Science
Scientific discoveries and research
The worse climate change gets, the harder it becomes to stop it
This year may be seen as a turning point in the climate crisis. The U.N. has accepted that global warming is going to exceed 1.5°C, while climate scientists hav...
SynFit guides enzyme engineering by balancing several useful traits at once
Enzymes are biology's tiny chemists. They help build, break and rearrange molecules quickly and precisely. In the lab, scientists have long put enzymes to work...
'I heard a barnacle'—how paying attention to nature's background noise can reveal animal secrets
During four days on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, I saw an Olympic marmot, a species found nowhere else on Earth; four bumblebee species working the same lave...
Vibrating mirrors of light create analog of a black hole event horizon
Optical cavities are pairs of light-trapping mirrors and underpin the operation of lasers, atomic clocks and many types of precision sensors. If the distance be...
Atom-scale model could help improve material growth for advanced electronics
Penn State researchers have refined an atom-scale model of how silicon carbide changes from a solid into vapor during crystal growth, work that could help manuf...
States tax sports betting heavily, but gamblers may barely feel it
Sports betting has grown explosively since 2018, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down a federal ban on it. Now, Americans wager more than $165 billion o...
Scientists achieve record-breaking low temperature on China's space station, paving the way for new physics experiments
Matter starts to behave differently at extremely low temperatures, creating conditions ideal for studying quantum physics and new states of matter. Now, researc...
Evolutionary history and genetic basis of spruce diversification revealed
The genus Picea (spruce) is widely distributed across the Northern Hemisphere and is a dominant component of boreal and montane forests. Understanding the evolu...
Researchers establish G0 founder population carrying targeted mutations in marine mollusks
Although genome-editing-based breeding has advanced rapidly in aquaculture, progress in marine mollusks has lagged behind. The main challenge is not genome edit...
Technique that spots tRNAs in action could accelerate drug development for inherited diseases
Human cells turn genetic instructions into proteins with great precision. Critical for the translation of this information are transfer RNAs, or tRNAs, small mo...
New method for upcycling polyethylene is suitable for mass production as a raw material for nylon
It would greatly benefit the environment and climate if nylon—chemically known as polyamide—could be produced on a large scale from plastic waste in the future,...
Robot successfully builds space structure in first autonomous construction demo
A robotic truss builder that was conceived, designed and built by Caltech researchers has successfully built a structure in space—without the help of astronauts...