A review led by the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has revealed that tiny ground-dwelling invertebrates are overlooked but important seed dispersers, challenging the traditional focus on birds and mammals and offering new insights into forest regeneration and biodiversity conservation.

When designing microscopes, optical engineers have long faced a trade-off between speed, field of view and resolution. But improving one of these properties typically comes at the expense of another. Now, a UC Berkeley–led team of researchers has found a way to address this challenge, opening the door to new possibilities in the field of microscopy.

Rice is the most-eaten food on the planet, and its discarded outer husk results in some 300 billion pounds of waste per year. FIU chemistry researcher Islam Ibrahim Hussein says the inedible castoffs could be the key to cleaner water.

A research team at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully demonstrated an AI modeling approach that accurately and rapidly predicts how reactions between solid materials unfold over time. It is the first predictive model that accounts for how atoms travel through materials during solid-state reactions. Importantly, its predictions provide practical insights into the best recipes for making advanced materials.

3D bioprinting allows scientists to build custom tissue structures for medicine, but printing soft tissues like the human brain remains a major challenge. The strong pushing forces required to squeeze biological materials through tiny printer nozzles often crush and damage sensitive cells, leading to low survival rates and weak printed structures.

Symbioses between plants and fungi are essential for most plants. Fungal structures known as mycorrhizae extend the area from which plants can draw water and nutrients from the soil. In return, plants supply the fungi with carbohydrates produced through photosynthesis. Although the importance of this symbiosis has been known for decades, researchers have not previously been able to study the underground network in its natural structure.

A new Vera C. Rubin Observatory image featuring hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies in and around the COSMOS field marks the observatory's first LSST Camera image and catalog release for science.

Plant biologists and engineers have extended their studies to the skies to track airborne pollen once it leaves a crop. In a new study, published in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, researchers established an accurate methodology for tracking, measuring and forecasting pollen dispersal of genetically engineered switchgrass at both ground and atmospheric levels.

Digital security currently relies on difficult equations to protect data. For example, when you use a credit card online, the information is locked inside a math problem that would take a modern computer thousands of years to solve. However, if someone builds a powerful enough computer, that security breaks.

Deep in the world's oceans, large male sperm whales emit slow, low-frequency clicks with the highest source levels of any animal communication sounds. These slow clicks are not the echolocation clicks the whales use to locate prey, but loud, low-frequency communication signals.

Why is recycling waste or switching off the lights sometimes perceived as more effective for the climate than giving up air travel? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) surveyed nearly 3,000 people and identified key psychological mechanisms underlying these misperceptions. Their findings pave the way for more effective communication strategies that encourage behaviors with the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The study is published in Nature Sustainability.

Salty water flowing through Antarctica's Blood Falls contains a distinct community of marine-specific microorganisms, providing evidence that the brine system beneath the glacier has a marine origin, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience. The findings offer new insights into how microbial communities can persist through major environmental transitions.

Digital technologies could strengthen food security in developing countries, but their impact will be limited unless governments address distrust, weak collaboration and institutional inefficiencies, according to a study focusing on Mauritius published in the International Journal of Agriculture Innovation, Technology and Globalisation.

Researchers at Flinders University have discovered an unexpected way light can control tiny electronic structures inside advanced materials, a development that could help pave the way for more energy-efficient memory devices, sensors and future computing technologies.

In a billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel and expand to become a red giant. Earth's oceans and atmosphere will be burned away, and Earth will likely be engulfed by the sun altogether. The sun will then shrink to a dim white dwarf, and all light and warmth in the solar system will diminish. In a hundred trillion years, the galaxy's ability to produce stars will be exhausted, and everything will turn dark. However, there's a way for life to escape this fate—and what's more, we wouldn't need to leave the planet to do it. We just need to build some safeguards.

