Invasive plants can have devastating effects on local ecologies, comparable to the effects wrought by global warming. And yet, there is currently no reliable understanding of how many invasive plant species there are in the world. New research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and recently published in Ecological Applications, is the first to comprehensively pinpoint the various...

From the window of a NASA Gulfstream III research aircraft, Alaska looks like a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. The land is covered in lush, green vegetation and dotted with bright blue lakes. Snow-capped mountains reach toward the sky, and chocolate milk-colored rivers snake across the landscape. The obvious signs of human activity—cities, roads, infrastructure—are hard to spot.

Vikas Nanda has spent more than two decades studying the intricacies of proteins, the highly complex substances present in all living organisms. The Rutgers scientist has long contemplated how the unique patterns of amino acids that comprise proteins determine whether they become anything from hemoglobin to collagen, as well as the subsequent, mysterious step of self-assembly where only certain...

For decades, figuring out exactly why cancerous tumors form in the human body has been a goal for scientists, but knowing how cancer cells spread is also key to fighting the often-deadly disease.

Cancer is characterized by a number of key biological processes known as the "hallmarks of cancer," which remodel cells and their immediate environment so that tumors can form, grow, and thrive. Many of these changes are mediated by specific genes and proteins, working in tandem with other cellular processes, but the specifics vary from cancer type to cancer type, and even from patient to patient.

Media coverage of terrorist attacks significantly raises fear amongst families and leads to children being kept out of schools in Kenya, new research reveals.

While there are several sources of ice forming particles in the atmosphere, sea spray aerosols (SSAs) are recognized as a significant source of ice-nucleating particles (INPs). But what comprises SSAs, how they affect cloud formation, and how they may in turn affect climate remain outstanding and important questions for atmospheric scientists.

Stress is common in all marriages, but same-sex married couples cope with that stress more positively and collaboratively than different-sex couples, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The study also found that women married to men report more negative support—meaning that their spouses react ambivalently or even hostilely in response to stress—than...

Telecommunications have reshaped many aspects of our lives over the past few decades by providing incredibly convenient ways to share and access information. One of the most important enablers for this transformation has been the adoption and improvement of broadband technologies, which cram enormous amounts of data over wide frequency bands to achieve unprecedented transfer speeds. Today, most...

A chemical analysis of sediment cores from the North Pacific Ocean show a consistent pairing of volcanic ash and hypoxia, a low ocean oxygen condition spanning thousands of years, during times of rapid climate warming at the end of the last ice age, new research published today in Nature shows.

The South China Sea is where most tropical cyclones (TCs) attack the Chinese mainland, but a lack of observational data has for decades hindered our ability to forecast them. In August 2022, a successful field campaign during TC Mulan boosted confidence in forecasting similar events in the future. The results of the campaign were recorded and published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

Genome editing comes with great hopes for the improvement of crops in regards to the challenges posed by climate change, but also for breeding of disease resistance and an improved sustainability of agriculture.

Research into quantum engineering may provide a number of significant advancements in sensor technology, but optical loss and signal noise have—until recently—held these applications back. In "Realistic model of entanglement-enhanced sensing in optical fibers" published in Optics Express earlier this year, the Optics and Photonics Research Group at CU Boulder and their partners predict and...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain to be one of the leading causes of mortality around the world. There is an urgent need for improved vascular models, anatomically and biologically, to advance our understanding of disease progression. Such understanding can lead to the development of new therapeutic interventions.

Photosynthesis is the means by which plants, algae, and cyanobacteria extract their "food" in the form of energy-rich biomolecules from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. It is a complex process, from which researchers are still coaxing many new details. A team led by LMU biologists Thilo Rühle, Bennet Reiter, and Prof. Dario Leister has now solved another piece of the puzzle of this essential...

The ALMA space telescope in the Chilean Andes suffered a cyberattack over the weekend that has downed its website and suspended its work, the observatory announced Wednesday.

Recent progress in the fabrication of nanostructures has led to their application in several fields, including biomedicine, chemistry, materials engineering, and environmental remediation.

The hand skeletons of women workers from the early days of industrialization reflect the diverse and unstable manual activities of their everyday lives.

U.S. schools and school districts have shared an estimated 4.9 million posts that include identifiable images of students on public Facebook pages, unintentionally putting student privacy at risk, according to a new study. Around 726,000 of these posts are thought to identify one or more students by their first and last names. The research was published today in Educational Researcher.

Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are phylogenetically and morphologically diverse prokaryotes that share an ancestral capability of producing intracellular magnetite (Fe3O4) or/and greigite (Fe3S4) nanocrystals within organelles called magnetosomes.

Data from the shipboard Automatic Identification System (AIS), which was created as a collision avoidance tool, can provide information about global fishing activity, including illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Fishing vessels may disable their AIS devices, but a new analysis identifies intentional disabling events in commercial fisheries and shows that, while some disabling events may...

As climate change threatens global food supplies, countries will need to increase the efficiency of food production, bringing about short-term gains, such as decreased deforestation, but long-term risks, including future pandemics stemming from animal-borne diseases, finds a new analysis appearing in the journal Science Advances.

Climate change is emerging as a top threat to biodiversity according to the latest Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Plant and animal species face greater risks of thermal stress as climate change pushes temperatures beyond their thermal tolerance.

How can we remove carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from fossil-fuel power plant exhaust before it ever reaches the atmosphere? New findings suggest a promising answer lies in a simple, economical and potentially reusable material analyzed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where scientists from several institutions have determined why this material works as well as it...