All Rodrigo Medellín wanted was a nap. A biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, he had been trapping bats for several nights in a row in the Lacandon rainforest near Guatemala, and was exhausted. “So I lay on the ground…

Every time the plasma physicists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, fire a shot on their fusion reactor, a big chunk of the hardware goes up in smoke. Their Z machine contains banks of capacitors that fill up with more electrical…

Between the jungle and the rice paddies, Fidel Costa struggled to find bare rock on the slopes of Mount Gede, a towering volcano near the western tip of the Indonesian island of Java. But an abandoned quarry hewn into the mountainside offered a rare chance…

At intersections of tectonic plates worldwide, slabs of ocean crust dive into the mantle, part of the continuous cycle that not only drives the continents’ drift, but also fuels the volcanism that builds up island chains like Japan and mountains like the…

 In 2008, researchers discovered that the worms squirm away from ultraviolet (UV) rays, presumably to avoid lethal doses of the sun’s radiation in the wild. But when scientists traced the nematodes’ light-avoiding behavior, they found the responsible protein…

There is a pervasive underlying fear from generations raised on dystopian science fiction that artificial intelligence and robotics will be the undoing of humankind. Eventually, the conventional…

You’re probably not aware of it, but when you’re suffering from a bad case of food poisoning or another infection, bacteria are busy stealing iron from you. Many microbes use special chemicals to snatch away the metal, which they need to reproduce. But this…

A new study is the first to show that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds--something only chemists had done before. Scientists have "bred" a bacterial protein to have the ability to make the human-made bonds--a finding that has…

As Zika spreads throughout the world, the call for rapid development of therapeutics to treat Zika rings loud and clear. Taking a step further in identifying a possible therapeutic candidate, a team of researchers has discovered the mechanism by which C10…

Up to 47 per cent of their structure is a mysterious sheath that surrounds the genetic material, researchers say. While the precise function of this sheath is unknown, researchers suggest it may keep chromosomes isolated from one another during the key process…

The novel method from the University of Central Florida's NanoScience Technology Center could eventually revolutionize technology as varied as mobile phones and electric vehicles. "If they were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could…

Scientists examined part of Mars' Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter's ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal…

Researchers from the U.S. DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University may have solved the mystery surrounding magnetic reconnection, bringing us one step closer to better solar flare prediction and (pmost notably) problems s…

So, scientists found out that there is a second liquid state of water. But what does that actually mean? Well, states of matter are determined by the shape, density, intermolecular distance and various other properties of compounds. So an international team…

Researchers are repurposing decades-old technology to build faster gadgets for the future, creating nanoscale vacuum tubes that could dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of personal electronics and solar panels.