Science
Scientific discoveries and research
South Africa's lion-petting industry: We spent three years investigating and here's what we found
An estimated 8,000 lions are held in captivity in South Africa in about 350 places, ranging from zoos to tourism venues where people can interact up close with...
Inside the narcissistic brain: fMRI research sheds light on the narcissist's struggle with empathy
Many people have narcissistic traits to some degree, for example, confidence in one's own superiority, a sense of entitlement and a desire to be the center of a...
Water into fuel: The new nanomaterial that could upgrade green hydrogen
Generating hydrogen without releasing carbon dioxide sounds simple: pass electricity through water, split water molecules and generate green hydrogen. The hard...
Glowing ghoul or chemical tool? The toxic chemistry behind Victorian séances
In November 1857, during a séance in Jersey City, the medium Leah Brown claimed her body produced luminous particles. So intense was the luminosity emanating fr...
Spending in‑person time with friends is the biggest predictor of whether college students flourish
Exercise, avoiding alcohol or even getting enough sleep aren't the factors most connected to college students' well-being. Spending face-to-face time with frien...
Freshwater flows reshape Coorong algae communities, 16 years of data reveal
Ongoing research is providing a clearer picture of how climate change can affect different aspects of the Coorong in South Australia—and is helping develop stro...
Could ecological roles offer clues to how life began?
Producers, consumers, and decomposers play different roles in today's ecosystems. Thinking about these familiar roles led me to a question: Could their differen...
Expanding hemp could boost Kentucky water quality and ecological diversity
Hemp has long been pitched to Kentucky farmers as a way to diversify their income. Research now suggests it could diversify the landscape itself, with measurabl...
Metalens microscope switches focus with voltage, not moving optics
Just as it is difficult for a camera to keep both a nearby flower and a distant mountain sharply focused at the same time, conventional optical microscopes face...
Beyond trial and error: Integrating computation, processing, and AI to design high-entropy alloys
Designing structural high-entropy alloys (SHEAs) means solving a problem with an enormous number of moving parts: which combinations of composition and processi...
Silent bacterial genes yield potential leads for future cancer drugs
Natural products produced by microorganisms are a promising source of new drugs. Researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) and its Saarbr...
Light-based monitoring could improve quality checks for lab-grown replacement cartilage
A new doctoral dissertation by Omar Anwar Elkadi in the field of Applied Physics on near-infrared spectroscopy for the continuous monitoring of tissue-engineere...