Mapped use of safely managed drinking water. (A) Number of users (B); Percent of people using an improved drinking water source; (C) Map showing fecal contamination (red), lack of accessibility (green) and inadequacy (blue); (D) Global Management Area Level 1 in LMICS. Source: Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adh9578 A multidisciplinary team of environmental scientists has created […]

Image credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Many people think that plants, while beautiful to look at, are defenseless and passive organisms. However, the many alien species – or “monster plants” – around us show that we should never underestimate plants and the fascinating battles that take place beneath our feet. Many of the first alien plants […]

Red hexagons mark the four locations where the Perseverance rover collected rock samples around the sediment fan in Jezero Crater in 2022. Image credit: NASA For nearly five months in 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the red planet and even contain evidence of […]

Sum frequency spectromicroscopy of phonon polaritons in SiC micropillar arrays. Image credit: Advanced materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202312507 Scientists from the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society have made a significant discovery in the field of nanotechnology, as shown in their recent publication in Advanced materialsTheir article entitled […]

Scientists have developed a new open-source software tool called OpenFold that uses artificial intelligence and harnesses the power of supercomputers to predict protein structures. The image shows that OpenFold matches the accuracy of AlphaFold2 by overlaying predictions from OpenFold and AlphaFold2 with an experimental structure of the Streptomyces tokunonesis TokK protein. Image credit: Natural methods […]

As my colleagues and I set out to solve a centuries-old cosmic mystery, we discovered an unexpected celestial laboratory in Terzan 5, a dense star cluster currently hurtling through our galaxy at breakneck speed. This stellar curiosity has allowed us to study the behavior of cosmic rays – high-energy particles whose irregular trajectories through space […]

Image credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Every summer, millions of people fly around the world on vacation. The United Nations World Tourism Organization estimates that international arrivals, the measure of global travel, will be 2% higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. However, as more people take vacations, some of the world’s tourist hotspots are more crowded […]

Enalioetes life reconstruction by Joschua Knüppe. Photo credit: Joschua Knüppe An international team of scientists, including researchers from Germany and Great Britain, has described a new species of ancient marine crocodile, Enalioetes schroederi. Enalioetes lived in the shallow seas that covered large parts of Germany during the Cretaceous period about 135 million years ago. This […]