Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
Few consumers realize that a property's poor energy rating can directly affect their ability to obtain a mortgage. In the future, flood and other climate-related risks will also play a greater role in lending decisions.
In a new Physical Review Letters study, researchers have demonstrated that bending diamond nanostructures can tune the light they emit without doping.
The change was obvious—but in the end, things stayed about the same. Cornell researchers took advantage of online petition website Change.org's gradual rollout of an artificial intelligence writing tool to gauge AI-enhanced language's impact on petition outcomes.
A new species of click beetle with a glossy and highly domed black body has been described from cloud forest sites in the mountains of the Dominican Republic and named in honor of the Arawak peoples who lived on the island before European colonization.
For communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane season presents a recurring challenge: knowing when, where and how to evacuate before a major storm hits. To tackle this, researchers at Texas A&M University have spent more than a decade helping local, state and federal agencies develop clear, data-driven evacuation strategies.
When designing a large underwater robot that could swim silently to avoid startling sea creatures, roboticist Rob Shepherd considered the unusual swimming system of oarfish, the meters-long fish whose ribbon-like dorsal fin moves in waves to propel its body.
The new push loosens U.S. regulations for sterilizing spacecraft bound for the Red Planet and calls for modernizing the science of “planetary protection”
El Niño has stymied storm formation even more than forecasters expected
A powerful "Kelvin wave," triggered by this year's super El Niño, is creeping up the Pacific coast of Central and North America and will soon reach California's shores, where it could raise sea levels by up to 1 foot (30 centimeters) for months, researchers warn.Kelvin waves are a well-known, planetary-scale ocean phenomenon, but this particular forecast has experts worried because it will likely amplify the damage from severe storms, storm surges, flooding and coastal erosion that the record-shattering El Niño is expected to bring this winter.In general, a Kelvin wave is a swell wave that spans thousands of miles and balances Earth's rotation, David Webb, a physical oceanographer at the Nat...
Researchers have discovered an exoplanet that travels around its small, red star backward, much like a rubber duck spinning against the current in a whirlpool. The discovery could give insight about how exoplanets form around the most common types of stars in our galaxy.It's a mystery why the alien world, called GJ 3090 b, orbits its star backward (also called a retrograde orbit). Stars and planets usually form from the same rotating disk of gas and dust, called a protoplanetary disk. Newly formed celestial objects normally rotate in the same direction as the protoplanetary disk, because changing the rotational direction requires a lot of energy applied in the right way.Astronomers have disc...
Scientists graded every river and stream in the contiguous United States, flagging specific repairs each one needs to support aquatic life.
The satellite, Smile, is a joint European and Chinese mission to study space weather and geomagnetic storms above Earth
Saphier’s nomination now heads to the full Senate for a vote
It's well-known that regular exercise comes with health benefits, but exactly how those benefits manifest at the cellular level isn't clear. Now, researchers have identified a series of changes in metabolism and the immune system that differentiate regular exercisers from people with sedentary lifestyles. The findings, published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances, point to potential pathways for managing chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, the scientists say.The team of researchers analyzed data from the Chinese Immune Multi-omics Atlas (CIMA), which includes data from 400 adults who gave blood samples and answered an in-depth questionnaire about their lifesty...
Scientists testing potential treatments for sleep apnea made an unexpected discovery. How quickly people react may depend on whether they’re breathing in or out.
Just days after a Fields Medalist predicted that an AI would solve the puzzle, Anthropic succeeded
A review of more than 265,000 people found that cannabis use was associated with higher rates of both committing violence and becoming a victim of it. The researchers say the link is significant but does not prove cannabis itself is the cause.
Astronomers have found strong evidence that some mysterious, minutes-long X-ray flashes are produced when two neutron stars collide and create a magnetar. One record-setting event glowed in X-rays for nearly 10 minutes, potentially opening a new way to find these extreme cosmic mergers.
Marine heatwaves may be only the most intense part of much longer warming events, with elevated temperatures sometimes lingering for months. Researchers found that conventional measurements underestimate total heat exposure by more than 150% on average, potentially overlooking a major source of stress on marine ecosystems.
New research suggests that poultry litter-based soil amendments and weather conditions, particularly extreme weather events, may influence how long bacteria survive in agricultural soils used to grow sweet onions. The findings could help inform food safety risk management for produce growers.