Science
Scientific discoveries and research
Bringing rice back to Hawaiʻi: Japanese cultivars yield high-quality grains in just three months
In a major step toward enhancing food security and exploring the potential to bring rice farming back to Hawaiʻi, an international research team has successfull...
Modeling reveals Sydney's 1789 smallpox outbreak killed as many as 220,000 indigenous Australians
Groundbreaking modeling has revealed that as many as 220,000 Indigenous Australians died in a devastating 1789 smallpox outbreak that originated in Sydney, trac...
A new net-membrane could clean up some tricky space debris
We've reported on all kinds of wacky ideas for capturing and deorbiting space debris safely. From electric tethers to lasers, engineers and scientists have been...
Atomic 'domino effect' found to drive phase changes in a two-dimensional crystal
Phase transformations—in which a material changes from one crystal structure to another, thereby acquiring dramatically different properties—are ubiquitous in n...
Engineers discover 'unexpected motion' in drug-delivery robots
One day, tiny swimming robots may travel through the human body to deliver drugs. The medication would target only areas of need—chemotherapy drugs for a tumor,...
Fighting the world's deadliest infection with PAC-MAN and AI
Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is the world's deadliest single-agent infection, responsible for 1.23 million deaths in...
The square kilometer array will revolutionize the hunt for alien life
With new technologies come new opportunities. And that is especially true in astronomy—with every new advanced telescope, we have the potential to see (or in so...
Record fireworks display choked Washington in toxic smoke
The U.S. capital, Washington, saw its worst air quality of the year over the July 4 weekend, as smoke from a massive fireworks display sent pollution soaring to...
Electrical imbalances at grain boundaries help explain solid-state battery failure
Next-generation batteries that use new electrolyte materials could achieve far higher energy density than today's lithium-ion batteries, without many of the saf...
Preparing birds for life in the wild: New technique boosts survival after release
Every year, thousands of parrots confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade arrive at rehabilitation centers across Latin America. For many of these birds, res...
Survival comes at a price: Frog study links salt adaptation to increased risk of disease
Over generations, a small North American frog has learned how to survive in a world that's getting increasingly saltier. But new research from the University of...
Detecting neutron sources by borrowing inference tools from cosmology
Neutron sources can be directly identified from measured spectra rather than proxies using inference tools adapted from cosmology, according to a University of...