Countries on Tuesday issued a landmark pledge to slash their methane emissions this decade, with US President Joe Biden chiding China's leader for skipping the make-or-break COP26 climate summit.

The Swedish body housing the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine on Tuesday said it will rename some buildings and a street named after racialist or pro-Nazi scientists.

Pinnipeds—a group including seals, sea lions and walruses—are relatively recently derived marine mammals that evolved from terrestrial carnivorans and reentered the marine environment. Their recent adaptations to an amphibious lifestyle make their evolutionary anatomy of particular interest to Baylor University researcher Sarah Kienle, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology.

An astronomer from NSF's NOIRLab has teamed up with a geologist from California State University, Fresno, to make the first estimates of rock types that exist on planets orbiting nearby stars. After studying the chemical composition of "polluted" white dwarfs, they have concluded that most rocky planets orbiting nearby stars are more diverse and exotic than previously thought, with types of rocks...

Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno.

In the media, a prevalent narrative is that Donald Trump lost the 2020 elections because of the way he handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Several researchers determined that Trump would have won the electoral vote and lost the popular vote, as he did in 2016, if the pandemic had not occurred or if it had been mitigated.

Being with friends and family may be a positive experience for some voles but it is merely tolerable to others, suggests a study published today in eLife.

Liquid crystals already provide the basis for successful technologies like LCD displays, and researchers continue to create specific kinds of liquid crystals for even better optical devices and applications.

In the last years, a new viral tomato disease has emerged, threatening tomato production worldwide. This is caused by the Tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV), a member of a devastating group of plant viruses called tobamoviruses. ToBRFV overcomes all known tobamovirus resistance in tomato, including the one conferred by Tm-22, a resistance gene responsible for the stable resistance to these...

A new analysis suggests that the movement of plankton and plankton-eating fish play a central role in driving local spikes of extreme biological productivity in tropical coral reefs, creating "sweet spots" of abundant fish. Renato Morais of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and colleagues present these findings in a study publishing November 2nd in the open-access journal PLOS...

When two galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes at their cores release a devastating gravitational "kick," similar to the recoil from a shotgun. New research led by CU Boulder suggests that this kick may be so powerful it can knock millions of stars into wonky orbits.

Dozens of countries on Tuesday joined a United States and European Union pledge to cut emissions of methane—a potent greenhouse gas—by at least 30 percent this decade, in a major commitment for climate action.

The bloom of a giant and stinky Sumatran flower nicknamed the "corpse plant" because it smells like a dead body is drawing huge crowds to a Southern California botanical garden.

Move over, Hollywood—science fiction is getting ready to leap off the big screen and enter the real world. While recent science fiction movies have demonstrated the power of artificially intelligent computer programs, such as the fictional character J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Avenger film series, to make independent decisions to carry out a set of actions, these imagined movie scenarios could now be...

One of the major challenges the world faces is how to provide sustainable sources of energy that meet societal needs as the global population continues to grow. Bioenergy crops have garnered increasing attention as a renewable energy source, but their productivity has not yet been fully realized. 

Childcare must be prioritized in future pandemic response plans to address gender inequality, quality of care and burnout, according to a Simon Fraser University researcher who tracked the lived experiences of childcare educators during the COVID-19 pandemic.

University of Leicester experts in the military uses of outer space have urged further international dialog and 'cool heads' following flight tests of a new Chinese hypersonic missile system.

The novel use of genetic contact tracing to identify the source of a bovine tuberculosis outbreak could signal a new approach in managing the disease, a study suggests.

The number of "unicorns"—high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurial ventures valued at more than $1 billion—is increasing in emerging-market nations such as China, Brazil and Colombia.

With the world coming to terms with the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, renewable alternatives have never been more important. One such alternative is bioenergy coming from the burning of biomass. Now a new article to be published in Carbon Capture Science & Technology details how to best optimize biomass fuel production: it's all about mixing materials.

Growing up in Seattle, Allyson McGaughey, USC Viterbi School of Engineering Ph.D. '21, was never faced with the daily reality of drought. In the increasingly hot and dry desert of Los Angeles, however, the scarcity of water was laid bare—increasing the urgency of finding alternate water solutions.

A new study shows climate change can have cascading effects on forests. Using computer modeling, researchers from North Carolina State University, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other institutions found increased temperatures during an historic drought in California contributed to the death of large numbers of giant pine trees by speeding up the life cycle of a tree-killing beetle.

Sometimes less is more, at least when it comes to building rapport during interviews. That's according to new research from the University of Georgia, which reveals that verbal interviewing techniques have a greater impact than nonverbal techniques—and combining the two had a detrimental effect.

Conflicts and disasters around the world have forced millions of people to move from their homes. By the end of 2020, about 11.1 million people were internally displaced in sub-Saharan Africa.