When we consider termites, we may think of the danger they can pose to our houses once they settle in and start eating wood. But in fact, only about 4% of termite species worldwide are considered pests that might, at some point, eat your house.

Powerful storm Fiona knocked out electricity to more than 500,000 homes Saturday as it lashed east Canada with strong winds and heavy rains in conditions that police said were "like nothing we've ever seen."

NASA has called off the scheduled Tuesday launch of its historic uncrewed mission to the Moon due to a tropical storm that is forecast to strengthen as it approaches Florida.

Blue-tongue lizards and sulfur-crested cockatoos are among the native animals frequently smuggled overseas.

Neptune and its rings haven't looked this good in decades.

There are at least 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, according to a new study that says even that staggering figure likely underestimates the total population of the insects, which are an essential part of ecosystems around the world.

A strong undersea earthquake shook Indonesia's northernmost province of Aceh on Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of serious damage or casualties and officials said there was no threat of a tsunami.

Hurricane Fiona barreled towards Canada on Friday with Nova Scotia province on high alert after the storm swept past Bermuda, where it left much of the population without power but caused little damage.

The Longhorned tick causes the loss of millions of dollars in agricultural revenue to cattle producers worldwide, and it is now in northern Missouri.

An approaching storm threatens to delay NASA's next launch attempt for its new moon rocket, already grounded for weeks by fuel leaks.

Since ancient times, humans have extracted salts, like table salt, from the ocean. While table salt is the easiest to obtain, seawater is a rich source of different minerals, and researchers are exploring which ones they can pull from the ocean. One such mineral, magnesium, is abundant in the sea and increasingly useful on the land.

New UMBC-led research in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests that viruses are using information from their environment to "decide" when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has implications for antiviral drug development.

Tiny nets woven from DNA strands can ensnare the spike protein of the virus that causes COVID-19, lighting up the virus for a fast-yet-sensitive diagnostic test—and also impeding the virus from infecting cells, opening a new possible route to antiviral treatment, according to a new study.

In a move that could allow a broad range of insects to be considered for endangered species status, the state Supreme Court has found that California bumblebees can be protected under the law as a type of fish.

About five minutes after the 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit near Mexico's southwest coast Monday, typically calm water deep in a Death Valley National Park cave started sloshing against the surrounding limestone rock.

From a box of Cracker Jack to The Da Vinci Code, everybody enjoys deciphering secret messages. But biomedical engineers at Duke University have taken the decoder ring to place it's never been before—the patterns created by bacterial colonies.

The impacts of air pollution on human health, economies, and agriculture differ drastically depending on where on the planet the pollutants are emitted, according to a new study that could potentially incentivize certain countries to cut climate-changing emissions.

Model animals, such as mice and fruit flies, have provided scientists with powerful insights into how cellular biology works. However, model animals are really just a guide, and it can be risky to generalize findings across animals from studying a selection of model organisms.

Due to their very high efficiency in transporting electric charges from light, perovskites are known as the next generation material for solar panels and LED displays. A team led by Dr. Lei Su at Queen Mary University of London now have invented a brand-new application of perovskites as optical fibers. The results are published in Science Advances.

Do we fall for political tricks—when politicians tell us things that seem completely meaningless? Social psychologists of the University of Amsterdam tested how people respond to vague and meaningless statements like "To politically lead the people means to always fight for them" and "For better and stronger Gonfel!" (a fictitious country). They find that right-wing people, and especially...

Details of the orbits of 450 candidate exoplanet targets of the European Space Agency's Ariel space mission have been presented this week at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022, and submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The study, coordinated by the ExoClock project, has been co-authored by 217 professional and amateur astronomers, as well as university...

Lunar enthusiasts of all ages are challenged to help identify features on the moon that might pose a hazard to rovers or astronauts exploring the surface.

Creating a mutation that inhibits how the bacterial pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes gonorrhea, a common sexually transmitted infection, could offer a new way to prevent and treat the disease, according to researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

In 2012, a crop of California's most prized ornamental trees was overrun by an invisible invader. The growing shoots of coral beans—the official city tree of Los Angeles—began wilting and falling away, revealing stems that had been hollowed out from the inside by the caterpillars of Erythrina stem borer moths.

From love charms to getting rid of demons and curing illness, ancient documents give a unique glimpse into how rich and poor in Malta used magic to improve their lives.

One of the fascinating aspects of scientific research is certainly the serendipity that comes with it, which is something the team of Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen, virologist and immunologist at the FARAH (Faculty of Veterinary Medicine) of the University of Liège can only agree with. His team has just published in Nucleic Acids Research the results of ten years of research on the study of an...

Stargazers across the globe will get a great view of Jupiter come Monday night, weather permitting.

Bermuda assessed damage Friday after Hurricane Fiona brushed past the island overnight, causing flooding and leaving most of the population without power as it set course for Canada.

Researchers at Tufts University have developed a method to make silk-based materials that refuse to stick to water, or almost anything else containing water for that matter. In fact, the modified silk, which can be molded into forms like plastic, or coated onto surfaces as a film, has non-stick properties that surpass those of nonstick surfaces typically used on cookware, and it could see...

In 2014, Los Angeles cut its annual carbon emissions by 43% and saved $9 million in energy costs by replacing the bulbs in more than half of the city's street lamps with light-emitting diodes.

Researchers from Uppsala University and elsewhere have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would make it difficult for them to travel the long distances between the trees they pollinate.

As the old saying goes, many hands can make light work. They can also work together to make light vanish.

Lithium sulfide (Li-S) batteries are considered a promising and efficient energy storage system because of their high energy density (2600 Wh kg-1) and low sulfur material cost. However, numerous obstacles to the practical implementation of Li–S batteries remain, including low sulfur conductivity, the shuttle effect, and the requirement for an adequate volume change (80%) of sulfur during...

A well-known phenomenon in the atmospheric sciences that challenges the classical baroclinic instability theory of cyclone development is midwinter suppression. That is, the North Pacific storm-track activity has a minimum in midwinter, despite the surface baroclinicity being at its highest.

Extreme climate warming has been shown to change how cloud cover behaves throughout East Asia (EA). Recent research suggests that in a warmer climate with greater amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, slow cloud responses to meteorological mechanisms can cause a cooling effect over certain regions of EA. However, in some areas within Asia, fast cloud responses may have the opposite effect. This new...

Climate change (e.g., global warming) is intensifying the global water cycle and the temporal variation of precipitation has increased significantly. The distribution of precipitation is more uneven over time, and drought and flood events occurred more frequently. This unstable variability in precipitation is particularly negative for crop growth.

Whether residents of high-income countries are morally obliged to have fewer children is a growing debate in climate ethics. Due to the high anticipated carbon impact of future population growth, some climate ethicists express support for non-coercive population engineering policies such as reduced child tax credits.

A woman in labor is having a terrible time and suddenly shouts out: "Shouldn't! Wouldn't! Couldn't! Didn't! Can't!"

University of Tennessee, Knoxville faculty members Shawn Campagna, professor and associate department head in chemistry, and Frank Loeffler, Governor's Chair professor in microbiology, have made a discovery that could lead to new capabilities for managing environmental contamination.