A strong storm packing high winds and extremely heavy rain flooded roads and downed power lines and tree branches across Hawaii, with officials warning Monday of potentially worse conditions ahead.

A NASA sounding rocket soared high from a launchpad in Norway on Wednesday morning in a decades-old quest to understand the cause of a persistent dense patch of upper atmosphere on Earth's sun-facing side.

In order to cause disease, the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus must adapt to the changing host environment. Many of these adaptations are mediated through two-component signal transduction systems (TCSs) that coordinate gene expression in response to environmental stimuli. In a new study reported in the Journal of Bacteriology, researchers at Illinois provide insight into the signal...

A pair of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published the results of a study that is the first to take a process-based modeling approach to understand how much CO2 rivers and streams contribute to the atmosphere. The team focused on the East River watershed in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, and found that their new approach is far more accurate than traditional...

Much like an overexploited ecosystem, the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States—and much of the world—is experiencing a catastrophic loss of diversity that threatens the resilience not only of democracy, but also of society, according to a series of new studies that examine political polarization as a collection of complex ever-evolving systems.

The body must constantly defend itself against bacteria and viruses. It generates millions of different antibodies, which are selected to recognize the enemy and trigger the best possible immune response. Scientists use these antibodies for therapeutic purposes to target proteins and disrupt their harmful effects. However, identifying small molecules that will form the basis of drugs is a long and...

Scientists spotted an endangered right whale dragging a length of fishing rope caught in its mouth as it swam with a newborn calf off the Georgia coast, a rare confirmation of a birth by an entangled whale that experts determined they can't safely attempt to help.

NASA selected 10 new astronauts Monday, half of them military pilots, as it looks ahead to the moon and Mars.

Biologist Larry York's fascination with plant roots has spurred his research across four continents and inspired him to create accessible tools that enable others to explore the underground world.

People are significantly more supportive of public funding for artists when they see artists as collaborators who are working to bring attention to and help solve problems in their communities, according to a new study.

To date, CRISPR enzymes have been used to edit the genomes of one type of cell at a time: They cut, delete or add genes to a specific kind of cell within a tissue or organ, for example, or to one kind of microbe growing in a test tube.

Sous-vide cooking has inspired an idea that took promising technology out of the lab and into the barn. Researchers at Purdue University have successfully developed an on-site bovine respiratory disease test that provides results within an hour.

As people curate their online news feeds, they may be unwillingly sorting themselves into polarized networks, according to a study led by researchers at Princeton University.

A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat—like war or a pandemic—fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as part of a Dynamics of Political Polarization Special Feature, the model identifies such atypical...

Iron is an essential nutrient that almost all life requires to grow and thrive. Iron's importance goes all the way back to the formation of the planet Earth, where the amount of iron in the Earth's rocky mantle was 'set' by the conditions under which the planet formed and went on to have major ramifications for how life developed. Now, scientists at the University of Oxford have uncovered the...

Two companion research articles published in the current issue of Language point to persistent gender bias in both peer-reviewed journal articles and course materials used in the field of linguistics. The first study examined undergraduate textbooks commonly used for linguistics courses taught in English. The second study examined over 1,000 research articles published in top linguistics journals...

The next phase in the development of laser-plasma particle accelerators (LPAs)—potentially game-changing tools for research and practical applications—is underway at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). A new approach to high-power lasers—combining the pulses from many fast-acting but lower-energy optical fiber lasers—will energize these...

Rising sea temperatures and overfishing threaten coral reefs in the western Indian Ocean with complete collapse in the next 50 years, according to a groundbreaking study of these marine ecosystems.

A recent study by the Weber-Ban and Ban groups (IMBB) published in Science Advances uncovers that the master regulator of the DNA damage response in mycobacteria, PafBC, leverages a unique mechanism of transcriptional activation to allow promoter recognition at promoters lacking the canonical -35 motif.

Where and how did life begin on Early Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago from non-living chemicals? A key necessity for the first cells on Earth is the ability to make compartments and evolve to facilitate the first chemical reactions. Membraneless coacervate microdroplets are excellent candidates to describe protocells, with the ability to partition, concentrate molecules and support...

Viral pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus change the interior structure of the cells they infect. These changes occur at the level of individual cell components—the organelles—and can provide information on how viral diseases develop. Extremely powerful imaging techniques are needed to visualize them, but such methods are very data- and time-intensive. A German-American research team...

Juan Carlos Tiznado is the lead author on a new paper in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering that helps engineers better understand and predict the "liquefaction" hazard during earthquakes and more reliably mitigate it.

Phobias are often irrational by nature—especially in the case of spiders, as these creatures are usually more afraid of humans than vice-versa. But: some species are a force to be reckoned with—for example, the Latrodectus spider, more commonly known as the Black Widow. It catches its prey by using venom—to be precise, latrotoxins (LaTXs), a subclass of neurotoxins, or nerve poisons. A bite...

Though it is one of the great mysteries of science, the transformation of water into ice often escapes people's minds as it is just assumed that's what happens. But how and why it happens is the subject of intense scrutiny by ice scientists like Hadi Ghasemi, Cullen Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston. In order to watch the process of...