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A new species of snake that feeds exclusively on birds

For decades, one of the major complaints about nuclear power in the United States has been the argument that, after all this time, we still have not come up with a dependable strategy for sequestering high-level radioactive waste, including spent fuel from plant operation. This issue is of such importance that Haruko Wainwright has put it at the center of her research agenda as an Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies at MIT and an associate professor in the departmen

A 178-year-old mystery surrounding one of the earliest recorded examples of space weather affecting technology has been solved by an international team led by Lancaster University.

The pressure to be the perfect parent can be overwhelming, but social media and perceived world threats are causing some to become overprotective parents, negatively affecting young people.

Over a third of U.S. adults (35%) cannot name all three branches of the government, and under half can name four of the five rights protected by the First Amendment, according to the 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Of the five First Amendment rights, only freedom of speech is identified by more than half of survey respondents.

Solid-state drives (SSDs), which store data in computers and servers, are critical to data center reliability. When they fail, they can contribute to service disruptions, data loss and high maintenance costs, making early failure prediction important.

Some of the most vulnerable children and young people are failing to access mental health support despite having much higher levels of need, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

Americans are heading into the 2026 midterm elections with widespread uncertainty about the integrity of the vote, according to a new national survey from the University of California San Diego.

The mammalian gut microbiome teems with a delicate balance of bacteria and the viruses that keep them in check, called bacteriophages, or phages. Each bacterial species usually has its own set of phage partners.

Laser scanning, often referred to as lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopies, rapidly providing high-resolution scans of the landscape below. This growing observational power is central to the scientific value of remote sensing technologies but also brings into focus the conditions, interests and power structures under which they are used.

Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed closer to the brink as wildfires raze vast swaths of their habitat on the western island of Sumatra, Indonesian conservation group Geopix told AFP on Wednesday.

Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a way to unravel changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, SIMP 0136, previously linked to northern lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.

A new national study reveals the widespread reach of violence across the United States, finding that more than half of U.S. adults have experienced physical violence and nearly half have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes. The U.S. National Study on Violence Experiences Across the Lifespan (USVEX) also shows stark disparities in who experiences violence and how closely violence is linked to economic hardship, mental health and substance use.

Neurons in humans and other mammals express many exceptionally long genes, ranging from more than 100 kbp to more than 2 Mbp, that are important for forming synapses and neural circuits. In general, genetic information is read from DNA into RNA. This process is called transcription. The longer a gene is, the more time it takes to read from beginning to end. In addition, gene expression must be regulated at several steps. Neurons are therefore thought to require special mechanisms to read long ge

This year, greyhound racing in Britain turns 100 years old. The first race took place on July 24, 1926, in Manchester, where six dogs chased a mechanical hare around a track.

Carbon dioxide (CO

Weather forecasts inform countless everyday decisions

In the hills of northwestern Morocco, overlooking the river that gives the site its name, research at Oued Beht is bringing to light a previously unknown chapter of the region

New cases of New World screwworm have recently surfaced in the United States, highlighting the critical need to track its paths to determine where future infestations may occur. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

No, President Joe Biden did not engineer Hurricane Milton. No, the ice crystal contrails left behind by high-altitude aircraft are not

Xufeng Zhang is using magnets to make computers more power efficient at the quantum level. The Northeastern professor of electrical and computer engineering recently published two papers highlighting small-scale magnetic systems he and his team developed that could help make computers much more power efficient in the future.

The European Union is set to propose curbing access to social media, video-sharing platforms, chatbots and online games for children younger than 15, according to a draft legal document seen by AFP.

Inside each human cell, about 2 meters (6.6 feet) of genomic DNA must be accurately copied and equally transmitted to two daughter cells during cell division. To achieve this, the copied DNA is condensed into thick, short structures called mitotic chromosomes. However, how chromatin is organized and condensed to form mitotic chromosomes has long remained a major question in genetics and cell biology.

