Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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NASA is developing a new family of flexible heat-shield systems with a woven carbon-fiber base material, and is using X-rays at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source to test the designs.

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We all do it; we all need it – humans and animals alike. Neuroscientists have been studying Mexican cavefish to provide insight into the evolutionary mechanisms regulating sleep loss and the relationship between sensory processing and sleep.

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Sound travels more slowly than light. Then why do sounds of meteors entering earth's atmosphere precede or accompany the sight of them? Sandia researchers believe they have an answer.

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Abnormal conditions in the northeast Pacific Ocean, nicknamed “the blob,” put ozone levels in June 2015 higher than normal over a large swath of the Western U.S.

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A collaborative study involving Brookhaven, MIT, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro suggests the gas cloud from which our solar system formed lasted about 4 million years.

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The creature has a considerably shorter and stronger neck with larger muscles than the long graceful necks of others in its species.

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James Cook University scientists have helped discover the remnants of a massive undersea landslide on the Great Barrier Reef.

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A compound extracted from a deep-water marine sponge collected near the Bahamas is showing potent antibacterial activity against the drug resistant bacteria methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) also called the “super bug.”

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A new study probes the origins of carnivory in several distantly related plants — including the Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants, which appear strikingly similar to the human (or insect) eye.

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Previous studies have linked the chemicals to kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children, among other health issues.

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China’s rapid ascent to global economic superpower is taking a toll on some of its ancient ways. For millennia, people have patterned their lives and diets around the vast fisheries of the East China Sea, but now those waters are increasingly threatened by human-caused, harmful algal blooms that choke off vital fish populations.

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The White Mountain National Forest is home to nearly 140 species of native bees, including two species of native bumble bees that are in decline in the Northeast, according to researchers with the University of New Hampshire who recently completed the first assessment of the state’s native bee population in the national forest.

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Research scientists at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) have been studying the genetics of great white and great hammerhead sharks, and their work brings us a few steps closer to understanding – from a genetic sense – why sharks exhibit some characteristics that are highly desirable by humans (specifically, rapid wound healing and possible higher resistance to cancers.)

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Where did the materials that make up the Earth and moon come from—and when did they arrive?

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Changes in the diets of the super-sized megafauna that ruled Australia during the last Ice Age indicate that climate change was a major factor in their extinction.

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The researchers found that insects engage in the largest continental migration on earth. Some 3.5 trillion insects in Southern Britain alone migrate each year – a biomass eight times that of bird migration.

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For decades, scientists have theorized that the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates is driven largely by negative buoyancy created as they cool. New research, however, shows plate dynamics are driven significantly by the additional force of heat drawn from the Earth’s core. The new findings also challenge the theory that underwater mountain ranges known as mid-ocean ridges are passive boundaries between moving plates. The findings show the East Pacific Rise, the Earth’s dominant mid-ocean ridge, is dynamic as heat is transferred.

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An international team of researchers conducted a comparative genomic analysis to gain insights into the genome structure and evolution of the diatom Fragillariopsis cylindrus, as well as its role in the Southern Ocean.

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Anthropologists at Université de Montréal have dated the oldest human settlement in Canada back 10,000 years.

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Fishing communities can survive ― and even thrive ― as fish abundance and market prices shift if they can catch a variety of species and nimbly move from one fishery to the next, a new University of Washington study finds.