More than half the cells on or in our bodies are microbes. Microbes help us digest food, affect our moods, and defend against invading pathogens.

The United States will send a crewed mission to the Moon "no earlier than 2025," NASA chief Bill Nelson told reporters on Tuesday, officially pushing back the launch by at least a year.

A federal agency announced Tuesday that it is taking a step toward designating a new national marine sanctuary off the central California coast that would be named for the region's Indigenous people.

Tiny particles of gold could be the new weapon in the fight against bacterial antibiotic resistance, according to research just published.

Crop improvement often involves the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another to produce a valuable trait. Some major examples of crops with these so-called "transgenes" include disease-resistant cotton and beta-carotene-enhanced golden rice. However, when foreign DNA is introduced into a host organism, a natural defensive response in plants is to repress or silence the expression...

Micro-electro-mechanical devices (MEMS) are based on the integration of mechanical and electrical components on a micrometer scale. We all use them continuously in our everyday life: For example, in our mobile phones there are at least a dozen MEMS that regulate different activities ranging from motion, position, and inclination monitoring of the phone; active filters for the different...

The American Dream may have faded, but it is unrealistically—and perhaps detrimentally—alive and well on teenagers' favorite TV programs, according to a report published today by UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

Scientists are calling for government transparency around the huge hidden carbon emissions of their armed forces.

A striped design showing the impact of global warming on 170 years of world temperatures at a glance has become a hit at the UN's COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Along the banks of the Mystic River in Groton, Zell Steever points to landmarks he doesn't expect to survive climate change.

A felony history carries more than just a social stigma. It can lead to more adults without work—even after paying their debt to society.

A team of physicists and engineers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) successfully demonstrated the feasibility of low-cost and high-performance radio frequency modules for qubit controls at room temperature. They built a series of compact radio frequency (RF) modules that mix signals to improve the reliability of control systems for superconducting quantum processors. Their...

A remarkably well-preserved fossil elephant cranium from Kenya is helping scientists understand how its species became the dominant elephant in eastern Africa several million years ago, a time when a cooler, drier climate allowed grasslands to spread and when habitually bipedal human ancestors first appeared on the landscape.

For the first time, researchers have shown that there is a genetic component underlying the amazing spatial memories of Mountain Chickadees. These energetic half-ounce birds hide thousands of food items every fall and rely on these hidden stores to get through harsh winters in the mountains of the West. To find these caches, chickadees use highly specialized spatial memory abilities. Although the...

He swayed slightly from side to side, his bare feet slapping the ground with each step. Identified only as Rogers, the lanky young man was one of nine neurological patients in a series of sepia-toned "electro-photographs," captured with novel stop-motion technology in Philadelphia in the summer of 1885.

Modern society benefits when people understand science concepts. This knowledge helps explain how cryptocurrency works, why climate change is happening or how the coronavirus is transmitted from person to person.

We were in Obalende: a bustling working-class neighborhood of office buildings, shops and residential areas, on Lagos Island, Nigeria. During the day, the neighborhood teems with small market stalls selling all manner of things, from fruit and vegetables to electronics, tailored clothes and everyday household items.

Climate change leadership requires more than stirring speeches, it means facing up to hard truths. One truth that governments around the world are struggling with is the immense contribution their militaries are making to the climate crisis.

An international team of physicists is proposing an addition to dark matter theory. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group is suggesting that dark matter came from regular matter and that dark matter is able to create more dark matter from regular matter.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted by burning fossil fuels for energy today will only be removed from the atmosphere by natural sinks—like forests and the ocean—in the next 300 to 1,000 years. That means the climate benefits of transitioning to clean energy become apparent on far longer timescales than political term limits and election cycles. A US study, for example, found that deep cuts to...

New emissions-cutting pledges—including a vow during COP26 by India to be carbon neutral by 2070—are likely to have a minimal effect on temperature rises this century, an updated UN assessment said Tuesday.

Political appointees in the Trump administration relied on faulty science to justify stripping habitat protections for the imperiled northern spotted owl, U.S. wildlife officials said Tuesday as they struck down a rule that would have opened millions of acres of West Coast forest to potential logging.

The metaverse is a virtual world in which users, represented by an avatar, can shop, socialize, take part in leisure activities—and learn. Its development has become a priority for many tech companies, including Facebook (which recently changed its company name to Meta) and Microsoft.

In modern subduction zones—regions around the world that have one tectonic plate sliding past another—one area can act like molasses for seismic waves. These anomalous areas are called low-velocity zones, or LVZs. In these zones, seismic waves are up to three times slower than waves that whiz through the surrounding rock. Some scientists suggest that the slowdown is because the downgoing plate...