For more than a decade, it was thought that the world

Irrigating U.S. crops prevents higher greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding land conversion, new research by Colorado State University shows. Agricultural irrigation allows the United States to grow more food on less land. If irrigation were suddenly shut off, the land-use change required to make up for lost yields would produce significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than irrigation emits

Microorganisms can do remarkable things

Have you ever bought something not because you wanted it, but because you were afraid of what might happen if you didn

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) travel incredibly long distances to search for a mate and new places to breed. They typically embark on these mammoth treks as young adults and often face numerous hazards along the way. These include busy highways, expanding human settlements and deadly wire poaching snares.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is best known for carrying genetic instructions from DNA to the cellular machinery that makes proteins. But all RNA molecules have another, less appreciated property: They are naturally sticky.

Environmental sustainability researchers at NUS found that widely used environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings often fail to reflect companies

In both biological and engineered systems, cells and sensors must make sense of noisy, changing signals to function. However, collecting and using this information consumes valuable energy. A new study, published in Physical Review Letters, describes a model for how a sensor or cell might maximize information collection from its surroundings while controlling the overall energy cost, resulting in an optimized system.

While people across the globe are experiencing various impacts of climate change, governments and communicators often use top-to-bottom, uniform communication strategies to inform people about climate change.

More than 5,000 years ago, a royal woman named Meretneith (also written as Merneith) lived in ancient Egypt. She was possibly the daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty, a period when the first kings ruled over a unified Egypt.

If you are trying to detect or bait little fire ants in your backyard, scientists at the University of Hawai

An international team of researchers, including professor David Oswald from our Department of Computer Science, has discovered a security vulnerability that could put sensitive data stored in cloud computing systems at risk.

New research from Syracuse University argues that communities battling AI data centers should borrow directly from the playbook developed a decade ago to fight fracking. The findings, by Syracuse University Associate Teaching Professor and urban planning expert Austin Zwick, were published in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge

Half smiling through crinkled eyes, Moussa Ndiaye, in his long tunic and skullcap, watched a combine harvest his northern Senegal rice paddy, where he expects a good haul

Do you think that a person who reorganizes their life so that their aging parents can live with them would be likely to push another out of the way on the subway? What about greeting strangers with a smile? The answers to these questions are at the heart of a puzzle social psychologists have been debating for 30 years: how to best understand differences among cultures.

Australia had a much larger Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans than previously thought, according to new research. The research also demonstrates much larger population losses resulting from colonization than previously believed, with an estimated 93% of the pre-European population lost in less than 80 years following the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet.

Eighty years ago, a massive tsunami devastated parts of Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and Oregon following an earthquake off the coast of Alaska. A Michigan State University team is launching a project to study the underwater fault system where it originated

Within the next five years, global warming is set to breach the 1.5

When JWST

Choosing an orbit for a satellite always comes with trade-offs. Very low Earth orbit (VLEO), between 100

Monitoring marine life helps scientists track ecosystem health, improve conservation and manage fisheries. A promising approach is environmental DNA (eDNA), which refers to trace genetic material naturally released into the water by organisms, such as skin cells, mucus and excreta.

A new recycling technique could help tackle a major challenge: breaking down some of the toughest plastics without generating large amounts of waste.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering has created a new type of dye-sensitized nanoparticle that can detect target chemicals at very low concentrations while also distinguishing between molecules with very similar shapes.

Have you ever wondered what Earth observation satellites see when they look down at the deep ocean or a dense tropical forest during the dead of night? The answer, for the most part, is nothing. Standard optical sensors require a steady stream of light to function, and in these photon-limited regions, they hit a hard physical boundary. But what if we could rewrite the rules of optical imaging? By borrowing techniques from quantum photonics, we can push beyond these classical limits and unlock a

Artificial intelligence is transforming how information is generated, processed and stored, but its rapid expansion is also driving unprecedented demand for computing power and electricity. Developing hardware that can process information more efficiently is therefore becoming one of the major technological challenges of the AI era.