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Researchers have developed a DNA vacuum that can suck genetic traces from animals out of the air and reveal which animals live in an area. In two new studies, the researchers collected air samples in three natural areas in Denmark and showed that the method can be used to map local wildlife. This brings them a major step closer to better monitoring biodiversity using DNA from the air.

As the construction of a hydroelectric dam loomed, archaeologists raced to uncover Angola's earliest dated burials and its only known cremation at a 15th-century settlement before it vanished beneath the water.

What dangers does smoke from wildfires pose? Who is most at risk? Here are some answers to health questions often asked, especially now with fires in France and Spain.

The laws of thermodynamics state that heat naturally flows from hotter systems or regions to colder systems or regions until a state of thermal equilibrium is reached. This simple principle underpins the operation of numerous technologies, ranging from refrigerators to power plants.

Thousands crowded into emergency shelters in France and Spain on Sunday after wildfires drove more than 300,000 people to flee their homes and vacation accommodations.

Scottish firefighters fought a wildfire Saturday that was burning through Cairngorms National Park in the north, with authorities advising residents to evacuate.

In nature, the rarest ingredient can be the one that holds everything together. In a new article published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Dr. Erika C. Freeman of the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin argues that a handful of scarce molecules can shape entire living communities, far out of proportion to how little is present. These are what ecologists call "keystone molecules."

In the words of a former Antarctic tour guide we interviewed: "You'd see massive glacier calvings, and you'd just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you'd be like … 'can you not put two and two together?'"

When Amy posts a photograph of herself on Instagram, she knows what will attract attention. A picture of her in a bikini may receive thousands of views. A post explaining the realities of living with a stoma (an opening in her abdomen that directs waste to a bag attached to it) may reach far fewer people.

A Taiwan–led study of Mandarin-speaking learners shows that the sounds we hear and produce are deeply shaped by our prior language experience, offering new insights into how humans learn and use language.

Swidden agriculture—often called "slash-and-burn"—has been practiced on every inhabited continent throughout human history, and for decades it has been blamed for the destruction of the world's rainforests. However, a new study of more than 18,000 forest patches around the world found that the environmental impact of swidden is more nuanced and less destructive than the term "slash-and-burn" suggests—and that unwritten social rules in small societies, not government oversight, often regulate lan

When an adult refuses to let an injustice pass—stands up to a bully or asserts their rights—we call it principle. When a 15-year-old retaliates to an insult thrown in a school corridor, risking detention, we call it a failure to think ahead. It's easy to ascribe this to a not-yet-developed teenage brain: a convenient shorthand for assuming they simply cannot weigh consequences properly.

By analyzing the data from NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, Chinese astronomers have investigated a recently identified millisecond pulsar known as PSR J0435+3233. As a result, they found that the pulsar exhibits gamma-ray pulsations. The discovery was detailed in a paper published July 17 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Dozens of archaeological sites were destroyed by looting during Syria's civil war, which began in 2011 and lasted until 2024. Because the last comprehensive analysis was published in 2017, the extent of more recent damage to cultural heritage sites since 2016—including at UNESCO World Heritage sites such as Palmyra, long-running archaeological excavations like Mari, and the ancient Roman city of Apamea, known for its Great Colonnade—has been largely unknown.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus)—the world's biggest fish—are one of the most charismatic marine species. They connect with the hearts of anyone lucky enough to encounter them, making people deeply curious about their lives and invested in their conservation.

People who receive information on social media play a greater role in the spread of misinformation than research has acknowledged, according to research published in the International Journal of Enterprise Network Management. The researchers argue that efforts to tackle "fake news" should focus as much on why users share false information as on identifying those who create misleading content.

Authorities have evacuated more than 340,000 people and suspended work and rail services as Typhoon Noul approaches southern China, with flight cancellations announced in Hong Kong.

Many molecules exist in two mirror-image forms—like left and right hands—that look identical but can behave very differently, especially in biological systems and pharmaceuticals. Distinguishing between these enantiomers (also called chiral molecules) is a longstanding challenge in science and technology. A useful analogy is that of a screw and a nut: A right-handed screw fits only into a right-handed thread, while a left-handed one will not engage properly.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Saturday firefighters were working to "save lives" in the blazes raging west of Madrid, as authorities said a separate fire in the east killed one person.

SpaceX's mammoth Starship rocket blasted off Friday on another test flight stretching halfway around the world, this time releasing 20 of the most advanced Starlinks.

All cells in the human body—and the motions they enable, from our beating hearts to our wiggling toes—use energy generated by a molecule called ATP. Its energy is thought to be released to fuel cellular processes in only one way: when ATP's decomposition is initiated by an enzyme, a specific type of protein.

Historians and archaeologists know that maize was a central food source and cultural symbol across the ancient Maya world, but much of what is known has come from studies focused on large Maya cities and elite burials.

Northern Eurasia contains about 20% of the world's forests and plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change by absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, thereby acting as a major carbon sink. However, understanding the region's carbon sink is challenging because it is influenced by multiple interacting factors, including rapid climate change, wildfires, land-use change and limited observational coverage across its vast extent.

Imagine holding one of our most precise quantum devices at a fixed position outside a black hole. A Josephson junction—two superconductors separated by an ultrathin barrier—can turn a voltage into a quantum oscillation with extraordinary precision. Would intense gravity change that quantum rule, or only change how a faraway observer reads the device?

