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A research team led by professor Yousung Jung from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University College of Engineering has developed a new catalyst design principle that suppresses the hydrogen evolution reaction, which interferes with ammonia production, while maintaining the nitrogen reduction reaction that produces ammonia.

The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.

University of Queensland research has shown microbes could give Australian-grown chocolate an edge in the global market. Working with growers in Far North Queensland, scientists found the cocoa fermentation process may have a bigger influence on the flavor of chocolate than the cocoa tree itself.

A cat-training program for children with developmental disabilities fostered healthy behaviors in children, strengthened relationships between children and their family cats and improved cats' social behavior, a new study published in the journal Animals has found.

East Africa's shrinking mountain glaciers on three peaks in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania will soon be no more. The 2025 State of the Climate in Africa report (page 13) estimates that the ice areas on Mount Kenya, the continent's second-highest peak, have shrunk 96% in the past 115 years. The ice cap will cease to exist in three to five years, says the report. Rainer Prinz, who studies climate-glacier relationships, explains the intricate processes behind the retreat and what the consequences will

Bull sharks have a slight preference for spending time with their relatives, new research shows.

Groundwater pumped to irrigate cannabis crops in California's Emerald Triangle can cause some streams that normally run year-round to dry up entirely during summer, say researchers from Simon Fraser University, the University of California, Berkeley and the United States Department of Agriculture.

A trove of recent articles bemoan the collapse in recreational reading among younger Americans, with COVID-related reading declines, artificial intelligence and social media often described as causes.

A study published in the Journal of Political Economy provides the first causal evidence that improving sleep can directly enhance academic performance.

People who experience greater hardship throughout their lives may become more susceptible to conspiracy theories when those experiences lead them to see the world as fundamentally unfair, according to new research.

Economics shapes many aspects of our daily lives, from the prices we pay to the policies governments adopt. Yet many of the ideas taught as universal principles of economics emerged from a narrow historical context and have rarely been examined through a decolonial lens.

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" turns organic web production into a superpower. In the 2026 film, Tom Holland's character, Peter Parker, begins producing webbing inside his body and shooting it from his wrists, rather than firing synthetic web fluid from the wrist-mounted mechanical web-shooters he used in earlier films. The switch transforms a familiar superhero technology into a biological ability and highlights the spectacular properties of real spider silk.

A research team led by Professor Dong-Yeun Koh of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, in collaboration with Professor T. Alan Hatton's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), developed an electrochemical dissolved ocean carbon removal (e-DOC) technology that converts carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater into calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), a stable mineral form that enables virtually permanent carbon storage.

The value of basic science in insect biology is no more evident than when a crisis arises involving a devastating insect pest like the New World screwworm, says University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum. In a 2016 essay in the journal Science, Berenbaum wrote about the successful—if temporary—eradication of the pest in many parts of the world. Here she answers common questions about the screwworm's return.

One of the most famous and intriguing results of quantum mechanics is the finding that fundamental particles, such as electrons, cannot be pinned down to one single location. Instead, a particle is described by its "wavefunction," which allows researchers to derive probability distributions—a sort of mathematical map that shows the possibilities—of fundamental properties such as its position and momentum. In particular, the electron wavefunctions within a molecule, known as "molecular orbitals,"

Nearly two centuries of maize-based agriculture in the U.S. Midwest has halved soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks compared with tallgrass prairies native to the region. Replacing annual maize/soy cropping with perennial bioenergy grasses may partially reverse these resulting SOC deficits.

The last time you had a cold sore, you might have fretted about how long it would hang around. Perhaps you avoided reflective surfaces. It's unlikely you worried about dying from it.

The power of social influence could be key to changing attitudes and behaviors around climate change, according to a new study by researchers at the Center for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). The team examined the role of social influence in accelerating climate action, outlining how celebrities, athletes, health care workers, religious leaders, hairdressers, small business owners, family, friends, neighbors and colleagues all have the ability to influence climate action.

Vegetable oils serve as critical feedstocks for biofuels and bioproducts by providing energy-dense hydrocarbon molecules. Some plants have evolved divergent enzyme sets to produce high-value unusual fatty acids with novel chain lengths or functional groups.

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are often described as a "fifth state of matter": a quantum state in which many particles lose their individual identities and behave as one collective object. For more than 60 years, researchers have sought to create such condensates from excitons—electron-hole pairs—as a solid-state route to macroscopic quantum coherence, which is useful for quantum technologies. This has been difficult to realize in controllable semiconductor devices because optically generate

Wildfires are burning in North America and Europe. Deadly heat waves have parked over cities and the world's oceans are the hottest ever recorded for this time of year. A strengthening El Niño is forecast to be off-the-charts, spiking global temperatures and warping weather all over.

Wastewater treatment is a critical issue for global environmental protection and public health. Researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have recently achieved a major breakthrough with the discovery of a novel oxidant-free electrocatalytic mechanism, opening a new direction for water purification technologies. The findings are set to significantly improve pollutant identification efficiency and potentially double the economic feasibility compared with existing

Seed dispersal through wind, water or animals is a crucial process for forest renewal and biodiversity preservation. In the Atlantic Forest, a new study showed that the amount of forest in the landscape surrounding an area and the amount of rain are the main factors responsible for ensuring seed richness and diversity. In practical terms, the research revealed that a small patch of forest with adjacent green areas is more capable of regenerating itself than a huge but isolated fragment amid a de

More than a year after the Palisades and Eaton fires, many residents are still asking: Is my yard contaminated? What about the beach? And what should I do if there is contamination?

