Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were “mixed and hilarious,” says Abbott, a computer scientist and researcher.  Then she typed in a few sentences in isiZulu...

Iceland is part of the longest mountain range in the world where plate tectonics is violently creating a growing, massive rift along the Mid-Atlantic...

Canada's national security agencies will investigate reports that a British Columbia-based company's cutting-edge anti-drone technology was purchased by a Russian university — a possible violation of sanctions imposed on Moscow over its war on Ukraine — Defence Minister Bill Blair said...

DENVER— To really understand how a material behaves, researchers need to simulate its whirling electrons, which govern most of its chemical and electronic properties. But they have traditionally faced a trade-off. They could simulate up to a couple of hundred electrons with near-perfect accuracy. Or they could simulate a much larger number—while accuracy fell off a cliff....

It took nearly 2 years for President Joe Biden to find and the Senate to approve the new director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Monica Bertagnolli, who took her post last week. But Biden has moved to fill the newly vacant top job at NIH’s largest institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in a tiny fraction of that time . Today, Biden...

The pretty ferns that adorn windowsills and gardens have some surprising powers. Biologists have long known that this ancient group of plants wards off hungry insects better than other flora, and now they’re homing in on why. They’ve discovered fern proteins that kill and deter pests, including, most recently, one that shows promise against bugs resistant to widely used natural...

African penguins, as well as members of two closely related species, sport individually unique patterns of black dots on their white chest feathers. In a study published last week in Animal Behaviour , researchers have discovered the birds use these dots like name tags to help identify their mates , perhaps to recognize them amid throngs of similar-looking...

Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, a cold cloud of gas and dust buried deep in one of the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms started to collapse. From there, gravity worked its magic. The cloud began to contract and fragment; one of those fragments was destined to become our Sun and the rest of the solarContinue reading "Tour the inner solar system" The post Tour the inner solar system appeared...

Amid an alarming surge in global habitat destruction and species extinction, new research by an international team of scientists proposes a new global approach to choosing protected lands that could reduce species extinction risk twice as efficiently as current methods.

Actuators are common machine components that convert energy into movement, like the muscles in the human body, vibrators in mobile phones or electric motors. Ideal actuator materials need good electrochemical properties to repeatedly conduct electrical currents made of flowing electrons.

Could the solution to the decades-long battle against malaria be as simple as soap? In a new study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, scientists at The University of Texas at El Paso have made a compelling case for it.

New research published in Science Advances paints an uncharacteristically upbeat picture for the planet. This is because more realistic ecological modeling suggests the world's plants may be able to take up more atmospheric CO2 from human activities than previously predicted.

Using historical records from around Australia, an international team of researchers have put forward the most accurate prediction to date of past Antarctic ice sheet melt, providing a more realistic forecast of future sea level rise.

When Cyclone Idai swept through Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park in May 2019, one of nature's deadliest forces encountered one of the most technologically sophisticated wildlife parks on the planet. Princeton researchers and colleagues from around the world documented the effects using trail cameras and animal-tracking devices that had been in use before the storm.

The core–mantle boundary (CMB) is the interface between the Earth's iron metal core and the thick rocky layer of mantle just above the core. It is a world of extremes—temperatures thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and pressures over a million times the pressure at the surface of the Earth. While it may seem far away from our environment on Earth's surface, plumes of material from the CMB can...

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin--Madison have identified a protein key to the development of a type of brain cell believed to play a role in disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and used the discovery to grow the neurons from stem cells for the first time. The stem-cell-derived norepinephrine neurons of the type found in a part of the human brain called the locus...

A new study sheds light on what works best to prevent migraine attacks, and surprisingly, cheaper medicines worked as well as the expensive ones.

Researchers have uncovered startling connections between micronutrient deficiencies and the composition of gut microbiomes in early life that could help explain why resistance to antibiotics has been rising across the globe. The team investigated how deficiencies in crucial micronutrients such as vitamin A, B12, folate, iron, and zinc affected the community of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other...

In a new textbook published November 10, 2023, "The World of Sea Cucumbers," a team of researchers, including Nagoya University professor Manabu Bessho-Uehara, takes us deep into the watery world of sea cucumbers and reveals their ability to emit light.

Policies that encourage landlords to evict tenants who have involvement with the criminal justice system do not appear to reduce crime, while increasing evictions among Black residents and people with lower incomes, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

A researcher at the University of Tennessee Herbert College of Agriculture has developed a potato plant that can detect gamma radiation, providing reliable indications of harmful radiation levels without complex monitoring technologies.