There's a fairly large flaw in the way that programmers are currently addressing ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Namely, existing approaches don't account for the fact that people might try to use AVs to do something bad.

In a study of New York state apple orchards, plant pathologists have identified a new fungal pathogen that causes bitter rot disease in apples.

Archaeologists have combined the latest scientific methods to offer new insights into life during the Norman Conquest of England. Until now, the story of the Conquest has primarily been told from evidence of the elite classes of the time. But little has been known about how it affected everyday people's lives.

Researchers have developed a new silicon chip with major applications in lidar systems for self-driving cars and smart phones.

Layered van der Waals materials are of high interest for electronic and photonic applications, according to researchers who provide new insights into the interactions of layered materials with laser and electron beams.

Tiny eye movements can be used as an index of humans' ability to anticipate relevant information in the environment independent of the information's sensory modality.

Researchers have discovered a new class of pipeline drugs to relieve pain and reduce fever without the danger of addiction or damage to the liver or kidneys.

Frailty and immune decline are two main features of old age. Researchers now demonstrate in an animal model that these two age-related impairments can be halted and even partially reversed using a novel cell-based therapeutic approach.

In an effort to improve large touchscreens, LED light panels and window-mounted infrared solar cells, researchers have made plastic conductive while also making it more transparent.

A new analysis of white dwarf stars supports their role as a key source of carbon in galaxies. Every carbon atom in the universe was created by stars, but astrophysicists still debate which types of stars are the primary source of the carbon in our galaxy. Some studies favor low-mass stars that blew off their envelopes in stellar winds and became white dwarfs, while others favor massive stars that...

Life as we know it could not exist without Earth's magnetic field and its ability to deflect dangerous ionizing particles. It is continuously generated by the motion of liquid iron in Earth's outer core, a phenomenon called the geodynamo. Despite its fundamental importance, many questions remain unanswered about the geodynamo's origin. New work examines how the presence of lighter elements in the...

Liquid droplets formed from DNA display a peculiar response to enzymes. An international collaboration has now been able to explain the mechanisms behind bubble formation.

The program could make it easier to identify the deadly antimicrobial resistant bacteria that exist in the environment. Such superbugs annually cause more than 2.8 million difficult-to-treat pneumonia or bloodstream infections and 35,000 deaths in the US.

In a surprise twist, a major group of flowering plants is evolving twice as quickly in temperate zones as the tropics.

New research identifies several existing compounds that block replication of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) within human cells grown in the laboratory. The inhibitors all demonstrated potent chemical and structural interactions with a viral protein critical to the virus's ability to proliferate.

The first comprehensive worldwide assessment of heatwaves down to regional levels has revealed that in nearly every part of the world heatwaves have been increasing in frequency and duration since the 1950's. The research has also produced a new metric, cumulative heat, which reveals exactly how much heat is packed into individual heatwaves and heatwave seasons. As expected, that number is also on...

Researchers have discovered a protein that drives the progression of esophageal cancer and liver cancer and it could be a promising target for cancer drug development.

Without stem cells, human life would not exist. Due to them, a lump of cells becomes an organ, and a fertilized egg develops into a baby. But what actually makes a stem cell? Are these a stable population of specially gifted cells? Scientists discovered that instead, stem cells might emerge due to the collective behavior of cells within the organs.

An international team of experts on heart disease and diet say there's no evidence that a low-saturated fat diet reduces cholesterol in people with familial hypercholesterolemia.

Researchers have developed a human cell 'membrane on a chip' that allows continuous monitoring of how drugs and infectious agents interact with our cells, and may soon be used to test potential drug candidates for COVID-19.

250 years ago, over one-fifth of Londoners had contracted syphilis by their 35th birthday, historians have calculated.

Scientists studying the 'near threatened' tequila bat, best known for its role in pollinating the Blue Agave plant from which the drink of the same name is made from, have analyzed its DNA to help inform conservationists on managing their populations.

Researchers have found that dogs adapt their communicative strategies to their environment and that owner behavior influences communicative effort and success. Experimental results found no evidence that dogs rely on communication history or follow the principle of least effort and suggest that owner behavior has a bigger impact on canine communication than previously thought.

Optical amplifiers based on chirped pulse amplification (CPA) are used to generate high intensity pulses. In the CPA scheme, a weak temporally stretched seed pulse is amplified to high energy in a laser amplifier and finally re-compressed resulting in an ultrashort pulse of very high intensity.