Science, engineering, and discovery — the research and breakthroughs that matter.

University of Massachusetts Amherst's Jeff Podos and his former graduate student João C.T. Menezes have identified two contenders for the title of world's loudest bird: the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. Their findings also help explain why some birds are so m

Student discipline, staffing problems, frustrated parents—school principals spend their days moving from one problem to the next.

A research team from The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and East China Normal University (ECNU) has published a meta-analysis demonstrating the impact of digital textbooks (DTs) on student motivation. Synthesizing 27 experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducte

BotChallenge.com adds daily bots and robots quiz rounds and challenges and more — today's student signal.

After taking a pill, the drugs it contains are distributed throughout the body, reaching the tissues and cells affected by disease and performing their intended function. However, they also enter healthy cells, where they often cause more harm than good.

Cities trying to cool sweltering streets often set broad tree canopy targets. But those targets can overlook the reality that not all shade is equally useful, and not every neighborhood has room for more trees.

When Pliny the Younger recorded his firsthand experience of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago—a cataclysm that buried Pompeii and killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder—he provided enough detail about the date to allow scientists to benchmark methods for dating volcanic e

Are there any geographical differences in how people experience weather conditions? This question was investigated in the citizen science project Kallt och svettigt (Cold and sweaty) for a year with the help of school pupils throughout Sweden.

Wild African elephants living in the Mount Elgon region of Kenya appear to seek out specific plants when unwell. Local experts also reported mothers administering plant-based "medicine" to their offspring.

Scientists discovered two strange new sea spider species in the Salish Sea, including a hairy-legged, red-eyed species that can groom itself with comb-like appendages. Another is frequently covered in tiny parasites, and researchers say many more undiscovered sea spiders may stil

A new technique for controlling optical components with light could help usher in a generation of high-efficiency signal-processing technology that could drive futuristic applications such as holographic video.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to discover new materials, but conventional data-driven approaches can struggle to explain their predictions, work reliably beyond their training data and remain consistent with physical laws. A new perspective proposes a framewo

Spiny lobster larvae spend six to nine months drifting in the open ocean, feeding within the plankton community, before eventually settling into shallow-water habitats such as mangroves, seagrass beds or coral reefs. This means the number of young lobsters reaching Bermuda is str

Cell division is a complex process. At the heart of this complexity is a membraneless organelle called the centrosome, which is made up of more than 200 components. It is responsible for clustering mitotic spindles, threadlike structures needed to separate genetic material. It ha

A team at the University of Córdoba (UCO) has reviewed and updated the catalog of versions of the wheat gene GLU-B1, which is responsible for a protein that makes up gluten. The team has also made a collection of wheat representing the gene's true variability available to the res

Plants cannot run away when the wind picks up, rain lashes down or a hungry herbivore begins chewing on their leaves. Instead, they must sense their surroundings and adapt. Now, researchers have uncovered an important piece of the puzzle of what happens inside plants when they ar

Researchers at AIST have developed a device that measures the absolute surface profile of curved optical elements with high precision without touching them.

Fueled by record-breaking drought and unusually high temperatures, Canada's 2023 wildfire season was the worst in the country's history, with more than 15 million hectares (37 million acres) charred. Smoke blanketed the eastern seaboard, with health alerts keeping people indoors

A Baylor College of Medicine-led team has developed a strategy that combines the analysis of thousands of proteins with artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of small molecules called molecular glues to treat disease. Their approach, published in Nature Communicatio

A newly described feathered dinosaur found in northeastern China adds evidence supporting the theory that flight-related features evolved differently in various bird-like dinosaur groups. The findings, reported in Nature Communications, are based on an analysis of an exceptionall

Photos taken using a microscope reveal the colorful, kaleidoscope-like crystal structure of a new NASA-made material that could be used for manufacturing during future space missions. Developed at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the material could be created directly o

Communities across the country are debating the role mobile crisis response programs can play in emergency response. These programs typically take calls from 911 dispatchers involving mental health, substance use, welfare checks and other situations that do not require a law enfo