Curtin University researchers have helped unravel the enduring mystery of the origins of the Earth’s water, finding the Sun to be a surprising likely source. A University of Glasgow-led international team of researchers including those from Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) found the solar wind, comprised of charged particles from the Sun largely […]

A team of international researchers from Canada, Colombia, and Germany has discovered a new marine reptile. The specimen, a stunningly preserved metre-long skull, is one of the last surviving ichthyosaurs – ancient animals that look eerily like living swordfish. “This animal evolved a unique dentition that allowed it to eat large prey,” says Hans Larsson, Director […]

A civil and environmental engineering researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has, for the first time, assimilated satellite information into on-site river measurements and hydrologic models to calculate the past 35 years of river discharge in the entire pan-Arctic region. The research reveals, with unprecedented accuracy, that the acceleration of water pouring into the […]

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view. Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of […]

The world’s eight most extreme wildfire weather years have occurred in the last decade, according to a new study that suggests extreme fire weather is being driven by a decrease in atmospheric humidity coupled with rising temperatures. “Extreme conditions drive the world’s fire activity,” said former U of A wildfire expert Michael Flannigan, who conducted […]

Snow monkeys living in one of the world’s coldest regions survive by ‘going fishing’ – scooping live animals, including brown trout, out of Japanese rivers and eating them to stay alive, a new study reveals. The snow monkey (Japanese macaque Macaca fuscata) is native to the main islands of Japan, except Hokkaido. The most northerly living […]

Technion scientists develop self-healing, antibacterial polymer as safer alternative to traditional post-surgical sutures. The smart bandage can dispense antibiotic, monitor wound-healing biomarkers and report important data directly to doctors. “Sutures? That’s practically medieval!” It is a staple of science fiction to mock sutures as outdated. The technique has, after all, been in use for at […]

Last spring, I reviewed a book about the pharmaceutical industry’s rise to dominate the universe of medical research at major universities, medical journal gatekeepers, and press coverage of medical science in the popular media. It was the brainchild of the Sackler family, planned and executed over decades. The missing piece of the story is the […]

If we thought we could build our way out of the climate and biodiversity crisis with more advanced human technology, the Covid-19 pandemic taught us that we are far more vulnerable to the powers of nature than we previously dared to admit, and that working with instead of against nature is the only way forward. […]

Researchers in Australia have uncovered the electrostatic origins of specific ion effects for anions in solution. By establishing correlations between the Coulomb interactions of a series of anions with their solution properties, the scientists confirmed that it is electrostatics that give rise to the divergent effects of anions in biological and chemical environments. These findings […]