Chinese astronomers report the detection of a peculiar optical transient event that occurred in the center of a dwarf galaxy. The newly discovered event, designated AT2019ijn, is a fast-rising, slow-decaying blue optical transient with exceptionally bright radio emission. The finding was detailed in a paper published July 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Ecologists have long understood that biodiversity is paramount to ecosystem stability. Until now, however, most ecological research has focused on a single layer of ecological life at a time—for example, plant or animal communities. In reality, ecological systems have multiple layers that interact continuously. Plants are eaten by herbivores, herbivores are eaten by predators, and fluctuations at one trophic level, or an organism's specific position in the food chain, can ripple through the enti

Modern research on secondary metabolites from microbes, plants and marine organisms has revealed a remarkable diversity of chemical structures and bioactivities with broad applications in biotechnology, agriculture and medicine. Most natural products are composed of primary biogenic elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.

One of Europe's highest distinctions in condensed matter physics has been awarded for a discovery that is reshaping our understanding of magnetism: The 2026 Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society (EPS) Condensed Matter Division goes to Professor Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Dr. Libor Šmejkal and Professor Tomas Jungwirth for their discovery of altermagnetism—a previously unknown fundamental class of magnetism.

The northern highlands of Ethiopia are among Africa's oldest agricultural landscapes. Some of the world's most important crops originated here, particularly pulses and grains, including teff. Yet another crop has a less well-known history in Ethiopia's Tigray region: the grapevine.

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) are playing a key role in the summer exhibition wONDERLAND at the Yper Museum. Thanks to interdisciplinary research on more than 1,000 excavated skeletons, they have succeeded in giving the anonymous medieval city dweller a face and a voice once again after centuries.

The fossilized spines of saber-toothed cats in the La Brea Tar Pits reveal evidence of an unexpectedly high prevalence of rare spinal nerve tumors, suggesting that the species became inbred just before extinction. These tumors, which cause significant pain and reduced limb function, could have made the cats particularly vulnerable to the lure of prey animals stuck in the tar pits.

Firefighters battled massive blazes tearing through forests across France and Spain on Monday, as authorities warned of a fresh heat wave set to engulf the scorched French wine-growing region around the major city of Bordeaux.

On a boat off the coast of California, Sara Lesser gazes wistfully at dozens of dolphins playing in the vessel's wake. This summer, extreme heat is making such a scene increasingly rare.

Museums, libraries, archives and heritage organizations face a difficult problem: Many of the objects they preserve are made from materials that naturally deteriorate.

The gigantic wildfire ravaging southwestern France has created an extremely dangerous "pyrocumulonimbus"—a phenomenon never before seen in the country—the spokesman for the country's National Firefighters Federation of France (FNSPF) told AFP.

A U.S.-Russian space crew landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Sunday after an eight-month stint on the International Space Station.

Jessica Metcalf's work stinks. Literally. But the Colorado State University professor's research may be key to protecting livestock and wildlife from a flesh-eating parasite.

A virtual reality (VR) platform has given researchers new insights into how artificial light at night alters the way coral reef fish respond to predators. The study brings together, for the first time, the metabolic expertise of the University of Glasgow with an innovative immersive virtual reality (VR) platform designed at the Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone and implemented at CRIOBE (Center de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement).

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.

A new study has found that mass shootings and deaths by suicide in the United States share seasonal patterns, reaching their highest levels during summer months. Analyzing national data spanning 2014–2021, researchers observed consistent summertime peaks in both mass shootings and suicide deaths, suggesting that common environmental, behavioral or biological factors may contribute to seasonal fluctuations in these forms of violence.

The need for a national deer management strategy to manage the decline of native forests is highlighted in a new research paper published today in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology. Led by Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) Emeritus Professor David Norton, the paper, "Deer in the headlights: sleepwalking our way to a native forest catastrophe," warns of a slowly developing crisis that is often hard to see.

One of the challenges of searching for technosignatures (i.e., signs that intelligent life somewhere in the universe has created technology) is understanding what to look for. Technology is a very broad area, and different types would show up as different features. One of the most commonly cited is a Dyson sphere, which attempts to encapsulate a star and capture its outgoing light to produce energy. But while we've looked for the mid-infrared waste heat these structures would produce for decades

A new study published in Nature Physics reports the first direct experimental evidence of a Floquet topological state, a novel light-induced phase of matter that, until now, has existed only on paper and in simulations. Topological insulators can conduct electricity along their surface while remaining insulating throughout their bulk. Physicists have spent years developing Floquet engineering, a technique that uses intense, rapidly oscillating light fields to temporarily reshape a material's ele

There are countless cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing they all have in common is that death is a part of everybody's life. Examining how different societies commemorate their dead can give archaeologists and anthropologists insight into how those societies work and what matters to them.

Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far primarily meant focusing on one particular type of signal—and that signal has normally been based on our own current cutting-edge technology. But what if that's the wrong way to look for signs of alien intelligence? What if a resource-conscious civilization decided it was too complicated to send femtosecond lasers in high-energy bursts across the universe? A new paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, from researchers Dániel Apai, Chia-Lung

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein's theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo B

The rapid growth of sustainable finance in recent years has fueled interest in green investment, ranging from green bonds and environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds to energy-efficient cryptocurrencies. While these assets are often grouped under the broader umbrella of green finance, their interaction during periods of market stress remains largely unexplored.

Animals are constantly moving to find food, water, suitable habitats, mates and safe places to rest. Because moving requires substantial energy, animals often rely on various biological and behavioral strategies to reduce unnecessary costs while seeking available resources.

In the increasingly polarized political realm, moderates may be viewed as disloyal by both conservatives and liberals when the opposing side seems threatening, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The way to make a plant grow more may be to take something away. Trimming a section off a plant gene raised rice harvests by up to 25% in new tests by University of Chicago scientists. The plants also showed a better tolerance for drought and heat.