Science News
- Home
- Science News
- As climate change intensifies, scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about how animals will cope with a more unpredictable world. One way to gain insight is by studying how animals have already responded to natural climate fluctuations. But for long-lived, social animals like humans and other primates, gathering this kind of evidence takes time.
- In 2023 and 2024, Earth's average global surface temperature spiked nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius above what was already expected from climate change. Each year was declared the hottest on record and coincided with deadly wildfires, heat waves and historic numbers of climate-related disasters.
- When solar storms strike Earth, they can disrupt power grids, rail systems, satellites, and even marine life. These effects arise because solar wind and geomagnetic activity disturb the magnetosphere–ionosphere system, generating electric and magnetic field variations that can resemble fainter signals from natural hazards. This risk is not theoretical.
- Solar emissions exert 'drag' on space junk orbiting Earth. From historical measurements across a period of 36 years, researchers have now shown that space junk begins to fall down much faster once the sun's activity across the solar cycle reaches approximately 67% of its peak. This result, which is expected to hold for station-keeping satellites too, is important for better planning of space missions that avoid collisions.
- The new focus on manned missions to the moon and Mars presents countless pressing challenges, including keeping humans alive in hostile environments. What happens when an astronaut or space tourist has a cardiac emergency millions of miles from the nearest hospital?
- A non-toxic coating developed by researchers at University of Toronto Engineering prevents proteins from sticking to surfaces—potentially offering a new tool in the fight against hospital-acquired infections.
- Acid-filled pitchers complete with fangs. Labyrinthine chambers decorated with bristles. Leaves that snap shut in less than a second. Employing strategies like these, carnivorous plants have a reputation as fearsome predators, but a new study published in the journal Ecology suggests they may do more to help their insect neighbors than previously thought.
- A new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals the surprising neurological landscape of fish brains. Harvard researchers map the internal structures of ray-finned fishes' brains in 3D detail, discovering brain size and shape, as well as the endocasts, vary far more than expected.
- In a new paper, an international team led by scientists from Charles University, Czechia, has brought evidence linking widespread release of methane (CH₄)—a strong greenhouse gas—from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) to a warmer period 9–4 thousand years ago. CH₄ has been detected at retreating glacier margins worldwide, raising concerns about potential climate feedbacks associated with their widespread retreat, but this is the first time that a study has systematically investigated the whole margin of an entire ice sheet. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
- A new model to predict how language changes over time has been developed by a statistical physicist at the University of Portsmouth. The model is a step towards understanding the "statistical physics of language," a scientific theory which borrows ideas from the physics of interacting particles to explain how words, accents, and dialects spread, shift, and disappear across regions and generations, and how they might change in future. The research is published in the journal Physical Review E.
- For the first time, scientists at University of Leeds reveal a complex mechanism behind blood clotting. The findings, published in Science Advances, visualize a key component of blood clotting—platelet myosin—and how it is activated.
- About 600 million years ago, the continents wandered Earth, yet to settle into their current positions. Their locations during the Ediacaran (as this time is called) have been tough for scientists to pin down. Earth's magnetic field appears to have behaved in erratic ways, and applying standard techniques to calculate the continents' positions based on records of the magnetic field yields implausible results. In particular, scientists debate the location of an ancient continent called Baltica, which is now part of Europe.
- Scientists at Keele University have created the first detailed map of the genetic "switches" that control reproduction in disease-carrying insects such as Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito species most responsible for malaria transmission, paving the way for more effective methods of genetically controlling these insects.
- A new paper from NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announces that volunteers have essentially doubled the number of known brown dwarfs, with over 3,000 new discoveries made over the past 10 years since the project began. Brown dwarfs are balls of gas the size of Jupiter, less massive than stars. There's one for every three or four stars near the sun.
- This series of images shows NASA's Curiosity Mars rover as it got a rock stuck to the drill on the end of its robotic arm, and—after waving the arm and running the drill a few times—finally detached the rock. The imagery showing the entire process was captured by the black-and-white hazard cameras on the front of Curiosity's chassis and by navigation cameras on its mast (head).
- New research into plant-based food and drinks has found a prevalence of mycotoxins—naturally occurring poisonous compounds produced by fungi—in hundreds of vegetarian and vegan products. A total of 212 plant-based meat alternatives (PMBAs) and plant-based beverages (PBBs) from UK shelves were tested—and all of them contained at least one of 19 mycotoxins, with multiple products containing more than one.
- Approximately 145 million: That's the number of specimens—including plants, animals, minerals, and human artifacts—curators estimate are held in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. However, these estimates do not reflect the billions of tiny individual specimens contained on microscope slides—thin pieces of glass that fix objects in place for observation—each representing a record of a species at a specific place and time.
- Florida State University researchers have discovered how to accurately predict winter weather forecasts months in advance, affording sectors such as agriculture, water management, energy use and public health a longer lead time to prepare for inclement conditions. The research, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, shows a method for forecasting how the stratospheric polar vortex, or SPV, will behave from winter through summer, before winter even starts.
- Watermelon is a quintessential summertime fruit, evoking images of warm, sunny afternoons and cookouts with friends and family. You can easily picture its striped, green rind and pink flesh, imagine the delicate crunch as you bite into a slice, and almost taste the sweet juice bursting onto your tongue. What you likely don't consider is the biological basis of traits like fruit color, texture, and sweetness—the genetics that have undergone millions of years of selection, both in nature and through intentional breeding, to give you that exact experience.
- As much as 40 million metric tons of microplastics are released into the environment globally every year. These tiny pieces of plastic come from larger plastic items that break down or are shed by products such as clothing, paints, and cosmetics.
Photographer: