversaries.

Vanderbilt and Penn State engineers have developed a novel approach to design and fabricate thin-film infrared light sources with near-arbitrary spectral output driven by heat, along with a machine learning methodology called inverse design that reduced the optimization time for these devices from weeks or months on a multi-core computer to a few minutes on a consumer-grade desktop.

Scientists are sounding the alarm. The biodiversity of islands around the world is becoming increasingly threatened, due in large part to habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive species and climate change. If healthy island environments are to be conserved and restored, immediate action is needed by everyone, from policymakers to the general population. These findings and recommendations are in...

British scientists working in Ghana have rediscovered a "holy grail" giant owl that has lurked almost unseen in African rainforests for 150 years.

The Earth's climate system seems to have shifted abruptly between colder and warmer modes in the past. Do we risk the same today from anthropogenic climate change? Frankly, climate models cannot answer that question yet. But a result in the journal Chaos by Gisela D. Charó, Mickaël D. Chekroun, Denisse Sciamarella and Michael Ghil suggests a way to resolve the matter. Analyzing a model that...

In the early 2000s, a fungus infected hundreds of animals and people in British Columbia and Washington State. Scientists found that the disease also killed porpoises and dolphins in the Salish Sea—perhaps affecting cetaceans even earlier than people.

Reports released Thursday by the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community laid out in frank terms the national security threat posed by climate change, and how rapidly evolving weather patterns will impact global stability in the decades to come.

Bacterial viruses, so-called phages, destroy bacteria. Bacteria are constantly exposed to viral attacks. A research team led by Martin Polz, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna, has now studied how bacteria defend themselves against viral predators. The study shows that bacteria have exchangeable genetic elements that are specifically designed for defense against viruses, allowing a...

Like a witness to a violent death, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently gave astronomers an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the first moments of a star's cataclysmic demise. Hubble's data, combined with other observations of the doomed star from space- and ground-based telescopes, may give astronomers an early warning system for other stars on the verge of blowing up.

Challenging the dogma of what scientists thought they understood about DNA viruses, a team of researchers led by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has shown that adenovirus uses its own efficient RNA splicing mechanisms to prevent the formation of double-stranded RNA, which otherwise would trigger a host immune response. By splicing its RNA transcripts in a way that prevents them from...

In a study that used inorganic, physical and analytical chemistry to mimic respiratory droplets that can carry viruses, researchers demonstrated a mechanism that enables multiple mask materials to be protective. Led by Stony Brook University Professor Amy Marschilok, Ph.D., the study findings suggest that adsorptivity of mask materials is an important feature in providing protection from viruses...

Financial inclusion is key to improving economic and social welfare, reducing inequality, and promoting economic growth. Globally, 1.7 billion people have limited access to financial services, especially in the developing world. As governments and NGOs work to strengthen financial resilience, digital technology has become a crucial component. New research from a University of Illinois specialist...

In recent years, energy consumption in developed countries has been rather wasteful. Nearly two-thirds of the total energy is typically discarded as "waste heat," which ends up contributing to global warming. Finding a way to productively use this heat has been every material researcher's priority of late.

Polymers make up everything from the clothes we wear to the plasticware we use for eating. In recent years, polymers that can release small molecules (like drugs) have been of major interest to pharmaceutical researchers. Previous studies have demonstrated that polymer systems can be modified to release fluorescent molecules when exposed to heat, light, or a change in pH. Now, researchers in the...

What if, in order to understand the social intelligence of animals, including humans, we had to study the brain at the group level and not only at rather than the individual level? This is a perspective put forward by Julia Sliwa, a CNRS researcher at the Paris Brain Institute, in the journal Science.

A research team, led by Northwestern Universitychemists, has made a breakthrough in surface science by introducing a new active mechanism of adsorption. Such adsorption-based phenomena, in which molecules are attracted onto a solid surface, are essential for today's catalysts, energy storage and environmental remediation.