The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first...

Beneath the surface of a freshwater stream, animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms create complex patterns of biodiversity. Brooke Penaluna, research fisheries biologist at the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, studies these dynamics, which can be complicated.

After weeks of tense speculation over a looming financial catastrophe, should the U.S. default on its debts, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and President Biden are finalizing terms for a bipartisan agreement to raise the debt ceiling. While it is clear that a bipartisan deal is necessary for legislative action during divided government, it is less clear whether bipartisanship is similarly...

When firms make their environmental policies public, they can get favorable media coverage only if their narrative carefully articulates signals of conformity (actions aimed at complying with existing norms) and distinctiveness (the adoption of a recognizably uncommon behavior).

Countries that offer tax breaks for corporate innovation realize greater economic growth than those with no such policies, according to a study from The University of Texas at Austin.

Palm trees infected with lethal bronzing disease emit signals that warn nearby healthy palms of the threat. Those healthy palms produce their own defense that University of Florida scientists one day hope to harness to protect palms against the disease.

For more than a decade, forests across much of Chile have been experiencing a megadrought, its effects overprinted on an already warming and drying climate. High in the Andes, stands of giant Nothofagus obliqua trees, also known as roble or southern beech, are stretching themselves to survive—and bucking a global forest trend.

Negotiators charged with hammering out a global treaty to end plastic pollution were warned there was "no time to lose" on Wednesday, after progress was slowed by two days of procedural debates that campaigners blamed on large producer countries.

The truth is out there—but we're going to need to look harder.

Firefighters on Wednesday faced a grueling uphill battle against wildfires in Canada's Nova Scotia province, including one threatening suburbs of Halifax.

A rare, triple-whammy of cyclones drove the deadly flooding that devastated much of northern Italy this month, but scientists said Wednesday that climate change doesn't seem to be to blame for the intense rainfall.

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool is using satellite remote sensing and machine learning to predict agricultural yields of key crops across Africa, to help mitigate the harms of climate change and other crises, its developers say.

A Griffith-led study has found that traditional and digital social networks are key to improving community water management and sanitation in the Pacific.

A new dissertation on forest industrial production systems, from researcher Per Nordin at Linnaeus University, reveals that successful regeneration measures are crucial for sustainable forestry. To ensure successful plant establishment, it is important to make decisions based on factors at regional, stand, and microenvironment levels.

The slimy outer layer of fungi and bacteria known as the "extracellular matrix," or ECM, has the consistency of jelly and acts as a protective and envelope layer. But, according to a recent study in the journal iScience, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the ECM of some microbes only gels when oxalic acid or other simple acids are...

The increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevents the emission of heat into space. As a result, the Earth constantly absorbs more heat through solar radiation than it can give back off through thermal radiation.

For the first time ever, researchers can track the movements of bats with the help of a brand new algorithm utilizing radar technology, created by the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and KLA Corporation, a provider of inspection and measurement systems for the semiconductor and related industries, have improved the accuracy of scanning electron microscope (SEM) measurements. Used for process control applications in semiconductor manufacturing, SEMs help ensure high-yield production of functional,...

Venturing out of one's comfort zone to perform a task—and then performing poorly in that task, such as a baseball pitcher trying to hit—can lead to better performance when returning to one's specialty, new research suggests.

If you've ever played Kerbal Space Program, you know how difficult it can be to get your spacecraft into the orbit you want. It's even more difficult in real life. This is why it's pretty impressive to see a proposal to study all of Saturn's large inner moons in one go.

The first public meeting of a NASA panel studying what the government calls "unidentified aerial phenomena," commonly known as UFOs, kicked off on Wednesday to discuss its findings since it formed last...

New hazard-monitoring technology uses GPS signals to go wave-hunting in the Pacific Ring of Fire. GUARDIAN's long-term objective is to augment early warning systems.

Overall survival for patients with melanoma that has spread to the brain is only four to six months. Immunotherapies, which harness the power of the immune system to attack cancer cells, have garnered excitement in recent years for their potential to revolutionize the treatment of metastatic melanomas, but results from early clinical studies indicate that the prognosis for most patients remains...

As more and more electric cars are traveling on the roads of Europe, this is leading to an increase in the use of the critical metals required for components such as electric motors and electronics. With the current raw material production levels there will not be enough of these metals in future -- not even if recycling increases.

Researchers working to improve the performance of superconducting qubits, the foundation of quantum computers, have been experimenting using different base materials in an effort to increase the coherent lifetimes of qubits. The coherence time is a measure of how long a qubit retains quantum information, and thus a primary measure of performance. Recently, scientists discovered that using tantalum...

There are many effects of climate change. Perhaps the most broadly known is global warming, which is caused by heat building up in various parts of the Earth system, such as the atmosphere, the ocean, the cryosphere and the land. 89 percent of this excess heat is stored in the oceans, with the rest in ice and glaciers, the atmosphere and land masses (including inland water bodies). An...

Researchers demonstrated that it's possible to make carbon dioxide capture filters using 3D printing.

Some people live longer than others -- possibly due to a unique combination of bacteria in their intestines, new research concludes.

The overfishing of codfish spanning the second half of the 20th century indicates that human action can force evolutionary changes more quickly than widely believed, according to a new study.

Young babies make many squeals, vowel-like sounds, growls, and short word-like sounds such as 'ba' or 'aga.' Those precursors to speech or 'protophones' are later replaced with early words and, eventually, whole phrases and sentences. While some infants are naturally more 'talkative' than others, a new study confirms that there are differences between males and females in the number of those...

Researchers report that in the absence of visible landmarks, desert ants increase the likelihood that foraging nest mates will find their way home quickly and safely by elevating their nest entrance. Ant colonies whose nests are found deep in the Tunisian saltpan are particularly reliant on the self-made landmarks. If the mound at the nest entrance was removed, they immediately began building a...

For over a century, researchers have thought that the patterns of brain activity that define our experiences, hopes and dreams are determined by how different brain regions communicate with each other through a complex web of trillions of cellular connections. Now, a study has examined more than 10,000 different maps of human brain activity and found that the overall shape of a person's brain...