/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. By combining AI with molecular dynamics simulations, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new tool to more accurately predict how plants and helpful microbes communicate and form partnerships at the most fundamental level. /news/2025-09-ai-combined-molecular-simulations-root.html Plants & Animals Molecular & Computational biology Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:26:04 EDT news677157962 On September 14, 2015, a signal arrived on Earth, carrying information about a pair of remote black holes that had spiraled together and merged. The signal had traveled about 1.3 billion years to reach us at the speed of light—but it was not made of light. It was a different kind of signal: a quivering of space-time called gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years prior. /news/2025-09-years-ligo-black-hole-machine.html Astronomy Sun, 14 Sep 2025 10:00:01 EDT news676716292 A recent study provides a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms driving polarization and issue alignment on Twitter/X and reveals how political polarization in Germany is reinforced and structured by two distinct types of highly active users: influencers and multipliers. /news/2025-09-polarization-political-narratives-circulate-twitterx.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:41:04 EDT news676798861 Canada's record-breaking 2023 wildfires exposed more than 350 million people in North America and Europe to air pollution that likely contributed to tens of thousands of deaths, according to new estimates published Wednesday. /news/2025-09-canada-linked-thousands-deaths.html Environment Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:50:03 EDT news676734521 When OpenAI released "study mode" in July 2025, the company touted ChatGPT's educational benefits. "When ChatGPT is prompted to teach or tutor, it can significantly improve academic performance," the company's vice president of education told reporters at the product's launch. But any dedicated teacher would be right to wonder: Is this just marketing, or does scholarly research really support such claims? /news/2025-09-ai-affect-cognitive-psychologist-hard.html Social Sciences Education Wed, 10 Sep 2025 12:42:05 EDT news676726921 Over the course of more than two decades, researchers at the University of Bern have developed the so-called "Bern model," a suite of computer programs that can numerically simulate the formation of planetary systems, thus shedding light on system architecture. These models are, however, very complex: each simulation from the Bern model can take a few days to a few weeks to be computed using modern supercomputers. /news/2025-09-ai-discovery-exoplanets-distant.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:43:04 EDT news676640582 An AI-powered satellite counting effort conducted over two years concludes that less than 600,000 wildebeest migrate across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem each year—half of previous estimates from manned aircraft surveys. The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus. /news/2025-09-ai-based-satellite-migrating-wildebeest.html Plants & Animals Ecology Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:47:02 EDT news676630021 Biologists and computational scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently refined two artificial intelligence (AI) programs originally built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to predict protein shapes. Their new combined model, called ESMBind, can predict the 3D structure of proteins to reveal how they bind to nutrient metals like zinc and iron, which are essential for life. /news/2025-09-ai-workflow-biofuel-crops-infertile.html Molecular & Computational biology Agriculture Mon, 08 Sep 2025 08:38:05 EDT news676539481 Essentially all cells in an organism's body have the same genetic blueprint, or genome, but the set of genes that are actively expressed at any given time in a cell determines what type of cell it will be and its function. How rapidly gene expression in a single cell changes over time can provide insight into how cells might become more specialized, but current measurement approaches are limited. A new method developed by researchers at Penn State and Yale University incorporates spatial information from the cell as well as data from cells processed at different times, improving researchers' ability to understand the nuances of gene expression changes. /news/2025-09-method-tracks-gene-reveal-cell.html Molecular & Computational biology Sat, 06 Sep 2025 09:52:46 EDT news676371155 One of the ways that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) earn their "forever chemical" nickname and persist in the environment is their acidity. /news/2025-09-chemicals-acidic-thought.html Analytical Chemistry Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:22:04 EDT news676214521 National anthems are more than music for ceremonies—they reflect the unique cultural and geographical characteristics of nations. A new study published in Scientific Reports has analyzed the emotional characteristics of 176 national anthems using machine learning and music information retrieval (MIR). /news/2025-09-happiest-saddest-national-anthems-globe.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:51:44 EDT news676205502 Researchers from the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Entomology and Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics have developed a technique that uses infrared light and machine learning to reveal the sex of blow fly larvae found on human remains. This innovative approach may help investigators estimate time of death with greater speed and accuracy. /news/2025-09-based-insect-analysis-sharpens-forensic.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:18:04 EDT news676203482 Strawberries are delicate and hard to harvest—easily bruised and often hidden under a canopy of leaves. This creates headaches for scientists trying to design robotic harvesters. Now a Washington State University-led team has designed one that combines an artificial-intelligence vision system, soft silicone "fingers," and a fan that gently moves leaves out of the way to get at hidden fruit. /news/2025-09-robotic-harvester-ai-vision-soft.html Biotechnology Agriculture Thu, 04 Sep 2025 09:50:03 EDT news676198201 In June, Google DeepMind took the wraps off AlphaGenome, its latest machine learning model for biological discovery. While DeepMind's Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold model focuses on proteins and how they fold, AlphaGenome predicts how genetic variants affect the processes that control when and where genes are turned on and off. /news/2025-09-massive-datasets-generated-powering-latest.