Assessment of four heritage sites in Tanzania finds that all are under threat from the institutions meant to steward them, prioritizing income from tourism over the sites' preservation and refusing to engage with community protection initiatives.

There's no sign that methane emissions are declining globally.

NASA-supported scientists have provided new information about how the early Earth may have acquired some elements necessary for the planet to become habitable. They also suggest a new role for Jupiter in the distribution of these elements throughout the young solar system. The study, published in Science Advances, examines this history by looking at the ratio of phosphorus to nitrogen in iron meteorites and in younger objects known as chondrites.

An international team of scientists has discovered that plants are not responding to global warming in the way researchers long assumed. Scientists have expected that ecosystems would keep pace with warming by rising the temperature at which photosynthesis works best.

Globally, agriculture faces mounting pressures. These are driven by climate change, land degradation, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions and the demand for food from a growing population.

Scientists at the SETI Institute recently searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our solar system. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. The paper is published in The Astronomical Journal.

El Niño is a recurring climate event with impacts across the globe. It has three phases: one cold (known as La Niña), one neutral, and one warm (El Niño).

The arrival of winter marks not only a change in weather, temperature, and day length, but also a change in our activity and behavior. The social outdoor events and trips to the beach over summer soon become a distant memory, and we ready ourselves for more solitary evenings indoors with a hot drink and a good book. Things slow down.

Off the southern coast of Japan, the Philippine Sea Plate lies underneath the Japanese mainland. The locked tectonic plates threaten to unleash a catastrophic megathrust earthquake, likely within the next few decades. Given the potential devastation a large quake could evoke, constant developments in predictive technology must be sought. However, predicting the unpredictable movement of the seafloor requires innovative thought.

A defendant stands in the dock. An expert describes them as a "psychopath." In an instant, one word threatens to eclipse their history, circumstances and the crime itself.

Diminutive warty birch caterpillars (Falcaria bilineata), less than 1.5mm long, ardently defend their leaf tip homes from invading caterpillars by scraping and pounding the leaf to warn off potential invaders. But how might the day-old caterpillars defend themselves when voracious ladybeetles (known as ladybugs in the US) are on the prowl?

Though decaf fans might disagree, caffeine is a critical component of a cup of joe. This compound is incredibly bitter on its own, but regular coffee itself is not. A team reporting in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has investigated why and explains that the answer may lie within interactions between caffeine and other coffee molecules called melanoidins that are produced during the roasting process.

For more than 30 years, manufacturers of ski and snowboard waxes have used PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—to make skis and snowboards glide faster over snow. These synthetic chemicals were highly effective and common in competitive racing just about everywhere.

Potent drugs like chemotherapy can be life-saving, but often with life-threatening side effects. Notably, they can be indiscriminate, killing both cancer cells and healthy cells in one swoop. Increasing a drug's on-target efficiency can reduce side effects and enable healthier outcomes for patients.

When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimizing the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are complex and depend on many factors: the force of the exhalation, the morphology of the respiratory system, the characteristics of the space, etc. Now, a new study led by researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has shown that temperature also plays an important role.

Summer brings with it the sight of surfers moving seamlessly across wave crests, with ocean waters carrying them along coastlines. A team of scientists has now created a similar phenomenon—with small objects rather than surfers—that can be controlled by humans rather than by nature.

UCF College of Medicine Assistant Professor Renee Fleeman continues to refine a powerful therapy for drug-resistant bacteria that pierces the gooey coating that anchors and protects such germs from the drugs we take to kill them. Her research has found that an antimicrobial peptide naturally found in cows weakens the biofilm defenses of Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria and destroys it.

Nanodiamonds are tiny diamond particles only a few nanometers in size. Because they are chemically highly stable and can host so-called color centers, optically active defects in the crystal lattice, they are considered promising materials for quantum technologies, sensing and biomedical research. Until now, however, it has been difficult to reliably produce nanodiamonds with uniform size, high purity and precisely integrated optical properties.

Researchers at IMDEA Materials Institute have developed a new hybrid methodology that combines quantum mechanics and thermodynamic calculations to predict the phase diagram of nickel-cobalt alloys.

The weather on Earth can get pretty messy sometimes. But in space, it can be wild, and the effects can be far-reaching. Solar flares, giant explosions on the sun, can send out streams of energy that block radio communications and fry satellite electronics. Geomagnetic storms, caused by variations in solar wind, can mess with GPS signals and spark current surges on Earth that overload power grids.