Californians won't be able to water their lawns for 48 hours after rainstorms or let their sprinklers run onto the sidewalk under mandatory water restrictions state regulators adopted Tuesday as a drought continues despite heavy December rain and snow.

Grow a tomato inside a square box, and you'll end up with a square tomato. It's an experiment that shows clearly how confinement can influence a body's evolving shape.

Increasing nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) input is one of the major contributors to anthropogenic climate change, which can regulate the sequestration and storage of soil organic carbon (SOC) by changing microbial communities and their residues, the significant component of stable SOC. However, it remains unclear how N and P fertilization influence aggregate-associated microbial communities and...

McGill University scientists have developed a new system for sharing the enormous amount of data being generated by the CHIME radio telescope in its search for fast radio bursts (FRBs), the puzzling extragalactic phenomenon that is one of the hottest topics in modern-day astronomy.

Researchers at EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, and colleagues have identified new bacterial and fungal species, as well as viruses in the human skin microbiome.

The snow storm is over but the travel misery is not: drivers on a major highway outside Washington reported Tuesday they have been stuck in their cars in freezing weather for 20 hours or more.

In June 2021, an unprecedented heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest and Canada, killing an estimated 1,400 people. On June 28, Seattle reached 108 F—an all-time high—while the village of Lytton in British Columbia recorded Canada's highest-ever temperature of 121.3 F on June 29, the day before it was destroyed by a heat-triggered wildfire.

The rhythms of activity in all biological organisms, both plants and animals, are closely linked to the gravitational tides created by the orbital mechanics of the sun-Earth-moon system. This truth has been somewhat neglected by scientific research but is foregrounded in a study by Cristiano de Mello Gallep at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, and Daniel...

The deepening concern over antibiotic-resistant infections, coupled with prevailing hospital-acquired infections from surgical tools, implants, and heavily touched surfaces, has ramped up antimicrobial material development in recent years.

The James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed its tennis-court sized sunshield Tuesday, a critical milestone for the success of its mission to study every phase of cosmic history, NASA said.

The Webb team has completed tensioning for the first three layers of the observatory's kite-shaped sunshield, 47 feet across and 70 feet long.

With many people heading indoors for the winter months and respiratory droplets acting as a major contributor to COVID-19 spread, the scientific community has renewed interest in the dynamics behind how they spread. Modeling such behavior in a variety of scenarios for particles that range from less than 1 micrometer in size to 1,000 micrometers proves challenging.

Orion offers you a spectacular firework display to celebrate the holiday season and the new year with this new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). But no need to worry, this iconic constellation is neither exploding nor burning. The "fire" you see in this holiday postcard is Orion's Flame Nebula and its surroundings captured in radio waves—an image that undoubtedly does justice...

When a hurricane or other violent storm blows through a community, one of the first pictures you're likely to see is a fallen tree.

One of the most comprehensive studies conducted on beavers has conclusively demonstrated that beavers are essential for freshwater conservation and ecosystem stability by creating and preserving aquatic and wetland environments in Minnesota. This new research from the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) at the University of Minnesota Duluth was recently published in the journal...

Black holes really are giant fuzzballs, a new study says.

Forensic researchers are calling for the research community to be more proactive about addressing systemic racism in the sciences—currently and historically—in order to address longstanding issues related to how Black people and their remains are treated by museum collections and society at large.

Chaos, often popularized as the 'butterfly effect', describes the irregular phenomenon of deterministic systems. Based on the unique features of sensitivity to initial conditions and unpredictability of future evolutions, chaos from laser diodes has found applications in private optical communication links, high-rate random number generations, Lidar systems, and optical computing networks....

Microscopic electric fields govern a remarkable variety of phenomena in condensed matter and their ultrafast evolutions drive plasmonics, phononics and highspeed nanoelectronics. Access to high-frequency electric waveforms is of crucial importance to diverse disciplines in nanoscience and technology, yet, microscopic measurements are still severely limited.

While silk is best known as a component in clothes and fabric, the material has plentiful uses, spanning biomedicine to environmental science. In Applied Physics Reviews, researchers from Tufts University discuss the properties of silk and recent and future applications of the material.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Adelaide, suggest a change in climate is the likely cause of the mysterious disappearance of ancient lions and bears from parts of North America for a thousand years or more prior to the last Ice Age.

In a paper published in Science China Chemistry, scientists present an orthogonal carbazole-perylene bisimide pentad, which is a photoconversion-tunable photosensitizer with diversified excitation and excited-state relaxation pathways.

In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists evaluated scenarios about what is causing methane concentrations to rapidly increase in the atmosphere. By combining new and novel isotopic datasets on methane source signatures with simple atmospheric models, they ran thousands of potential emission pathways and isolated those that best matched the observed...

Recently, the research team led by Prof. Yu Luo from the school of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, discovered surface Dyakonov-Cherenkov radiation. This new type of Cherenkov radiation not only presages the next generation of miniaturized Cherenkov detectors, but also provides an indispensable route to detect particle trajectory. Moreover, this work offers...