Science & Technology

A litany of negative environmental pressures have had little to no effect on sand dollars and heart urchins in the Florida Keys, a new study shows. Scientists arrived at this unexpected conclusion after surveying 27 sites along a 20-mile stretch of coa…

Propofol is the most commonly used drug to induce general anesthesia. Despite its frequent clinical application, it is poorly understood how propofol causes anesthesia.

Incidence of myocarditis, pericarditis or myopericarditis is two- to threefold higher after a second dose of the Moderna Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine when compared to the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine; however, overall cases of heart inflammation with …

Yeast is not the simple single-celled microorganism we once thought, but a competitive killer. When starved of glucose, yeast releases a toxin that will poison other microorganisms that have entered its surrounding habitat, even its own clones. This ve…

Discovering a new species is always exciting, but so is finding one alive that everyone assumed had been lost to the passage of time. A small clam, previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at Naples Point, near Santa Barbara.

Computer simulations by Rice University scientists and their collaborators are the first to integrate a model of planet formation and evolution that explains two puzzling observations of exoplanets orbiting distant stars: the rarity of worlds about 1.8…

Using a combination of computational and robophysical modeling, as well as fluid dynamics experiments, the researchers were able to see for the first time the mechanics of springtail movement. They determined how springtails control their jump, self-ri…

COVID-19 patients placed on ventilators can take a long time to regain consciousness. New research is now illustrating that these delays may serve a purpose: protecting the brain from oxygen deprivation.

A new species of exciton with novel characteristics has been discovered in moiré crystal superlattice. Scientists have developed a pristine unit-cell matrix projection method that reduces computationally a million-fold without loss of accuracy. Superco…

The earliest morphological traces of life on Earth are often highly controversial, both because non-biological processes can produce relatively similar structures and because such fossils have often been subjected to advanced alteration and metamorphis…

A machine learning algorithm automatically extracts information to speed up — and extend — the study of materials with X-ray pulse pairs.

A new treatment may significantly enhance the efficacy of chemotherapy in breast cancer patients, reducing the risk for lung metastasis following chemo from 52% to only 6%. Conducted in an animal model, the study identified the mechanism that generates…

Researchers examined how rogue waves form and analyzed the likelihood that a ship would encounter them while navigating the rough waters of intense storms.

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another, produce the most devastating seismic, volcanic, and landslide hazards on the planet. A new report presents an ambitious plan to make major advances in understanding subduction zone haza…

Text messages sent automatically from patients’ primary care office after hospitalization were tied to decreased odds of needing further emergency care.

Motivation is affected by oxidative stress in the brain, a study shows. The findings also suggest motivation can be improved through nutritional interventions.

With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, people were plunged into a situation that required them to acquire information about an emerging scientific issue to assess the adequacy of government actions and programs of significant personal import to ea…

Researchers find that one type of tissue-resident memory cell fights reinfection better than another.

To find out how different aspects of music influence the body, researchers turned a live electronic music concert into a lab study. By introducing levels of bass over speakers that were too low to hear and monitoring the crowd’s movements, scientists f…

With the advance of quantum technologies, new microscopy modalities are becoming possible — ones that can see electric currents, detect fluctuating magnetic fields, and even see single molecules on a surface. A prototype of such a microscope, demonstr…