New Delhi struggles with pollution year-round, but the problem becomes acute during fall and winter months. On Wednesday, the concentration of tiny pollution particles was nearly 30 times above the level deemed safe over a 24-hour period by the World Health Organization.

An international team of researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Kiel University in Germany have discovered a path that could lead to shape-shifting ceramic materials. This discovery could improve everything from medical devices to electronics.

Liquids containing ions or polar molecules are ubiquitous in many applications needed for green technologies such as energy storage, electrochemistry or catalysis. When such liquids are brought to an interface such as an electrode—or even confined in a porous material—they exhibit unexpected behavior that goes beyond the effects already known. Recent experiments have shown that the properties...

On a recent day in November, the car-size rover rolled slowly forward, then stopped, perched on the threshold of a Martian landscape. But this rover, named OPTIMISM, wasn't on the Red Planet. And the landscape was a boulder-strewn mock-up of the real Mars—the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

For years, researchers believed that the smaller the domain size in a ferroelectric crystal, the greater the piezoelectric properties of the material. However, recent findings by Penn State researchers have raised questions about this standard rule.

Contrary to popular belief, there has been no great migration in the U.S. during the pandemic.

Dr. Cathy Williams knew something wasn't right. The veterinarian had felt off for weeks after her 2014 trip to Madagascar.

The term "greenhouse effect" became part of public lexicon decades ago, thanks to the ongoing discourse on climate change. A natural phenomenon, the greenhouse effect describes how heat from the sun, in the form of radiation, is trapped by gases in the Earth's atmosphere. But a large amount of radiation is still lost to outer space, because these wavelengths are poorly absorbed by atmospheric...

Imagine being able to grow plants that could absorb even more CO2 from Earth's atmosphere and thereby help solve the world's climate problems. Humans have selected, bred and optimized plants to increase food production and ensure for our survival for thousands of years.

Tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are the foundation of most food webs in the ocean, and their productivity drives commercial fisheries, carbon sequestration, and healthy marine ecosystems. But little is known about how they will respond to increasing ocean temperatures resulting from the changing climate. Most climate models assume they will all respond in a similar way.

Since July, every weekly update from state wildlife officials has set a new record for the most manatee deaths counted in a single year. On Wednesday, Florida crossed an especially tragic threshold: More than 1,000 manatees dead.

As devices continue to shrink, new challenges in their measurement and design present themselves. For devices based on molecular junctions, in which single molecules are bound to metals or semiconductors, we have a variety of techniques to study and characterize their electric transport properties. In contrast, probing the thermal transport properties of such junctions at the nanoscale has proven...

When you think about how rapidly computers filled our homes, our cars and even ourselves through watches and earpieces, it might be hard to believe that there is a massive gap between computer's processing power and the speed, capacity and reliability of our brains. But, by 2040, it is predicted that this gap will pose a critical problem for energy consumption, because by one estimate all the...

The third millennium BCE is a highly dynamic period in the prehistory of Europe and western Asia, characterized by large-scale social and political changes. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Copper Age was in full swing in around 2500 years BCE with substantial demographic growth, attested by a large diversity of settlements and fortifications, monumental funerary structures, as well as ditched...

A team of scientists has identified an additional force that likely contributed to a mass extinction event 250 million years ago. Its analysis of minerals in southern China indicate that volcano eruptions produced a "volcanic winter" that drastically lowered earth's temperatures—a change that added to the environmental effects resulting from other phenomena at the time.

Analysis of results from a survey conducted in Japan reveals how financial literacy and financial behaviors are associated with age and gender, suggesting potential targets for policies to improve financial health. Shohei Okamoto of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and Kohei Komamura of Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on...

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behavior of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

An unprecedented glimpse of the human embryo at an early stage of development has provided critical clues on how undifferentiated cells become the specialized ones of which we are made, researchers reported on Wednesday.

A paper in Nature proposes a new evolutionary scenario that helps to better understand the evolution of our phylum and to discover what the ancestor of tunicates—the sister group of vertebrates—were like. Specifically, it reveals that the massive gene losses which deconstructed the gene network in the heart of tunicates eased the transition to a free pelagic lifestyle in appendicularian...

Chemistry researchers at the University of Bath have developed a new method using blue light to create pharmaceuticals in a more sustainable way, significantly reducing the amount of energy needed and the chemical waste created in the manufacture process.

Affordable plastic shields reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection for passengers on motorcycle taxis popular in many developing countries—offering an economic lifeline for drivers during any future waves of the pandemic, a new study suggests.

Building insulation has become an increasingly important topic in recent years. Good exterior insulation reduces heating costs, which means lower CO2 emissions. Nowadays, sustainable natural insulation materials are already available for the interiors of buildings. But what does sustainability really mean? It means the material should be environmentally friendly and made from renewable raw...

In a recently published article in Physical Review Letters, the ALICE collaboration has used a method called femtoscopy to study the residual interaction between two-quark and three-quark particles. Through this measurement, an interaction between the ɸ meson (strange-antistrange quarks) and a proton (two up and one down quarks) was unveiled for the first time.

New TRIUMF research from the Saint Mary's University-led IRIS group has unveiled an unexpected shape deformation in the nucleus of helium-8 (He8), providing further insight into the unique dynamics of how neutron-rich nuclei take shape and maintain stability.