Science, engineering, and discovery — the research and breakthroughs that matter.

The globe is full of unknown species. But is it really possible to find a completely new animal species in the middle of the largest city in the United States?

Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet somehow, the proteins in deep-sea creatures remain functional. This raises an intriguing question: how?

Imagine this. You pick up a contact lens from its container and—yikes!—it falls on the bathroom floor. Before you know it, your cat pounces, claws out. By the time you wrestle it back, the lens looks like a tiny chew toy. And then, just like that—the scratches fade away and the r

The historic droughts of 2023 and 2024 in the Amazon reduced river flows and altered the region's rainfall composition. Daily monitoring in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, revealed these changes through the use of isotopes, which act as a kind of water "fi

An entomologist at the University of Missouri has discovered two saucer bug species previously unknown to science, adding to our understanding of Earth's biodiversity.

Light in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum plays a key role in modern sensing. Because molecules interact with this kind of light in specific ways, researchers use technologies like mid-IR spectroscopy to identify biological materials, drugs and po

A University of the Basque Country-EHU research group has determined the causes of a 255 m (837 feet) crustal uplift of the Atlantic slope and a 167 m (548 feet) uplift of the Mediterranean slope, as well as the development of rivers in these areas.

Tiny manufacturing imperfections in optical components normally go unnoticed. Yet they can alter light in surprisingly significant ways. An international research team led by TU Darmstadt has shown that such imperfections can affect not only polarization—the direction in which li

Tiny flowers trapped in amber around 15 million years ago are offering scientists a rare glimpse into the plant life of a tropical rainforest in what is now Southeast China. Researchers have studied two exceptionally well-preserved fossil flowers from the Zhangpu flora.

The joint BepiColombo mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is settling into orbit around Mercury after an eight-year journey. In early September, BepiColombo's two orbiters, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magn

Europe's climate monitor said Thursday that August was the hottest month ever recorded worldwide and warned of worse to come as an unprecedented El Niño pattern grows stronger.

As cost-of-living pressures increase and the rental crisis worsens, many families are moving more often.

Indonesian authorities are working to repatriate five baby orangutans allegedly trafficked to India, where they were found motherless in a forest, Jakarta's forestry ministry told AFP on Friday.

A revolution in forecasting natural disasters is underway, say researchers in Switzerland who are training AI models using vast troves of NASA climate data to produce potentially lifesaving data at lightning speed.

The southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is known as the Copperbelt because of its rich deposits of copper and other minerals.

London has one of the lowest violent crime rates of any region in England and Wales, tops a global ranking of the best cities, and pays more in taxes than it receives back in public spending—but the public overestimates how likely Londoners are to become victims of crime, underes

Give, eat, cook and serve are everyday English words. On TikTok, they're doing something different.

Money market funds (MMFs) that grow rapidly when equity markets are soaring pose a systemic risk to global financial systems, new academic research reveals.

The globe is full of unknown species. But is it really possible to find a completely new animal species in the middle of the largest city in the United States?

For decades, scientists have understood proteins primarily through two defining features: their amino acid sequence and their three-dimensional structure. This framework has driven major advances in biology, biotechnology and medicine, culminating in recent artificial intelligenc

Switching to a more sustainable diet could halve food-related emissions in cities such as Amsterdam, while in cities such as Dhaka and Delhi, the focus should be more on making food production more sustainable as they widen food access. A new database by Leiden researchers shows

The Hammerschmiede clay pit near Pforzen in the eastern Allgäu is famous for its wealth of finds: Besides fossils of two early anthropoid apes, the remains of numerous vertebrate species have been uncovered in 11.6-million-year-old river sediments—but until now, very few birds.

To be or not to be a gentle parent? That is the question. There is so much controversy these days about gentle parenting. What is it, and what is it not?

To monitor the amount and type of nuclear material at power plants and weapons facilities, scientists look for a special signal—the unique pattern of gamma rays emitted by specific radioactive elements. However, some of these elements also emit X-rays in the same energy range as