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

Tree planting provides wood, biomass and climate benefits, but the location where those new forests are established matters. An international study by researchers in Spain, Chile and Finland shows that converting nonforested land into planted forests can increase wildfire activit

Stanford engineers and colleagues designed a chip that can take a muddled mixture of light from multiple lasers and output clean beams of light. It's the first time researchers have demonstrated a device that can take in mixed, or partially coherent, light and sort its photons in

A survey of 50,000 people across 92 countries finds global mental health may be languishing, including in the wealthiest countries, and especially among young people, who in previous generations had comparatively higher levels of mental health.

Monarch butterflies get tiny trackers to help scientists follow their mysterious migration and more — today's news signal.

As a child, Rebeca Quiñonez-Piñón wondered where monarch butterflies stop for a meal and a night's rest on their long migrations across North America. Now she and other scientists are attaching tiny tracking devices to hundreds of butterflies to find those critical stopover locat

A new historical analysis challenges the received wisdom as to why Chinese characters developed their distinctive square shapes. The work, published in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, argues that their shape resulted from interacting linguistic, technological an

To what extent does bottom trawling impact the seafloor of the Baltic Sea—and how quickly does it recover? Two new studies from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) show that the marks on the seafloor provide a much clearer picture of the actual impact t

Little is known about the long-term effects of deep-sea mining on the organic matter that supports life on the seafloor. However, as interest in mining the deep sea for rare metals grows, there is concern that disturbing the seabed could affect the ecosystems of the deep ocean.

Working as a Christian minister years ago, Landon Schnabel noticed a paradox common to many U.S. churches: Men filled leadership roles, implying that religion is masculine and patriarchal, but many more women participated in services, Bible study and other activities.

People who speak with an accent know it can lead to discrimination. It can cost them in job interviews, at work and in everyday exchanges. But what they usually have to go on is anecdote: their own experiences and those of people they know.

Exceeding 1.5C of global warming will have "irreversible" consequences for glaciers, sea ice and the Earth's frozen regions, two U.N. reports warned on Monday, calling for urgent action.

Enzymes are essential to a wide range of industrial processes. As biocatalysts, they play a key role in producing active pharmaceutical ingredients, specialty chemicals and ingredients for cosmetics, besides being vital to the food industry. Enzymes allow many chemical reactions

A newly identified Arctic Ocean bacterium may have an unusual way of making the building blocks it needs to grow. Using acetone, a common chemical in seawater, the bacteria incorporate carbon dioxide (CO₂) into their metabolisms, allowing them to survive in waters where nutrients

High temperatures change how mealybugs feed, and that could help explain why some pasture mealybug infestations do far more damage than others, according to early findings from Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists.

Physicists have found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it is expected to occur only around once in every 10 billion "beauty" particles. The result, from the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), follows a search spanning more than 40 years and b

Recent media reports of alleged sexual assaults by teenage boys draw attention to an uncomfortable truth: Young people sometimes perpetrate harmful sexual behavior against their peers.

Tree planting provides wood, biomass and climate benefits, but the location where those new forests are established matters. An international study by researchers in Spain, Chile and Finland shows that converting nonforested land into planted forests can increase wildfire activit

More than a century after they were excavated from beneath Cairo, almost 3,000 stone tools from Heliopolis show that specialized work was already reshaping village life before Egypt became a state.

Astrophysicists think that the supermassive black holes (SMBH) we see in the modern universe are the result of a long, drawn-out process. That process is referred to as the hierarchical black hole mergers framework. It explains how some SMBHs can reach such staggering masses. Som

Yale research scientist Saúl Domínguez-Guerrero didn't set out to catch "evolution in the act" when he traveled to the Caribbean with a team of Yale researchers a few years ago. At the time, the team from the lab of evolutionary biologist Martha Muñoz planned to do fieldwork on C

It was a frightening time.

University at Buffalo scientists have found evidence that different species of yeast have shared genes originally acquired from an ancient virus—and the guts and droppings of beetles may have helped make it happen.

During his renowned excavations at the Shanidar Cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, American archaeologist Ralph Solecki located burial sites containing pollen and flower fragments from various species of wildflowers. He interpreted this as evidence that Neanderthals may have p

When fishers are out working their boats, they are typically targeting a specific type of fish. However, other species often end up in their nets or trawls as well. This is known as "bycatch"—seafood for which the fishers receive no payment. Although it is illegal to discard byca