Research in the International Journal of Materials and Product Technology describes a metal-free dye-fixing process that could help make natural plant dyes more practical for high-performance textiles, addressing a longstanding obstacle to their wider use in sustainable clothing.

YCNCC Science Communications Fellow Samantha Tracy recently sat down with Wong to discuss the influence of soil fertility on tropical forests and their responses to global change. The study is published in the journal New Phytologist.

Australia's unique animal species are in sharp decline, with more than 40 mammal extinctions over the past 238 years. This atrocious mammal conservation record is the worst in the world.

Using continuous imagery from NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, scientists predicted the near-Earth arrival of a solar eruption to within 30 minutes in an initial proof-of-concept test. The results, presented Tuesday at the Committee on Space Research Scientific Meeting and under review at the journal Space Weather, could revolutionize the way Earth-impacting storms are forecast.

Scientists from Rice University in the U.S. have developed a way to precisely tune the temperature inside a trapped-ion simulator. The breakthrough means they will be able to run quantum simulations at precise temperatures that better reflect real-world conditions.

Sudden, hard-to-explain market gyrations involving billions of dollars are often triggered by a lack of transparency, new academic research suggests.

Guatemala remained on alert Tuesday after evacuating villages during an eruption of the Fuego volcano, one of Central America's most active.

For the first time, researchers have discovered a new species of extinct amphibian from Ice Age Los Angeles at La Brea Tar Pits: a spadefoot toad they have named Spea labreae. Only one other extinct Pleistocene amphibian from North America has ever been found (a tree frog from Florida).

Common ravens are intelligent omnivores that regularly consume the eggs and young of nesting birds, and their populations are boosted by human-provided food and nesting resources. This has resulted in elevated predation by ravens on many sensitive prey species, including greater sage-grouse.

Suddenly, the world is plunged into an eerie, violet darkness. The temperature drops. Birds and other animals, bewildered by unforeseen night, start behaving strangely. Stars and planets appear in the sky next to the blotted-out sun.

Scientists have uncovered a previously unknown natural process that dramatically increases the number of cloud-forming particles in the Arctic atmosphere—potentially altering cloud cover, sunlight reflection and future climate change.

Deep in the forests of North Sumatra, Indonesia, lives the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), the world's rarest great ape. Fewer than 800 individuals remain, confined to the Batang Toru ecosystem, a landscape that is also home to other rare species like Sumatran tigers, Sunda pangolins, agile gibbons and helmeted hornbills.

A research team led by Kazuyoshi Murata has discovered that virus-like particles (VLPs) of human norovirus genotype GII.3 are not structurally rigid, but can adopt two distinct conformational states, similar to those previously reported for murine norovirus.

A new study from the University of Kansas complicates the picture of primates living in North America some 55 million years ago during the Eocene, a warm period that allowed mammals to diversify quickly.

Some speed-reading advocates claim that with proper training (outlined in many popular books and YouTube videos) or the use of special apps, it's possible to increase your reading rate to 1,000 words per minute or more.

Even when the lights go out and nuclear reactors are turned off, the story inside the reactor core still has a great deal to tell. Radioactive, long-lived fission products continue to decay for months or even years, producing a faint flux of a specific type of particle known as antineutrinos. (Anti)neutrinos are the lightest and most elusive known particles in the universe, allowing them to escape unhindered from both the reactor and the surrounding shielding.

For more than 60 years, evolutionary biologists have debated whether a unique genetic system found in ants, bees and wasps helps explain one of nature's most remarkable innovations: eusociality, a form of social organization in which colonies divide reproductive labor between queens and workers.

Snakes are seemingly simple in structure: a head attached to a long, unremarkable noodle. They do have some pretty cool features at the front end, with venomous fangs and the ability to stretch their mouths and swallow large prey whole, but their bodies are not just the simple tubes we once thought.

Scientists plan to use a total solar eclipse that will be visible in Spain next week as a rare chance to learn more about the stormy, unpredictable nature of our star.

In the late 1990s, Malaysia created a new way for corporations to raise money by issuing bonds that comply with Islamic law, which prohibits the payment or collection of interest.

A flowering plant has been confirmed as a new carnivorous lineage, according to research published in Nature Communications. The findings show that Saxifraga candelabrum can attract, trap, digest and absorb nitrogen from insects, supporting a prediction made by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago.

Using a combination of laser cooling techniques and strong magnetic fields, researchers at Colorado State University have for the first time created an ultracold neutral plasma with electrons cooled to temperatures measured to be within one degree Kelvin.

A study by La Trobe University researchers has found annual ryegrass, the most damaging weed in Australian grain systems, can adjust its growth and reproduction to survive under drought stress, making it potentially harder to manage as climate conditions become more variable.

A multidisciplinary team of JCU scientists published research in the journal Minerals Engineering, describing the extent of Queensland's rare earth element resources and exploring more sustainable methods of rare earth element (REE) extraction.

After tropical cyclones, communities are often left in upheaval. Those that had few resources to begin with tend to be especially vulnerable to external stresses, and people often experience homelessness, health problems and other forms of insecurity as a result. But once the disaster response gets underway, communities recover and tend to become less socially vulnerable than they were before the disaster, new research by Jiang and team suggests. The findings are published in the journal GeoHeal

The Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, spreads serious pathogens, including severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) virus, Rickettsia and Theileria, and its bite can cause a meat allergy in humans. Once confined to Japan, South Korea, North Korea, China and Russia, the ticks have expanded across Oceania, and in 2017, they were detected in the United States. Perhaps contributing to this spread is the ability of some female ticks to produce offspring without fertilization