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 04 Sep 2025 07:51:05 EDT news676191062 Artificial intelligence relies on machine learning algorithms trained on massive datasets to make predictions—think of how ChatGPT learned language by gorging on the internet. In biology, however, scientists face a frustrating challenge—the high-quality datasets needed to train powerful artificial intelligence models are rare. Without these datasets, we can't harness machine learning to tackle our most pressing health challenges. /news/2025-09-scale-biology-massive-datasets-aiding.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:00:04 EDT news676133411 Quantum computers promise enormous computational power, but the nature of quantum states makes computation and data inherently "noisy." Rice University computer scientists have developed algorithms that account for noise that is not just random but malicious. Their work could help make quantum computers more accurate and dependable. /news/2025-09-algorithms-malicious-noise-result-accurate.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:24:04 EDT news676131841 The conversion of carbon dioxide into clean fuels is regarded as an important route toward carbon neutrality. CO2 methanation, in particular, has drawn increasing interest due to its favorable thermodynamic properties and environmental benefits. Yet, large-scale deployment continues to face challenges such as insufficient catalyst activity at low temperatures and vulnerability to carbon deposition. /news/2025-09-ai-nickel-catalyst-carbon-dioxide.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:06:03 EDT news676119961 Genetically engineered cell lines used in biomedical research have long been prone to misidentification and unauthorized use, wasting billions of dollars each year and jeopardizing critical scientific discoveries. These problems not only undermine reproducibility of research results, but also put valuable intellectual property at risk. /news/2025-09-advance-technology-cells.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Wed, 03 Sep 2025 11:52:04 EDT news676119122 With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), teachers have been thrust into a new and ever-shifting classroom reality. /news/2025-09-teachers-key-students-ai-literacy.html Education Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:17:05 EDT news676034222 The climate benefits of planting trees may have been greatly overestimated, but swift action could ensure reforestation meets its potential to curb dangerous emissions, new research has found. /news/2025-08-climate-case-trees-overhyped-late.html Earth Sciences Environment Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:10:02 EDT news675680727 On a bench in a Philadelphia lab, a robot the size of a microwave clicks through tiny vials, building molecules that existed only as lines of code a week earlier. /news/2025-08-harnessing-ai-revolutionize-antibiotic-discovery.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Fri, 29 Aug 2025 11:55:28 EDT news675687318 What if plants could speak when they were thirsty? Agriculture, in essence, is a dialog among crops, soil and climate. Yet drought, the most insidious stressor, remains largely silent until its damage is visible. /news/2025-08-ai-simple-images-early-drought.html Biotechnology Agriculture Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:53:40 EDT news675680013 Since January's wildfires flattened entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, displacing 12,900 households and causing an estimated $30 billion in losses, California's many other fire-prone communities have been eager for solutions to better protect themselves. /news/2025-08-home-hardening-defensible-space-halve.html Environment Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:36:04 EDT news675617761 The fears are familiar: Artificial intelligence is going to eat our jobs, make our students weak and lazy and possibly destroy democracy for good measure. /news/2025-08-universities-bolster-democracy-fostering-students.html Education Political science Thu, 28 Aug 2025 15:48:04 EDT news675614881 One of the big benefits of open-access journals is that they make research articles freely and immediately available to everyone online. This increases exposure for scientists and their work, ensuring there are no barriers, such as cost, to knowledge. Anyone with an internet connection can access the research from anywhere. /news/2025-08-ai-tool-shady-science-journals.html Other Education Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:30:15 EDT news675606033 EPFL researchers have developed Systema, a new tool to evaluate how well AI models work when predicting the effects of genetic perturbations. /news/2025-08-advanced-ai-simple-genetic-perturbation.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:20:03 EDT news675602086 New research from the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is tackling a complex packing problem. Thanks to the development of a powerful new computational tool introduced in a study published in the journal Genome Research, scientists can better investigate how genomes fit into the tiny confines of a cell nucleus, how they are repackaged across different biological dimensions and how that influences gene expression and disease risk. /news/2025-08-tool-genome-dna-3d.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:30:03 EDT news675595801 In the discussion around artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, Sanmay Das has found one constant: While many people believe that some jobs can be replaced by AI, they believe that their own job is far too nuanced and complex to be handed over to the machines. /news/2025-08-probes-ai-role-social-workers.html Social Sciences Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:16:05 EDT news675594962 The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, roamed the Australian mainland, Tasmania and New Guinea for millions of years, up until the last one died in Tasmania in 1936. Despite the names, the thylacine was neither a tiger nor a wolf, but actually a marsupial relative of the Tasmanian devil. /news/2025-08-tasmanian-tiger-extinction-ancestral-gene.html Plants & Animals Evolution Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:30:01 EDT news675509128 Volcanic eruptions can have dramatic consequences. But how can we anticipate this phenomenon, which unfolds up to tens of kilometers beneath the surface? /news/2025-08-heart-volcanoes.html Earth Sciences Wed, 27 Aug 2025 09:33:04 EDT news675505981