Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
Dark matter could be a type of matter in the universe that does not emit, absorb or reflect detectable light and appears to interact very weakly with regular matter. Although physicists have observed gravitational effects attributed to dark matter, they have not yet been able to determine what it is made of.
Students in a new study were neither clearly positive nor negative about more climate-friendly school meals. Whether the food tasted good, was filling and felt familiar played an important role. Students were somewhat more positive about reducing the amount of meat in recipes than about having more all-vegetarian days.
When you swim through the azure waters of the Great Barrier Reef, there is one creature on the seafloor that's almost impossible to miss: the giant clam. Its huge, fluted shell frames a soft mantle shimmering with electric blue, green and gold.
An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Department of Physics and the Hong Kong Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (HKIAA) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has discovered a previously hidden phase of high-energy activity following the merger of compact stars.
As Ted Schuur stepped along the edges of Smith Lake, a bubble surfaced from the muck underfoot. And then another. They're bubbles of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas made from decomposing plants and animals that had once been stuck in Alaska's frigid permafrost. But that frozen ground is thawing because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. For thousands of years that frozen ground stored dead plants and animals, but the accelerating thaw is allowing them to decay into methane and carbon dioxide.
Saturn's icy moon Enceladus hides a global ocean beneath its frozen surface. From fractures near its south pole, material from this ocean is ejected into space as a plume of water vapor and ice particles. These particles offer scientists a rare opportunity to investigate an extraterrestrial ocean without drilling through kilometers of ice.
The U.S. prison population is declining at an accelerating rate, and prison admission rates are predicted to fall an additional 50% within the next two decades, according to new research from University at Albany professor Shawn Bushway.
Deep in Peru's Acarí Valley lie the ruins of Tambo Viejo, an Inka provincial center where excavations have uncovered tasseled sacrificial llamas and brightly adorned guinea pigs. But save for a few seeds and some stored leaves, evidence of how the Inka used one of their most sacred plants in rituals remained elusive. Now, archaeologists have discovered coca leaves still stuck in the wool of some sacrificed llamas.
A meteor crater buried beneath Oklahoma has turned out to be nearly 100 million years younger than scientists thought. Zircon crystals show the Ames impact occurred about 370 million years ago, meaning it was not part of the mysterious Ordovician bombardment once linked to a possible ring of debris around Earth. Instead, the impact coincided closely with a major mass extinction that devastated marine life.
Tiny magnetic fields created shortly after the Big Bang may help explain the long-running disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding. Detailed simulations show that these primordial fields could have changed the formation of hydrogen in the early universe, affecting the cosmic microwave background and the expansion rate inferred from it.
When light travels through a strongly scattering material, such as biological tissue or other disordered opaque media, it follows many different paths and produces a seemingly random speckle pattern. Wavefront shaping makes it possible to control this complex interference and focus light through such materials.
Physicists smashed gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light and found an unexpected pattern in the particles these collisions sprayed out. If confirmed, that pattern could help reveal how the hot soup of quarks and gluons that filled the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang cooled and condensed into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today. In every collision, particles are flung out sideways; how hard they are flung, on average, varies slightly from one collision to the next. Physicists expected the size of these variations to change smoothly as they adjusted the collision energy. Instead, the variations dipped, shrinking and then growing aga...