Cooling accounts for about 15 percent of global energy consumption. Conventional clear windows allow the sun to heat up interior spaces, which energy-guzzling air-conditioners must then cool down. But what if a window could help cool the room, use no energy and preserve the view?

This glittering group of stars, shining through the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, is NGC 2660 in the constellation Vela, best viewed in the southern sky. NGC 2660 is an open cluster, a type of star cluster that can contain anywhere from tens to a few hundreds of stars loosely bound together by gravity.

It's that time of year again: White sharks, just like snowbirds, have started heading south for the weather. They're turning toward Florida's waters after spending the summer off Cape Cod and Nova Scotia, hunting seals and tuna.

Leveraging the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientists ran 100 simulations exploring jets—narrow beams of energetic particles—that emerge at nearly light speed from supermassive black holes. These behemoths sit at the centers of active, star-forming galaxies like our own Milky Way galaxy, and can weigh millions to billions of times the mass of the...

A warming climate is causing a decline in sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, where loss of sea ice has important ecological, economic and climate impacts. On top of this long-term shift due to climate change are weather events that affect the sea ice from week to week.

Confocal technology is one of the most important advances in optical microscopy, and many disciplines within Texas A&M AgriLife and other parts of The Texas A&M University System are discovering it can also be a game-changer in their research.

The urgent need to remove excess carbon dioxide from Earth's environment could include enlisting some of our planet's smallest inhabitants, according to an international research team led by Michael Hochella of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The brains of all higher-order animals are filled with a diverse array of neuron types, with specific shapes and functions. Yet, when these brains form during embryonic development, there is initially only a small pool of cell types to work with. So how do neurons diversify over the embryo's development? Researchers know that neural stem cells called neuroblasts divide multiple times to...

SpaceX is set Wednesday to launch the first private—and Japanese—lander to the Moon.

In our daily lives, we rely on weather forecasts to know whether it will rain tomorrow. The monitoring and prediction of space weather such as geomagnetic storms and substorms are also vital for the operation safety of satellites outside the atmosphere and the living conditions of astronauts in space. However, space weather is far more unpredictable than the weather on Earth, which depends on...

Protected areas are one of the most effective tools for safeguarding biodiversity, but new research published today has found that most Asian countries failed to achieve a global minimum target of protecting at least 17% of land by 2020. Under current trends, the outlook for achieving the Global Biodiversity Framework's 2030 target to protect at least 30% of land is bleak, with Asia set to miss...

For thousands of kilometers along the western coasts of the Americas, low-oxygen waters known as oxygen minimum zones stretch out into the Pacific Ocean. In part due to climate change, this oxygen-starved region is likely to get wider and deeper, expanding by millions of cubic kilometers by the end of the century, models in a new study predict. Larger oxygen minimum zones threaten marine...

West Nile, Zika, dengue and malaria are all diseases spread by bites from infected mosquitoes. To track the threat of such diseases over large populations, scientists need to know where the mosquitoes are, where they've been, and where they might go.

How picky should females and males be when they choose a mate? How fiercely should they compete for mates? And how much should they engage in raising their offspring? The answers to these questions largely depend on the ratio of adult females to males in the social group, population or species.

Governments should embrace the realities of shifting biodiversity rather than "investing in futile efforts to return the natural world to its historic state," a new study argues.

Fountains of lava up to 200 feet (60 meters) high have been fired into the air from Hawaii's Mauna Loa, geologists say, generating rivers of molten rock from the world's largest active volcano.

Climate change can manifest in different ways: stronger tropical droughts, extreme droughts, warmer climates and highly unpredictable rainfall patterns. All these endanger the availability of food, which in turn could increase conflict over resources, which can turn violent in the absence of spaces for dialogs and negotiations to transform conflict by peaceful means. Violent conflict affects...

The stories historians tell about society and climate typically take one of two forms: stories in which societies experience catastrophic collapse due to climate change and stories in which societies show resilience, riding out climatic disasters due to the durability of the system's structures.

A new book "Women, Work and Transport" brings together researchers with international expertise in gender and transport work, to provide original evidence of the experiences of women working in all transport modes across countries in the Global North and the Global South.

Linking the identity of wild microbes with their physiological traits and environmental functions is a key aim for environmental microbiologists. Of the techniques that strive for this goal, Stable Isotope Probing—SIP—is considered the most effective for studying active microorganisms in natural settings.

Since its launch 25 years ago, the Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD) has matured from six projects on a spreadsheet into a flagship genomic metadata repository, making curated microbiome metadata that follows community standards freely available, and enabling large-scale comparative genomics analysis initiatives.

The sustainable development of agriculture has laid a solid foundation for the birth of human civilization and countries. Early agriculture has long been a focus of archaeology. China is the only country in the world with two independent agricultural systems, that is, rice farming in the south and millet farming in the north.

Many factors can limit the size of a group, including external ones that members have no control over. Astronomers have found that groups of stars in certain environments, however, can regulate themselves.

In a recent study published in the journal National Science Review, a laboratory search for exotic spin-dependent interactions was conducted with an ensemble-NV-diamond magnetometer. New experimental constraints on two types of exotic interactions were established at the micron scale.