When it comes to extreme weather, climate change usually gets all the attention. But according to a study from The University of Texas at Austin and two universities in China, the unique effects of cities—which can intensify storms and influence where rain falls—need to be accounted for as well.

Best management practices (BMPs) for solar installations to protect Hawaiʻi's native and endangered birds have been released by the University of Hawaiʻi Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit. The new technical report synthesizes current literature on the threats posed by industrial-scale solar installations to birds, identifies the species most at risk from solar infrastructure, lists the locations...

Enzymes are biology's catalytic workhorses, binding molecules together, splitting them apart and reconfiguring them in processes vital to everything from digestion to breathing. Their availability, efficiency and specificity have long made them popular for reactions outside biological systems as well, including those involved in food preservation, detergents and disease diagnostics.

When two sheets of the carbon nanomaterial graphene are stacked together at a particular angle with respect to each other, it gives rise to some fascinating physics. For instance, when this so-called "magic-angle graphene" is cooled to near absolute zero, it suddenly becomes a superconductor, meaning it conducts electricity with zero resistance.

Since the first lab-modified virus capable of replication was generated in 1974, an evidence-based consensus has emerged that many changes introduced into viral genomes are likely to prove unstable if released into the environment. On this basis, many virologists would question the release of genetically modified viruses that retain the capacity to spread between individual vertebrate hosts....

January is filled with resolutions to start the new year off right, from exercise and diet to financial health. One area that may often be overlooked is checking your credit score, and according to new research, there may be a reason for that.

There is more going on in the deep, dark ocean waters than you may think: Uncountable numbers of invisible microorganisms go about their daily lives in the water columns, and now researchers have discovered that some of them produce oxygen in an unexpected way.

To fight infections and heal injuries, immune cells need to enter tissue. They also need to invade tumors to fight them from within. Scientists from the Siekhaus group at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria now discovered how immune cells protect their sensitive insides as they squeeze between tissue cells. With their study published in the journal PLOS Biology the team lays the...

Although twisted sheets of double bilayer graphene have been studied extensively the past few years, there are still pieces missing in the puzzle that is its phase diagram—the different undisturbed, ground states of the system. Writing in Nature Physics, Carmen Rubio-Verdú and colleagues have found a new puzzle piece: an electronic nematic phase.

Europe's sky is filling up with near-empty polluting planes that serve little other purpose than safeguarding airlines' valuable time slots at some of the world's most important airports.

A new tree species has been named after actor Leonardo DiCaprio as a tribute to the Hollywood star's anti-logging campaigning, London's Royal Botanic Gardens announced Thursday.

Almost every country on Earth could experience extremely hot years every other year by 2030, according to new research Thursday highlighting the outsized contribution of emissions from the world's major polluters.

No longer solely in the realm of science fiction, the possibility of interstellar travel has appeared, tantalizingly, on the horizon. Although we may not see it in our lifetimes—at least not some real version of the fictional warp-speeding, hyperdriving, space-folding sort—we are having early conversations of how life could escape the tether of our solar system, using technology that is within...

Researchers from Imperial College London and Lancaster University have suggested a new approach to test the limits of applicability of quantum mechanics.

Grasslands are widespread and relevant ecosystems responsible for sustainable roughage production. Plant genetic diversity (PGD; i.e., within-species diversity) is related to many beneficial effects on the ecosystem functioning of grasslands. In their recently published paper, Miguel Loera-Sánchez, Bruno Studer and Roland Kölliker report a set of 12 multispecies primer pairs that can be used for...

Researchers from KeyGene and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), in collaboration with colleagues from Japan and New Zealand, have discovered a gene that will make it possible to produce seeds from crops that are genetically identical to the mother plant and that do not need pollination.

An Oregon State University research team and collaborators have developed an automated method that can accurately identify calls from a family of fishes.

In a joint recommendation, the German higher federal authorities draw a picture of how the development of safe and sustainable advanced materials can be controlled and regulated. The term "advanced materials" is understood to refer to a broad and heterogeneous group of materials that have been deliberately designed to meet the functional requirements for future-oriented applications. The paper...

A simple, low-cost method of directly converting natural gas into useful chemicals and fuels, using the precious metal gold as a key ingredient, has been proposed by researchers at Cardiff University in collaboration with researchers in Lehigh University, U.S. and the National Centre for Magnetic Resonance in Wuhan, China.

Asthma is one of the most common chronic respiratory diseases worldwide and its prevalence is on the rise. Epidemiological studies reveal that the incidence of asthma ranges from 1% to 18% in various countries. More than 400 million people are suffering from asthma all over the world. The number of asthma patients aged 20 years and above in China has is over 45.7 million. However, the treatment of...

The air in a zoo is full of smells, from the fish used for feed to the manure from the grazing herbivores, but now we know it is also full of DNA from the animals living there. In the journal Current Biology on January 6th, two research groups have each published an independent proof-of-concept study showing that by sampling air from a local zoo, they can collect enough DNA to identify the animals...

Researchers studying coral reefs damaged by rising sea temperatures have discovered an unexpected 'bright spot' of hope for communities who depend upon them for food security.

In the most comprehensive analysis to date, researchers found that the shapes of fingerprints—whether they are circular, wavy, or winding—are influenced by the genes responsible for limb development instead of skin patterning. The study, presented January 6 in the journal Cell, could help scientists better understand the association between genes and phenotypical traits in humans.

Over the past several years, research from University of California San Diego biologist Gürol Süel's laboratory has uncovered a series of remarkable features exhibited by clusters of bacteria that live together in communities known as biofilms.