World leaders must do more to protect the oceans, a major United Nations conference concluded on Friday, setting its sights on a new treaty to protect the high seas.

It may seem like technology advances year after year, as if by magic. But behind every incremental improvement and breakthrough revolution is a team of scientists and engineers hard at work.

The fossil record tells us about ancient life through the preserved remains of body parts like bones, teeth and turtle shells. But how to study the history of soft tissues and organs, which can decay quickly, leaving little evidence behind?

The Supreme Court decision to limit how the Environmental Protection Agency regulates carbon dioxide emissions from power plants could make an already grave situation worse for those affected most by climate change and air pollution, advocates say.

A Mozambican park welcomed its first white rhinos in 40 years on Friday after 19 of the threatened animals completed a 1,600-kilometre (thousand-mile) truck ride from South Africa, conservationists said.

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon reached a record level during the first half of 2022, the INPE national space agency said Friday.

New research shows two widely used computer models that predict summer melt pond formation on sea ice greatly overestimate their extent, a key finding as scientists work to make accurate projections about Arctic climate change.

One way cells can control the activities of their genes is by adding small chemical modifications to the DNA that determine which genes are turned on or off. Methyl groups are one of these chemical modifications or tags. Researchers have found that in bacteria DNA methylation plays a role in regulating virulence, reproduction and gene expression. In other organisms, including humans, DNA...

Kamptozoa and Bryozoa are two phyla of small aquatic invertebrates. They are related to snails and clams (collectively called mollusks), bristleworms, earthworms, and leeches (collectively called annelids), and ribbon worms (nemertea). But their precise position on the tree of life, and how closely related they are to these other animals, has always puzzled evolutionary biologists. Previous...

Curing debilitating genetic diseases is one of the great challenges of modern medicine. During the past decade, development of CRISPR technologies and advancements in genetics research brought new hope for patients and their families, although the safety of these new methods is still of significant concern.

Many of us know the conventional theory of how the dinosaurs died 66 million years ago: in Earth's fiery collision with a meteorite, and a following global winter as dust and debris choked the atmosphere. But there was a previous extinction, far more mysterious and less discussed: the one 202 million years ago, which killed off the big reptiles who up until then ruled the planet, and apparently...

A new paper published in Science Advances synthesizes the impact of metal and coal mines on salmon and trout in northwestern North America, and highlights the need for more complete and transparent science to inform mining policy.

Although most fundamental mathematical equations that describe electronic structures are long known, they are too complex to be solved in practice. This has hampered progress in physics, chemistry and the material sciences. Thanks to modern high-performance computing clusters and the establishment of the simulation method density functional theory (DFT), researchers were able to change this...

Halobenzoquinones (HBQs), as new emerging disinfection by-products (DBPs), are frequently detected in potable and swimming pool waters. In fact, HBQs are also precursors of other DBPs such as currently regulated trihalomethanes (THMs), which pose a high risk to the public health and the environment. When UV is applied during the chlorination process, the DBPs formation may be quite different from...

A photodetector is a kind of optoelectronic device that can detect optical signals and convert them into electrical signals. These devices include photodiodes, phototransistors and photoconductors.

Recently, a team led by Prof. Huang Qing at the Institute of Intelligent Machines, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has reported the fabrication of ultrasensitive biosensors based on Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) to detect the cancer metastasis related programmed death ligand (PD-L1) biomarker.

Americans were more likely than people living in the UK to feel threatened by China's growth as a world power, a new survey shows.

Magnetars are some of the most fascinating astronomical objects. One teaspoon of the stuff they are made out of would weigh almost one billion tons, and they have magnetic fields that are hundreds of millions of times more powerful than any magnetic field that exists today on Earth. But we don't know much about how they form. A new paper points to one possible source—mergers of neutron stars.

The excessive emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, is rapidly raising the average global temperature. Capturing the carbon dioxide and converting it to useful fuels and chemicals can be an ideal way to reduce carbon dioxide concentration and ease this serious environmental problem.

Seabird reserves in northeast England and Scotland have been closed to visitors after a suspected outbreak of bird flu, officials said on Friday.

Researchers investigating the exposure of small mammals to plastics in England and Wales have found traces in the feces of more than half of the species examined.

A study reveals an unprecedented change in the fire regime in Europe which is related to climate change. The affected areas are in Southern, Central and Northern Europe but this historical change in Europe's fire regime is more intense in the Mediterranean area. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is led by Jofre Carnicer, lecturer of Ecology at the Faculty of Biology, and...

Stars with the mass of the sun or larger are typically accompanied by one or more orbiting companion stars. The system forms when gravity contracts the gas and dust of an interstellar cloud until clumps develop that are dense enough to coalesce into stars. Multiple stellar systems develop, according to one model, when the cloud has a slight spin. That generates a disk that then fragments to...

Most cells can defend themselves against viruses after they have been activated by the body's own messenger substances (interferons). This happens with the help of proteins that recognize invading virus components and interfere with virus replication. One of these proteins is the myxovirus resistance protein B (MxB). It can inhibit many viruses, for example HIV and herpes viruses. But until now it...