The planet's water cycle is becoming increasingly erratic, swinging between too little and too much, the United Nations warned Thursday, with an unprecedented El Niño expected to exacerbate the long-term trend.

Scientists have discovered a crater on the moon that's bigger than the Roman Colosseum and is the result of a powerful impact two years ago that initially went undetected.

Human-caused global warming thinned glaciers and thawed mountain permafrost, likely helping to destabilize the Himalayan slope that collapsed last month and unleashed catastrophic flooding across Nepal, according to a report released Thursday.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of how people learn, solve problems and construct knowledge. Yet whether AI strengthens human intelligence or encourages excessive dependence remains an open question.

For many, the Bayeux Tapestry conjures images of clinker-built ships, prancing horses, the Normans feasting on chicken on the eve of the Battle of Hastings, and the arrow in King Harold's eye that ended centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule.

When most Australians say 'spring is in the air,' they're speaking metaphorically, as the days become longer and warmer.

It's not so much where people live, but where they frequently spend their time, that can provide useful information for predicting community health measures. A team led by geographers in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences found that adding place visitation data—geographic data points collected from millions of anonymous cellphone users with GPS-enabled devices—to a population health model increased the model's predictive performance by an average of 7.5%.

Understanding the migration pathways of sharks and rays is key to conserving some of the world's most endangered marine species, according to new University of Queensland research.

A new report by the International Bar Association (IBA) has found a significant gap between the importance legal professionals attach to fundamental rule of law principles and their assessment of how effectively those principles are implemented in practice.

A study in Pollino National Park shows that large trees, complex canopies and deadwood diversity play a major role in shaping vascular plant communities, highlighting the ecological value of one of Italy's most remarkable old-growth forest landscapes.

Large-scale oyster reef restoration in the Chesapeake Bay is successfully creating three-dimensional habitats that support larger, more diverse fish communities, according to new research from scientists at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study, published in Ecosphere, provides compelling evidence that restoration efforts are shifting underwater ecosystems from communities dominated by small, transient schooling fish to those supporting larger, resident species.

Biofilms are complex microbial communities that adhere to a surface and encase themselves in a viscous matrix they produce. This structure protects bacteria from antibiotics and the immune system far more effectively than if they lived in a free-floating state, making biofilms one of the most common causes of hard-to-treat chronic infections—such as respiratory infections in people with cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic wounds, or infections associated with catheters and prosthetic devices. Added to this is the global rise in antibiotic resistance, which makes it increasingly urgent to have tools capable of predicting which treatment will work in each case.

When a material heats up, its electrical resistance often rises. The harder question is what, exactly, is getting in the way. The electrons carrying the current may be scattered by vibrations of the material's atomic lattice, known as phonons. They may also collide with one another. Frustratingly, a conventional temperature test warms the electrons and the lattice together, so the effects arrive tangled in the same resistance measurement.

Forty-four years ago, Nadrian Seeman published his groundbreaking ideas on using DNA as a structural material, expanding DNA's significance far beyond its role as a carrier of genetic information. Since then, the steadily growing field of DNA nanotechnology has seen numerous innovations. One was the DNA origami technique, which enables researchers to fold a single long strand of DNA into a desired 2D or 3D shape.

What factors influence students' decisions about whether they will continue to use ChatGPT for learning in the future? This was the question addressed by a new study from ELTE's Faculty of Informatics, which used an interpretable machine learning framework to identify the factors that most strongly influence the use of generative artificial intelligence in higher education.

A square peg doesn't fit a round hole. But what if the peg could change the shape of the hole? A newly developed drug molecule can do something surprisingly similar when binding to its target protein, according to a University at Buffalo-led study published Tuesday (Sept. 15) in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation—as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England's great survivors.

Rainwater connects the biogeochemical cycles of land and the atmosphere. It's effectively a chemical conveyor belt that delivers compounds to the ground during a process called wet deposition.

Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria, and found that it was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before being adapted into a burial site. The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.

The ocean's aphotic zone—the dark, high-pressure region below the surface, where sunlight cannot reach—is home to a vast wealth of microbial life. Yet scientists know relatively little about the genetic makeup, growth and function of many of these enigmatic organisms.