If you've ever been under a dark sky in the early morning before dawn, you may have seen a faint glow, almost like a column of light rising from the east. It's sometimes known as the false dawn because it appears before true dawn. It can also appear in the west after sunset, though it typically isn't as noticeable. The glow is caused by dust in the inner solar system. It is a diffuse plane of tiny particles that aligns with the plane of the inner planets. Since the planets move through the zodiac constellations, so does this plane of dust, which is why it is also known as the zodiacal light.

It is six months since the main road into the village of Torcross, in South Devon, collapsed after a series of storms caused extensive damage to the community's sea defenses. Residents are still coming to terms with the devastation and isolation caused by the storms and awaiting the results of a £20 million investment that will see huge quantities of rock placed on the beach at Slapton Sands to bolster those defenses.

Researchers at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering have developed a new approach to nanoscale 3D printing that improves both speed and fidelity, overcoming a challenge that has limited the technology's broader use in manufacturing.

A research team led by Professor Hyoyoung Lee of the Department of Chemistry at Sungkyunkwan University has developed a new catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into ethanol with high selectivity. The study, titled "Atomic-scale Cu–Zn synergy directs asymmetric C–C coupling for ethanol-selective CO2 electroreduction," was published in Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy.

El Niño continues to intensify steadily and is expected to dominate global climate patterns in the August to October 2026 season, increasing the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the world and driving significant shifts in rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

A new study provides quantitative data on cranial vault thickness in Homo antecessor, based on the analysis of three parietal fragments recovered from the Gran Dolina site in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain.

An international research team led by Assistant Professor Ryuji Takasaki of the Faculty of Biosphere-Geosphere Science at Okayama University of Science has published a paper proposing a new hypothesis on the evolutionary history of dinosaur digestive systems by focusing on gastroliths—stones found within dinosaur abdominal cavities. By examining the degree of wear on these gastroliths, the team sheds light on dinosaur digestion strategies. The findings are published in the journal Paleobiology.

A study from the University of Manchester into the effects of polymer cross-contamination on the outcome of mechanically recycling plastics has found that the presence of contaminants radically alters degradation mechanisms.

Ants live in highly organized colonies and cooperate daily to tackle a wide range of problems. Their striking group behaviors have fascinated biologists for centuries and even inspired the development of various artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, most exist on their own.

Admissions applications, discussion posts, grades, and activity logs are among the most common signals educators use to gauge whether students will thrive in an online program. But two new Georgia Tech studies suggest those measures tell only part of the story.

Roll back the tape of Earth's history, and geologists and astrobiologists remain perplexed about the environmental conditions on early Earth. That's because conventional pathways for understanding Earth's history have been lost to time owing to the planet's active geology and atmospheric weathering.

Cyanobacterial blooms, like the ones that occur in Lake Geneva, are rapid, dense growths of photosynthetic bacteria in fresh and marine waters that can threaten the health of swimmers and their pets.

When a hurricane roars toward land, forecasters try to predict how high sea levels will rise to help coastal communities prepare for the worst impacts.

Students who open a personal social media account earlier in adolescence appear to perform worse on later standardized tests, according to a study in Nature Human Behaviour based on 5,227 Italian students. The authors speculate that these differences may be attributable to excessive social media engagement and disruptions to students' attention.

Imagine trying to swallow a sip of water while your face feels stuffed with congestion, your sense of taste is dulled and your body is floating 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

A microscopic predator may offer a new way to protect some of the Caribbean's most endangered corals. Georgia Tech researchers found that tiny predatory bacteria can halt the spread of a destructive coral disease by hunting and consuming pathogens responsible for the infection.

The interaction between X-rays and matter can be actively controlled, according to an international research team led by the University of Hamburg and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory that has succeeded in producing bright X-ray images with significantly less damage. In an article published in Nature Communications, the researchers report using ultrafast pulses that partially reverse the damage they generate.

In southeastern Madagascar, patches of forest that were once cut down to make way for farms are slowly regenerating naturally after being left to lie fallow. But recovering a native forest needs more than just gaining tree cover. The animals that once lived in these forests also need to make their way back so that the forest can function the way it used to.

