Science & Technology

Researchers say social distancing contributed to a decline in drinking among first-year college students. But the downward trend could change with the return to campus.

Thousands of COVID-19 cases and deaths in California, Oregon, and Washington between March and December 2020 may be attributable to increases in fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) from wildfire smoke, according to a new study.

Researchers have uncovered hidden potential in metasurfaces and demonstrated optical devices that manipulate light’s polarization state with an unprecedented degree of control. The research demonstrates a new way to control polarized light with metasur…

Some types of RNA viruses cloak themselves to hide inside a cell and create copies of themselves. But an enzyme that acts as a virus sensor might be attuned to their whereabouts. A slight variation in their genomic code gives some people’s cells the ca…

July 2021 was the world’s hottest month ever recorded, according to new global data released by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

A new study suggests that crop insurance serves as a disincentive for farmers to adopt climate change mitigation measures on their croplands.

A decades-old problem about how to reliably control millions of qubits in a silicon quantum computer chip has now been solved.

A new study shows that between 2013 and 2018, as many U.S. states were legalizing recreational marijuana, cancer patients continued to abstain in large numbers.

Artificial nest experiments demonstrated that the raccoon dog, an alien species abundant in Finland, is a more common duck nest predator than any indigenous mammalian species. The species depredated nests on shorelines as well as in forests, rural land…

Research reveals that a tree’s carbohydrate reserves are crucial to surviving an onslaught of hungry caterpillars.

Researchers took a middling monomer and, by using a special catalyst, they created a tougher polymer that can form long chains. The polymer can then be easily depolymerized back to the monomer state with an acid catalyst, resulting in a chemically recy…

Researchers have characterized how the essential mRNA poly(A) tails are synthesized in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The study reveals several mechanisms controlling poly(A) tail lengths and hereby ensuring the robustness of gene expressi…

New research shows how bacteria can overcome starvation situations and survive for an extended period, which has broader implications for chronic infections.

The production of the Alzheimer’s-associated, toxic protein amyloid beta in the brain is tightly regulated by cholesterol in the cell membrane, advanced imaging reveals.

Researchers have discovered why boiling droplets can race across hot oily surfaces. The commonplace phenomenon, now quantified for the first time, could be harnessed for many useful applications.

Robots that need to use their arms to make their way across treacherous terrain just got a speed upgrade with a new path planning approach. The improved algorithm path planning algorithm found successful paths three times as often as standard algorithm…

Getting a full understanding of how genes are regulated is a major goal of scientists worldwide. Now, researchers have developed a technique that can map out nearly all of the likely regulatory switches across a genome.

A new study identifies two ways in which APOBEC3A — a vital enzyme that is responsible for genetic changes resulting in a variety of cancers while protecting our cells against viral infection — is controlled.

A new study exposes the dire need for new clinical risk management tools to help hospital healthcare workers prevent the deaths and intensive care admissions of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) COVID-19 patients with pneumonia, say researchers.

A new study describes a significant step toward improving photosynthesis and increasing yields by putting elements from cyanobacteria into crop plants.