For The Better

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…