On the morning of July 4, 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the Searles Valley in California's Mojave Desert, with impacts felt across Southern California. About 34 hours later on July 5, the nearby city of Ridgecrest was struck by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake, a jolt felt by millions across the state of California and throughout neighboring communities in Arizona, Nevada, and even Baja...

Political ideology and user choice—not algorithmic curation—are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news provided by Google Search, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers faculty published in the journal Nature.

Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs and fish, mammals long ago traded in their ancestral suit of armor for a layer of insulating hair.

Prof. Liang Haojun from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) proposed a new catalytic assembly approach to escape from metastable states in a far-from-equilibrium system of DNA-functionalized colloids. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Weed killers of the future could soon be based on failed antibiotics.

Particles known as extracellular vesicles play a vital role in communication between cells and in many cell functions. Released by cells into their environment, these "membrane particles" consist of a cellular membrane carrying a cargo of specific signaling molecules, proteins, nucleic acids and lipids. Unfortunately, only tiny quantities of the vesicles are formed spontaneously by cells.

For the past 40 years, a devastating fungal disease has been ravaging frog populations around the world, wiping out 90 species. Unlike the global COVID-19 pandemic, you may not even be aware of this "panzootic"—a pandemic in the animal world. Yet it's the world's worst wildlife disease.

For many of us, light pollution has robbed our skies of once readily visible objects. That’s why many residential observers have turned away from nebulae and galaxies to pursue other targets, such as double stars. This month, let’s enjoy a few of my favorite springtime binocular binaries. We begin with a challenging binocular target, IotaContinue reading "Binocular Universe: Double duty" The...

Many of the biological materials that researchers are most interested in studying, including those associated with major diseases, don't lend themselves to the conventional methods that researchers typically use to probe a material's structure and chemistry.

When most people consider the arctic, or high-altitude mountain landscapes, they think of endless snow, ice and bare rock. But pastel-colored flowers, sometimes just a few millimeters wide, bloom in these dramatic places too. The miniature flowers not only weather some of the toughest habitats on Earth, but can also help engineer the landscape for other species.

Orcas living off Europe's Iberian coast recently struck and sunk a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar. Scientists suspect that this is the third vessel this subpopulation of killer whales has capsized since May 2020, when a female orca believed to be the originator of this behavior suffered a traumatic encounter with a boat.

For years, we’ve debated the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) for society, but it wasn’t until now that people can finally see its daily impact. But why now? What changed that’s made AI in 2023 substantially more impactful than before? First, consumer exposure to emerging AI innovations has elevated the subject, increasing acceptance. From songwriting and composing images in ways...

Using various space telescopes, an international team of astronomers have observed a recently detected luminous quasar known as SMSS J114447.77-430859.3, or J1144 for short. Results of the observational campaign, available in the July 2023 edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shed more light on the properties of this source.

Scalable photonic quantum computing architectures require photonic processing devices. Such platforms rely on low-loss, high-speed, reconfigurable circuits and near-deterministic resource state generators. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Patrik Sund and a research team at the center of hybrid quantum networks at the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Münster...

A team of space scientists affiliated with several institutions in Czechia, Japan and the U.S. has found evidence of lightning pulses on Jupiter that are similar to those found on Earth. In their study, reported in the journal Nature Communications, the group examined years of data from the Juno space probe circling Jupiter.

Citations of Chinese research have risen because of sequencing of Covid-19 genomeChina has overtaken the US to become the biggest contributor to nature-science journals, in a sign of the country’s growing influence in the world of academic research.The Nature Index, which tracks data on author affiliations in 82 high quality journals, found that authors affiliated with Chinese institutions are...

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Everything you need to know about the wild world of alternative jet fuels  The aviation industry is responsible for about 3% of all human-caused global warming. One way it hopes to reduce that…

President’s pledges to scale up national health insurance must come with action on health worker shortages, say analysts.

Bee experts from the Saskatchewan government and University of Saskatchewan give advice on helping bees in both the wild and urban...

New Zealand's prime minister on Wednesday joined a chorus of Kiwis complaining about the treatment of their national bird by a Miami zoo.