New research led by Flinders University is renewing calls to protect the source of water and aquifers supporting the ecologically significant Doongmabulla Springs Complex in central Queensland from a proposed Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin.

Asteroids are remnants of the early Solar System, with the potential to reveal secrets of our planet's origins. But they could also bring an end to life on Earth. Now two missions, Lucy and DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will provide further insights into both of these features—with DART even attempting to redirect the orbit of a moon around an asteroid.

While the impact of emissions on Antarctic ice melt may not become clear for another hundred years, the consequences of the climate decisions made this decade will be felt for centuries.

The hot and dry desert environment has led to big genetic differences between male and female jojoba plants, a discovery which could boost jojoba production and shed light on how plants adapt to environmental stress.

EPFL and Microsoft Research scientists demonstrated ultrafast optical circuit switching using a chip-based soliton comb laser and a completely passive diffraction grating device. This particular architecture could enable an energy-efficient optical datacenter to meet enormous data bandwidth requirements in future.

Consumers would be better off in the long run buying more selectively and at their normal time, according to Professor Manmohan Sodhi, Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass).

In the search for dark matter particles, a tabletop experiment in the heart of a Canadian mine might do the trick. The SENSEI collaboration uses skipper charged-couple devices, or CCDs, which are the most sensitive sensors of their kind, dreamt up decades ago and only recently realized.

On Oct. 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Veterinary Services Laboratories announced confirmation of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—in two previously uninfected animal species at a zoo in Illinois. Dr. Leyi Wang, a virologist and professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, first tested the samples in the university's Veterinary...

Few things alive on Earth occupy as little of our brain space as fungi. The vast majority of these organisms—neither plant nor animal—are invisibly small or perpetually hidden underneath our feet. Only when mushrooms breach the soil can we even see them.

Ocean warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions will prompt many species of marine plankton to seek out new habitats, in some cases as a matter of survival. ETH Zurich researchers expect many organisms to head to the poles and form new communities—with unforeseeable consequences for marine food webs.

Researchers at the Universities of Helsinki and Lyon and the Geological Survey of Finland found that complex teeth, a hallmark of mammals, also evolved several times in reptiles, prompting the evolutionary success of plant-eating lizards. However, contrary to mammals their tooth evolution was not unidirectional.

The field of synthetic biology has had great success engineering yeast and bacteria to make chemicals—biofuels, pharmaceuticals, fragrances, even the hoppy flavors of beer—cheaply and more sustainably, with only sugar as the energy source.

An international research team, with the participation of the Institute of Molecular Science (ICMol) of the University of Valencia, has achieved spin-electric control in molecular nanomagnets. This fact offers great advantages when preparing quantum devices based on magnetic molecules. The work has been published in the journal Nature Physics.

Scientists have worked out how to best get DNA to communicate with membranes in our body, paving the way for the creation of 'mini biological computers' in droplets that have potential uses in biosensing and mRNA vaccines.

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Canada and one in the U.S. has found that eelgrass genetic diversity increases when sea otters live in eelgrass meadows. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of eelgrass meadows under different conditions. Joe Roman, with the University of Vermont, has published a Perspectives piece in the...

University at Buffalo researchers have developed a new process for creating three-dimensional artificial tissue, an advancement that could improve experimental drug testing, the quality of artificial organs and more.

Chinese researchers recently released an integrated observation dataset of the hydrological and thermal deformation covering permafrost engineering and slope areas in the Qinghai-Tibet Engineering Corridor (QTEC).

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites (OIHPs) are promising in photovoltaic energy harvesting, electro-optic detection, and all-optical conversion. Understanding the atomic structure and structural instability of OIHPs is the key to appreciate their remarkable photoelectric properties.

Fluids are like the "blood" inside the solid Earth, playing an important role in the transportation of matter and energy. Due to the compositional difference, rocks that composed mainly of silicate and common fluids have a typically low level of miscibility.

Did Mars ever look like Earth? We think it did!

Madagascar is an important world conservation "hot spot" that supports a large number of endemic species. It is home to six endemic baobab species, the most remarkable trees in Africa. What will be the effect of global climate change to these ecological keystone species in Madagascar?

Whistler mode chorus waves are electromagnetic emissions common in planetary magnetospheres. Among other impacts, their scattering of magnetospheric electrons is one driver for the formation of auroras. An important attribute of these waves is frequency chirping, in which the frequency of the emission rises or falls nearly monotonically with time.

A new study by the energy science and policy research institute, Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy shows that the disposal of over 16 billion barrels of oil and gas wastewater into unlined pits over a 50-year period has introduced salts, carcinogens, and other toxins into regional aquifers.

Surface energy (γs) plays a key role in the formation of bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) films in organic solar cells fabricated by solution process. The miscibility of BHJ films can be predicted by the difference of surface energy between donor and acceptor. The vertical distribution and the stacking orientation of BHJ films can be regulated by the surface energy in the bottom interface layer. The...