Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law has released a human rights assessment of the use of large language models (LLMs) in the fields of law, journalism and education.
We've been searching for life on Mars for a long time, but so far we've come up empty. The fundamental problem is a Catch-22 involving two of the key ingredients for life. Life as we know it needs liquid water and reasonable temperatures, both of which are available on Mars, but hardly ever at the same time. But a new paper from lead author Anna Bognar and her team at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University and the Konkoly Observatory describes a way for life to access both requirements at the same time—by hiding away in salt crystals.
Taylor Swift is now the namesake of a genus of plant-feeding insects from Australia that were previously unknown to science.
Scholasticide—deliberate attacks on a society's education system in armed conflict—is a war crime that must be publicly condemned and its perpetrators held to account, insists an editorial published by The BMJ.
AI engineers often recognize ethical risks associated with the systems they build, but many lack the authority, incentives and organizational support needed to act on them, according to new research from the University of Manchester.
Researchers at the National Graphene Institute have shown that naturally occurring channels within a common clay mineral can respond to pressure, voltage and pH, offering possibilities for controlling the movement of ions through extremely small, confined spaces. The study, published in Advanced Materials, focuses on vermiculite, a naturally abundant layered clay whose structure contains channels only a few angstroms high, providing naturally confined pathways through which ions can move.
Porous liquids combine permanent nanoscale cavities with fluidity, making them promising for applications like carbon dioxide capture, gas separation and other chemical processes. Their viscosity must be tailored to the intended application: Lower-viscosity liquids are easier to pump and circulate while facilitating faster heat and mass transfer, whereas higher-viscosity liquids provide greater structural stability in membrane formation.
From the Vredefort Dome in South Africa (the world's oldest and largest known meteorite impact structure) to the volcanic lakes of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, Africa's landscapes hold some of Earth's oldest stories. Morocco's M'Goun UNESCO Global Geopark records more than 200 million years of geological history, while Tanzania's Ngorongoro-Lengai landscape brings together a vast caldera, an active volcano and the fossil record of Olduvai Gorge.
A new study published in Science Advances reveals how Bronze Age communities in Central Europe adapted to changing environmental and social conditions by adopting broomcorn millet, a fast-growing, climate-resilient crop.
This year's Lasker Awards — coveted prizes for biomedical research that are sometimes called "America's Nobel Prizes" — have gone to scientists behind fundamental discoveries in sleep science and to researchers who developed a groundbreaking treatment for hemophilia.Additionally, a Lasker Award for public service went to actor Michael J. Fox for his advocacy for patients with Parkinson's disease that has helped advance research into the neurodegenerative condition. The prizes, each of which comes with an honorarium of $250,000, will be presented in person Sept. 17 in New York City. The awardees were announced Wednesday (Sept. 9) by the Lasker Foundation, which was established in 1942 by the ...
Morocco spent most of the last decade drying out. Between 2019 and 2024, the country recorded six consecutive years of below-average rainfall, the longest on record. The 2023–24 hydrological year was the driest in more than six decades, with a national total of just 106.4 mm.
From targeted cancer treatments to self-healing materials and microscopic robots, many emerging technologies depend on molecules that can be controlled with light. Researchers at Tohoku University have now developed a way to make these light-responsive molecules much more sensitive to visible light by using a molecular antenna. The breakthrough gives scientists better control over molecular photoswitches remotely and potentially expands their use in medicine and advanced materials. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.