A Sherpa guide scaled Mount Everest for the 25th time on Friday, breaking his own record for the most ascents of the world's highest peak.

Cells talk to each other to coordinate nutrition, waste removal, energy use, and, in some cases, disease progression. The cells that line the surfaces of organs or specific tissues, called epithelial cells, appear to speak two different languages—one for either side of the cell, according to a new study by researchers based in Japan.

As decarbonization progresses rapidly in the world, fuel cells offer potentially higher electrical efficiency than conventional power-generating systems. Anion exchange membrane fuel cells offer advantages of using non-precious metal catalysts than proton exchange membrane fuel cells. One of the challenges of this next-generation fuel cell is to clarify the hydroxide ion conductivity in the ion...

Clocks are essential building blocks of modern technology, from computers to GPS receivers. They are also essentially engines, irreversibly consuming resources in order to generate accurate ticks. But what resources have to be expended to achieve a desired accuracy? In our latest study, published in Physical Review X, we answer this question by measuring, for the first time, the entropy generated...

To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies.

A team of researchers from the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine, the Technology & Research Academy University and the University of Hyderabad, all in India, has found that flatworms are able to sense light exposure even after decapitation. The researchers have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A former colleague who was a researcher and promoter of local food systems once argued that local meat markets connect children with reality. "If young people do not have a direct experience with food," he told me, "they might think it originates on supermarket shelves. Local butcheries improve food literacy and reduce the disconnect between consumers and their choices." Many would dispute this...

People spend about 80-90% of their time indoors. Compared to outdoor air quality, the indoor air quality is more relevant to people's health. Therefore, understanding the levels, sources and evolution of particulate matter (PM) indoors is important for the accurate evaluation of people's health risks to aerosol exposure.

Large amounts of gas are sometimes funneled to a galaxy's nuclear regions, with profound consequences. The gas triggers starburst activity and can also feed the supermassive black hole, converting it into an active galactic nucleus (AGN); indeed the supermassive black holes in AGN are thought to gain most of their mass in these accretion events. Eventually, outward pressure from supernovae,...

Australia, the driest inhabited continent, is prone to natural disasters and wild swings in weather conditions—from floods to droughts, heatwaves and bushfires.

Physicists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have for the first time been able to prove a long-predicted but as yet unconfirmed fundamental effect. In Faraday chiral anisotropy, the propagation characteristics of light waves are changed simultaneously by the natural and magnetic-field induced material properties of the medium through which the light travels. The...

Observing how cells stick to surfaces and their motility is vitally important in the study of tissue maintenance, wound healing and even understanding how cancers progress. A new paper published in The European Physical Journal Plus, by Raj Kumar Sadhu, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, takes a step towards a deeper understanding of these processes.

The applied nitrogen in crop production is easily lost through ammonia emission and nitrogen leaching. Therefore, many attempts have been made to develop novel slow-release fertilizers to reduce nitrogen loss and improve crop production.

Despite their extremely small size, submicron atmospheric aerosols are critical pollutants with climate change, air quality, and human health implications. Of these particles, secondary organic aerosols (SOA) form when volatile organic compounds (VOCs) oxidize to lower volatility products that bond with and increase aerosol particle size, or in some cases, they may simply exist by themselves. SOA...

They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University's holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.

A team of researchers from Zhejiang University, Xi'an Jiaotong University and Monash University has developed a way to bind multiple strands of graphene oxide into a thick cable. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their process and possible uses for it. Rodolfo Cruz-Silva and Ana Laura Elías with Shinshu University and Binghamton University have published a...

A team of researchers from Lund University, the University of Copenhagen and the Nature Research Centre in Lithuania has found that some great reed warblers climb as high as 6,000 meters when they fly over the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes monitoring migrating great reed warblers by affixing tiny data loggers to their...

Human laughter is common, but it's a somewhat mysterious part of our evolution. It's clear to evolutionary scholars that we laugh as a part of play, signaling our cooperation or friendliness. But how did laughter evolve? And are humans the only ones who do it?

Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana is carrying out combined tests to prepare for the arrival of Ariane 6, Europe's next generation heavy-lift launch vehicle.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) today announced that an African Swine Fever Virus vaccine candidate has been adapted to grow in a cell line, which means that those involved in vaccine production will no longer have to rely on live pigs and their fresh cells for vaccine production.

On their long journey to form planets, dust grains may coalesce with each other much earlier than previously thought, simulations by RIKEN astrophysicists suggest1. This may mean revisiting conventional theories of planet formation.

Two proteins play a key role in the development of flight muscles and their tendons in fruit flies, two RIKEN developmental biologists have shown1. Their study reveals how the components of the muscle–tendon system develop in sync with each other, thereby avoiding catastrophic results.

Extreme weather poses increasing challenges to the agricultural sector. New insurance models based on satellite data may reduce the risk of drought for farmers, writes Robert Finger.

If you're anything like us, you may have wondered if an octopus and a seabird would ever end up in a fight. Well they do, and it's a YouTube wormhole that can prove quite addictive.