A highly contagious herpes virus causes Marek's disease, a deadly illness that mainly infects chickens. While it does not make people sick, the virus causes tumors and paralysis in chickens and, if unchecked, can spread rapidly through entire flocks.

Scientific reports, political directives and national plans follow one after another, urging regions to adapt to new climate realities. Yet one question remains: How do adaptation initiatives among local communities and businesses actually unfold on the ground? While announcements of public or government-backed projects or regulatory frameworks often take center stage, other, far more discreet grassroots forms of action or reorganization are at work, which can be grouped under the term "silent adaptation."

If you build a house in the United States today, there's a good chance you'll be living under the dictates of a neighborhood homeowners association—roughly two out of every three new homes are in an HOA, as are a third of existing homes.

While Earth's core consists mostly of iron, its density implies that lighter elements are also mixed in. Because hydrogen is abundant in the universe and can mix with iron under certain conditions, scientists suspect it makes up part of the lighter-element composition. Data from earthquakes suggest the inner part of the core also changes with depth, but scientists aren't sure exactly how this occurs. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that hydrogen likely exists in a gradient within the inner and outer core that arises from thermodynamic equilibrium.

We often speak of loving things like a cozy sweater or new camera. But this talk is not generally taken literally. It's a kind of emotional shorthand. We use it to express our fondness for precious objects.

New research reveals that cells of the same chronological age can follow dramatically different biological aging paths, offering new insights into cancer, neurodegeneration and the fundamental biology of aging. Rather than aging uniformly, tissues become a mosaic of biologically younger and older cells, with some individual cells aging much faster than others—a discovery that could reshape how scientists understand aging and the earliest origins of age-related disease.

Earth's oceans repeatedly lost oxygen and produced metal deposits during the planet's deepest ice ages. An international team of researchers analyzed manganese and other chemical signatures preserved in more than 27,000 ancient seafloor samples collected from six continents.

Low river discharge reduces the likelihood of young Atlantic salmon reaching the North Sea. Fewer salmon reach the Haringvliet sluices, and their passage takes longer, making them more likely to fall prey to predators. Using so-called predation tags, researchers were able to demonstrate for the first time that this predation occurs largely before the Haringvliet sluices and is probably mainly caused by predatory fish. The results provide leads for improving the management of the Haringvliet sluices.

People often talk about "getting out into nature" as if all green spaces offer the same experience.

At first glance, it looks exactly like a seahorse. It has the same horse-shaped head tilted down from the body, the same curled, grasping tail and, in the males, a fully enclosed pouch for brooding the young.

For decades, scientists have asserted that the leakage of warm, salty Indian Ocean water south of South Africa into the Atlantic is a major contributor to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a component of the global ocean conveyor system.

Risso's dolphins around the British Isles are part of a single population—genetically distinct from those elsewhere in the Atlantic, new research shows. Scientists studied the DNA of dolphins that stranded in England, Scotland and Wales from 1992 to 2016.

There's something almost comic about the modern British summer ritual: As soon as the mercury climbs, we head to the nearest park, sit cross-legged on scorched grass and hunch over a flimsy foil tray to sear sausages over an open flame.

An international team of scientists has described seven new species of Madagascar's elusive diamond frogs (Rhombophryne), revealing that one of the island's most mysterious groups of amphibians is even more diverse than previously thought. The research is published in the journal Vertebrate Zoology.

Butterflies are charismatic, colorful and cherished around the world. One of the most diverse groups of insects, with more than 19,000 described species, they inspire international organizations such as the North American Butterfly Association and the Xerces Society, as well as countless websites devoted to their identification, monitoring and natural history.

For male humpback whales, singing is serious business. Their haunting, complex songs can last for hours and travel for miles underwater, playing a central role in reproduction during the winter breeding season. But despite decades of research into what these songs sound like, scientists have had far less insight into what the whales are physically doing while they sing.