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- Bats can produce ultrasonic pulses with high frequencies between 20,000 and 120,000 hertz, which are inaudible to humans. The sound waves they produce travel forward, hitting nearby objects and bouncing back in the form of echoes.
- Are the laws of physics truly the same everywhere in the universe? This fundamental principle, known as Lorentz invariance, lies at the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity. Yet some theories that seek to reconcile gravity with quantum physics suggest that it might not always hold. To investigate this possibility, researchers from the international KM3NeT collaboration analyzed 5,828 atmospheric neutrino candidate events detected by KM3NeT/ORCA, a neutrino telescope located deep in the Mediterranean Sea.
- Climate observers have long tied the strength of a major ocean current to water temperatures in the so-called "cold blob" in the North Atlantic Ocean. The 965,000-square-mile (2.5 million square kilometers) area south and southeast of Greenland cooled by as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century as other ocean waters warmed.
- A study led by researchers from the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP) and the Blood and Tissue Bank (BST) has developed and validated a manufacturing platform for extracellular vesicles that meets pharmaceutical quality requirements, marking a key step toward their clinical application.
- Modern space exploration hasn't quite reached "Star Trek" levels of boldly going where no one has gone before. But if, like the denizens of the USS Enterprise, astronauts one day want to land on an uncharted planet, they'd first want to know what's on—and under—the surface.
- Tiny skeletal plates recovered beside fossil whale bones in southern Denmark offer a rare glimpse of life around a whale carcass approximately 9.5 million years ago. Researchers have identified a new species of brittle star, Ophiura huebnerjenseni, from the Gram Clay Pit and suggest it represents the first fossil record of brittle stars associated with a whale fall.
- Southern Ocean waters reveal distinct nutrient recycling pathways during decades-long journeys northThe Southern Ocean may seem far removed from the North Pacific or the Gulf of Maine, but its waters are linked to all the world's major ocean basins through a vast circulation system.
- Imagine shuffling a deck of cards where some of the cards are fading just because of the way they interact with the external environment as you shuffle them. Your job is to figure out the interplay between the shuffling, or "imposed randomness," due to the way you shuffle your cards and how that relates to the fading as cards are exposed to the external environment.
- Waste dumped into the Tijuana River can travel seven times farther than expected before becoming airborne and affecting San Diego's air, at least 20 miles (32 kilometers) from its source, according to new UC Riverside research.
- There have been decades of regulations to make vehicles greener and improve air quality in London and Beijing, as well as a popular shift toward less polluting road transport. Now, total emissions of harmful air pollutants from vehicle exhausts are lower than those from cooking in the centers of these two megacities, a study has found.
- A new evolutionary theory suggests changes in body size, rather than competition for food and habitat, may drive the earliest physical differences between species.
- About 300,000 years ago, the emergence of the first Homo sapiens in Africa was accompanied by major cultural and technological changes, marking the beginning of a new archaeological period, the Middle Stone Age. At that time, African landscapes were also undergoing profound transformations. To understand how the earliest members of our species lived and adapted, it is therefore essential to reconstruct the environments in which they lived.
- Finding a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization takes more than just pointing a telescope in the right direction. We may also need to listen at exactly the right time.
- Two recent review articles in the journals Trends in Ecology & Evolution and Fish and Fisheries, to which researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) contributed, focus on the influence of humans on the diversity of fish behavior and on how management can help preserve this diversity.
- Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology (Poland), IBM Research Zurich and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have observed a new quantum state of matter known as a supersolid in an exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Remarkably, the phenomenon occurs not at temperatures close to absolute zero, but at room temperature. The results have been published in Science Advances.
- For a comprehensive understanding of the content of millions of Arabic manuscripts held in libraries around the world, it is crucial for scholars to first examine what their marginalia reveal, according to a new study published in the Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization.
- Researchers from ICMAB-CSIC, the Politecnico di Milano and Université de Liège have adapted a direct laser writing technique that allows them to "draw" superconducting properties in a material. The result is a new way to locally program the behavior of a superconductor, tuning it from a fully superconducting state to an insulating one with extraordinary precision.
- Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are known as "forever chemicals" because of the impact they make on the environment and human bodies. Much of modern manufacturing relies on these substances for safe packaging, fire protection and waterproof coatings.
- Dialing up the power on electricity-driven chemical reactions doesn't guarantee that they'll be more efficient, suggests a new study, a finding that gets researchers closer to creating the ideal conditions for sustainable chemical manufacturing.
- Human-induced global change has reached an unprecedented scale and intensity. Through intensive land use and the associated loss of species, humans are permanently altering the habitats and communities of wild animals. "How do predators manage to find their way in landscapes heavily shaped by humans and establish their niche? It is precisely this question that interested us," says Kathi Kasper, a doctoral student at the MRI PAS, the EBD-CSIC and the Leibniz-IZW and an author of the study.
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