China's National Bureau of Statistics has confirmed what researchers such as myself have long suspected—that 2022 was the year China's population turned down, the first time that has happened since the great famine brought on by Chinese leader Mao Zedong in 1959-1961.

New Mexico is one of the largest producers of chile pepper (Capsicum spp.) in the United States, with 51,000 tons of production in 2021 from an area of 8500 acres with average productivity of 6 tons/acres according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Statistics Service. The average productivity decreased by 25% as the area planted to chile pepper production remained the...

In salt water solutions, water molecules rapidly move around salt ions at a scale of more than a trillion times a second, according to both experiments and simulations led by scientists at New York University and the Sorbonne.

Like people, plants have to cope with stress. The impact on humans is well catalogued, but less is known about how stressors—including high salinity and lack of nutrients—affect plants such as habaneros. Now, researchers report in ACS Agricultural Science & Technology that these conditions change the levels of natural compounds in the peppers. The results could have ramifications for growing...

Lasers are intense beams of colored light. Depending on their color and other properties, they can scan your groceries, cut through metal, eradicate tumors, and even trigger nuclear fusion. But not every laser color is available with the right properties for a specific job.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, but they face a common barrier—the blood-brain barrier. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a way to move therapies across the brain's protective membrane to deliver brain-wide therapy with a range of biological medications and treatments.

It's not at every university that laser pulses powerful enough to burn paper and skin are sent blazing down a hallway. But that's what happened in UMD's Energy Research Facility, an unremarkable looking building on the northeast corner of campus. If you visit the utilitarian white and gray hall now, it seems like any other university hall—as long as you don't peak behind a cork board and spot...

When the company OpenAI launched its new artificial intelligence program, ChatGPT, in late 2022, educators began to worry. ChatGPT could generate text that seemed like a human wrote it. How could teachers detect whether students were using language generated by an AI chatbot to cheat on a writing assignment?

The evolutionary secrets that enable the medicinal herb known as barbed skullcap to produce cancer fighting compounds have been unlocked by a collaboration of UK and Chinese researchers.

The US Department of Agriculture on Thursday unveiled new rules to strengthen oversight of the "organic" label on food, after some significant fraud cases.

Cancer cells migrate through the body for multiple reasons; some are simply following the flow of a fluid, while others are actively following specific chemical trails. So how do you determine which cells are moving and why? Purdue University researchers have reverse-engineered a cellular signal processing system and used it like a logic gate—a simple computer—to better understand what causes...

Your skin cells are clearly different from your brain cells even though they both develop in the same person and carry the same genes. They are different because each cell type expresses a particular set of genes that is different from the ones expressed by the other. This is possible thanks to cellular mechanisms that tightly regulate gene expression.

In 2015, a submarine volcano in the South Pacific erupted, forming the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai island, destined to a short, seven-year life. A research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) jumped on the rare opportunity to study the early microbial colonizers of a newly formed landmass and to their surprise, the...

A new study by Stony Brook University researchers published in Global Change Biology demonstrates that warming waters and heat waves have contributed to the loss of an economically and culturally important fishery, the production of bay scallops. As climate change intensifies, heat waves are becoming more and more common across the globe. In the face of such repeated events, animals will...

Recent advances in spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC)-based quantum light sources based on two-dimensional layered materials have been made by a team led by Prof. Ren Xifeng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, collaborating with Prof. Qiu Chengwei and Dr. Guo Qiangbing from the National University of Singapore (NUS). The...

University of Wyoming College of Education faculty members have published a paper in the journal PLOS ONE describing the development of an interactive dashboard that combines data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

UniSC's Professor Patrick Nunn and Roselyn Kumar didn't set out to rewrite history.

A whale skull fossil estimated to be some 12 million years old has been found on a beach in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, according to a local museum.

We can frequently find in our daily lives a localized wave structure that maintains its shape upon propagation—picture a smoke ring flying in the air. Similar stable structures have been studied in various research fields and can be found in magnets, nuclear systems, and particle physics. In contrast to a ring of smoke, they can be made resilient to perturbations. This is known in mathematics...

More than 2 billion people live in "water stressed" countries. These are territories where more than 25% of the available freshwater resources are withdrawn for human use each year.

African rhino numbers are declining at unsustainable rates in core state-run parks which is why more than half the continent's remaining rhinos are now on private land.

The red junglefowl—the wild ancestor of the chicken—is losing its genetic diversity by interbreeding with domesticated birds, according to a new study led by Frank Rheindt of the National University of Singapore published January 19 in the journal PLOS Genetics.

Imagine overhearing the Powerball lottery winning numbers, but you didn't know when those numbers would be called—just that at some point in the next 10 years or so, they would be. Despite the financial cost of playing those numbers daily for that period, the payoff is big enough to make it worthwhile.

People around the world are seeing fewer and fewer stars in the night sky. The change in star visibility can be explained by an increase in the sky brightness of 7–10% per year. The rate of change is faster than satellite measurements of artificial light emissions on Earth would at first suggest.