Through joint research with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Tokyo, NIMS for the first time experimentally demonstrated friction completely independent of sliding velocity—an ideal that had never been realized—by heating mica, a layered oxide also used as a lubricant material, to 200°C (392°F). NIMS also clarified that this is caused by the disappearance of defects within crystals at high temperatures.
At just an inch (2.5 centimeters) long, the sand hoppers skipping across California's Isla Vista Beach at dawn don't exactly look like a force of nature. But a new study reveals that these shrimp-like creatures might be doing more to shape the landscape in which they live than any other animal on Earth.
A 178-year-old mystery surrounding one of the earliest recorded examples of space weather affecting technology has been solved by an international team led by Lancaster University.
Across its basins and thousands of meters down, the Mediterranean Sea is getting warmer and saltier. Now, a new study finds it is also doing so at an increasingly rapid pace. The speedup is largest in the central and eastern Mediterranean and strongest of all in the Adriatic, where it reaches all the way to the sea floor.
Dwarf galaxies—with a mass equal to about a billion suns, but often considerably less—are the most abundant in the universe. However, because of their low luminosity, they are very difficult to detect. They have mostly been discovered in the vicinity of the Milky Way, in what is called the Local Group, but also, and in large quantities, at greater distances, where current instrumentation cannot distinguish individual stars.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have measured the most powerful gas outflow ever recorded from a "dead" galaxy outside our cosmic neighborhood and found that even outflows this extreme may not be enough to permanently shut down star formation.
"Sediment and fossil records are a major pillar of our understanding of how the climate works—but climate scientists have gotten something wrong about Australia's ice age," says Dr. Alex F. Wall, lead author of a new research paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Humpback whale mothers may experience grief when their calves die, a rare research observation led by Griffith University and Sea World Foundation has found.
The mammalian gut microbiome teems with a delicate balance of bacteria and the viruses that keep them in check, called bacteriophages, or phages. Each bacterial species usually has its own set of phage partners.
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, foams and gels often display complex and unusual behaviors compared with ordinary solids or liquids. From a mechanical point of view, for instance, they can resist deformation like solids, but they can also start to flow like liquids when a sufficiently strong external drive is applied. This transition from solid-like to liquid-like behavior, known as "yielding," is central to the physics of soft amorphous materials and to many industrial and biological processes.
Astronomers have confirmed that one of the fastest-changing stars ever observed has entered a new stage of its evolution, offering a rare opportunity to watch a star's life unfold on human timescales.
The longest satellite record ever assembled shows that Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice since the 1970s, raising global sea level by more than 3 centimeters (1.2 inches)—and that most of the loss has come from glaciers flowing faster into the ocean, not from melting at the surface.
Laser scanning, often referred to as lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopies, rapidly providing high-resolution scans of the landscape below. This growing observational power is central to the scientific value of remote sensing technologies but also brings into focus the conditions, interests and power structures under which they are used.
SpaceX announced Tuesday that it was planning to send its flagship rocket, Starship, into orbit, a key step in its project to one day reach the moon or Mars.
Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn't look like the rocks she'd been studying caught her eye. It turned out to be the fossilized tooth of a Pacific mastodon.
Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a way to unravel changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, SIMP 0136, previously linked to northern lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.
Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed "David Greybeard" break off a twig to fashion a fishing rod for termites, researchers following in her footsteps have found that adult chimpanzees in Senegal literally hand youngsters the tools for learning.
Heat stress is a leading cause of weather-related deaths and can be especially dangerous in cities, where phenomena like urban heat islands drive temperatures higher than in surrounding rural areas. Now, a new dataset developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) aims to provide city governments and health officials with information that could minimize heat impacts on residents.
A new prehistoric animal species from Tanzania dating to around 240 million years ago, during the Triassic period, has been described by an international team of researchers. Led by the University of Bristol, the new species, named Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, could help scientists refine the age of one of the world's most significant fossil sites and reshape the timeline of early dinosaur evolution.
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