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

Wildfires push endangered Sumatran elephants to brink: Indonesian NGO and more — today's engineering signal.

Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed closer to the brink as wildfires raze vast swaths of their habitat on the western island of Sumatra, Indonesian conservation group Geopix told AFP on Wednesday.

A new national study reveals the widespread reach of violence across the United States, finding that more than half of U.S. adults have experienced physical violence and nearly half have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes. The U.S. National Study on Violence Experienc

A new prehistoric animal species from Tanzania dating to around 240 million years ago, during the Triassic period, has been described by an international team of researchers. Led by the University of Bristol, the new species, named Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, could help scienti

Weather forecasts inform countless everyday decisions—from farmers deciding when to sow crops and energy companies anticipating demand to public authorities preparing for heat waves. But how useful those forecasts are depends considerably on where people live.

Xufeng Zhang is using magnets to make computers more power efficient at the quantum level. The Northeastern professor of electrical and computer engineering recently published two papers highlighting small-scale magnetic systems he and his team developed that could help make comp

An international team that includes researchers from Murdoch University's Centre for Crop and Food Innovation (CCFI) has built the most comprehensive genetic map of the peanut yet and used this new genomic resource to breed a higher-yielding dwarf peanut line.

Irrigating U.S. crops prevents higher greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding land conversion, new research by Colorado State University shows. Agricultural irrigation allows the United States to grow more food on less land. If irrigation were suddenly shut off, the land-use change

Researchers have developed an innovative imaging technique to visualize the transition of single cells into multicellular organisms in new detail.

Proteins are high-performance molecular machines that carry out nearly every biochemical function inside living cells. To understand how they achieve this, scientists often examine their detailed atomic structure, which holds important clues to their activity. The more precision

Microscopic plant remains are revealing how GunaiKurnai ancestors used Cloggs Cave for ritual practices over thousands of years. People deliberately gathered whole grasses, carried them into the dark cave, and burned them in thin layers, leaving behind traces that may span 25,000

More than 5,000 years ago, a royal woman named Meretneith (also written as Merneith) lived in ancient Egypt. She was possibly the daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty, a period when the first kings ruled over a unified Egypt.

Britain’s towering Devil’s Arrows were built from 25-tonne stones hauled at least 18 kilometers from Brimham Rocks around 4,000 years ago. The discovery reveals an astonishing feat of prehistoric engineering and suggests the stones’ distant source may have been chosen for cultura

Humpback whale mothers may experience grief when their calves die, a rare research observation led by Griffith University and Sea World Foundation has found.

Nearly nine in 10 (86%) UK-licensed online gambling websites are operating in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation, according to new research from the Gambling Research, Education and Treatment (GREAT) Center at Swansea University published in the journal Computers in

The mammalian gut microbiome teems with a delicate balance of bacteria and the viruses that keep them in check, called bacteriophages, or phages. Each bacterial species usually has its own set of phage partners.

Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, foams and gels often display complex and unusual behaviors compared with ordinary solids or liquids. From a mechanical point of view, for instance, they can resist deformation like solids, but they can also start to flow li

Astronomers have confirmed that one of the fastest-changing stars ever observed has entered a new stage of its evolution, offering a rare opportunity to watch a star's life unfold on human timescales.

The longest satellite record ever assembled shows that Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice since the 1970s, raising global sea level by more than 3 centimeters (1.2 inches)—and that most of the loss has come from glaciers flowing faster into the oc

Laser scanning, often referred to as lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopies, rapidly providing high-resolution scans of

Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed closer to the brink as wildfires raze vast swaths of their habitat on the western island of Sumatra, Indonesian conservation group Geopix told AFP on Wednesday.

SpaceX announced Tuesday that it was planning to send its flagship rocket, Starship, into orbit, a key step in its project to one day reach the moon or Mars.

The United States has confirmed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space, a remarkable revelation after previous warnings about countries such as Russia possibly weaponizing a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes.

Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn't look like the rocks she'd been studying caught her eye. It turned out to be the fossilized tooth of a Pacific mastodon.