Science News

Night and day, as the moon orbits around earth and the earth around the sun, the gravitational forces of these celestial bodies pull on the earth. This pulling force is what causes the earth's sea... levels to rise and fall, a phenomenon we call the "tides." But did you know that land, too, experiences a tide?

(Phys.org)--A team of researchers with California Institute of Technology and the Karlsruh Institute of Technology has improved the efficiency of thin film solar cells by mimicking the architecture of... rose butterfly wings. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group explains their inspiration for studying the butterfly wings and the details of their improved solar cells.

In the grand club of galaxies, the Milky Way is increasingly looking like an outlier. This is a looming challenge for cosmology, says Geraint Lewis

Aphids, midges and wasps are being added to the list of rapidly vanishing insects. It's another alarming sign of a sixth mass extinction, says Olive Heffernan

If greenhouse gases are such a problem, can't we just suck the carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere? It's a perfectly reasonable question and an important area of technological research to... pursue. The technique is referred to as negative emissions technology. As emissions remain high, experts are starting to accept that we'll need to […]

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, but it doesn't have to be.

There is an urban myth that dogs can smell human emotions, now it seems to be true: dogs can sense a person's emotional state just by sniffing a sample of their sweat

Scientists at Massey University have been involved in calculating the structure of oganesson, a relatively new element which has proved elusive to study.

A silicon solar cell harvests the energy of the sun as light travels down through light-absorbent silicon. To reduce weight and cost, solar cells are thin, and while silicon absorbs visible light... well, it captures less than half of the light in the near-infrared spectrum, which makes up one-third of the sun's energy. The depth of the material limits absorption. But what if light within the cell could be channeled horizontally so that silicon could absorb its energy along the width of the cell rather than its depth?

An ecological catastrophe 201 million years ago supposedly paved the way for the rise of giant dinosaurs, but it may not have happened that way after all

Older adults who walked but didn't meet exercise guidelines of 2 hours a week boosted their life span in the new study.

Psychology makes us swift to blame those who experience sexual harassment, but the #MeToo movement could be making it easier to speak up, says Nichola Raihani

The VR experience will bring you face to face with one of the most famous wreck-diving sites in the world: the WWII SS Thistlegorm, which was sunk by German bombers in 1941 in the Red Sea.

The SS Thistlegorm was sunk by German bombers in 1941 on the way to the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Now, a team has recreated the famous wreck in virtual reality.

A severe pain in one man's artificial hip joint turned out to be caused by an extremely rare bacterial infection, according to a new report of the man's case.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) A Berkeley Lab-led research team has discovered a surprising set of chemical reactions involving magnesium that degrade battery performance even before the... battery can be charged up. The findings could steer the design of next-gen batteries.

(Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) Through the combined effect of flexoelectricity and piezoelectricity, researchers at the ICN2 led by ICREA Gustau Catalán in collaboration with the UAB have found... that polar materials can be made more or less resistant to dents when they are turned upside down... or when a voltage is applied to switch their polarization. This research points to the future development of 'smart mechanical materials' for use in smart coatings and ferroelectric memories.

(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)) Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), a member of the Leibniz Association. The... Blue Planet Prize honors outstanding thinkers who help to meet challenges of planetary dimensions. It is awarded by the Asahi Glass Foundation and handed over in presence of Japan's Imperial Prince and Princess. Schellnhuber received the prize for establishing a new field of science, Earth System Analysis, and introducing most influential concepts including the notion of tipping elements in the climate system.

(Rice University) Scientists from Rice University and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi's Harte Research Institute have discovered that Earth's sea level did not rise steadily when the planet's... glaciers last melted during a period of global warming; rather, sea level rose sharply in punctuated bursts.

(Universit Ca' Foscari Venezia) Ca' Foscari University of Venice won two ERC Starting Grants as a host institution specifically chosen by the researchers for the first time, with a total fund of about... 3 million euros.

(FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) Satellites have detected powerful solar flares in the last two months, but this phenomenon has been recorded for over a century. On Sept. 10,... 1886, at the age of just 17, a young amateur astronomer using a modest telescope observed from Madrid one of these sudden flashes in a sunspot. This is what researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the Universidad de Extremadura have recently found.

(Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences ) The same optical fibers that deliver high-speed internet and HD video to our homes could one day double as seismic sensors for monitoring... and studying earthquakes.

(University of Stirling) The environmental impact of hydropower generation in the Amazon may be greater than predicted, according to new University of Stirling research.

(Fundação de Amparo Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) The glass is a non-equilibrium, non-crystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short time scale but relaxes toward the liquid state,... proposes Brazilian scientist. The inspiration for the new definition occurred to him after giving the Turner Memorial Lecture at the Society of Glass Technology (SGT) Centenary Conference, in Sheffield (UK).

(Bentham Science Publishers) Patients suffering injuries in low and middle-income countries have a higher prevalence of HIV than baseline populations and HIV Infection may be associated with greater... risk of post-injury mortality.