India and Pakistan are no strangers to heat. This time of year is the worst, as heat peaks before the monsoon brings cooler conditions from June.
In a study published in Nature Geoscience, a research team led by Prof. Liu Lingli from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) has identified a mean annual precipitation (MAP) threshold of approximately 700 mm, beyond which the dominant controls on ecosystem nitrogen retention shift.
A recently discovered extinct bird from the early Cretaceous Period (approximately 121 million years ago) may have waggled its long tail feathers to attract mates, according to a study published May 27, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Alexander Clark of the University of Chicago and colleagues. Clark shares more details about his team's findings in the following Q&A.
Around the world, people watched NASA's Artemis II mission in awe as humans returned to lunar orbit for the first time since 1972.
Nonlinear interactions between light and matter are at the heart of some of the most powerful tools in modern optics, but pushing these processes to their limits has long been hampered by a fundamental constraint: the stronger you make the laser, the more likely it is to destroy whatever it illuminates.
Climate change is exacerbating rainfall, flooding and sea-level rises in coastal and low-lying areas. During the past few years, disastrous floods have swept through Lismore in New South Wales, Northern Queensland, and the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. Large waves have pounded beaches, causing erosion in Byron Bay and Wamberal Beach in NSW and Lancelin, Western Australia.
Some 350,000 years ago, the center of New Zealand's North Island appeared much different than the mountainous, scrub-covered landscape it is today. Amid a glacial period, temperatures were colder and conditions harsher. Vast beech and podocarp forests blanketed the region, providing habitat for abundant native birdlife.
Astronomers from the George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, DC, and elsewhere have employed NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft to observe a pulsar wind nebula inside a supernova remnant known as CTA 1. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a research paper published May 20 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the morphology and properties of this nebula.
As wildflowers go, the mountain jewelflower is demure, clever and quietly unbreakable. It has spread across many of California's iconic landscapes, from Sonoma wine country to the oak-dotted foothills, even over the Sierra Crest, where snow covers the ground during winter.
Highlights from the last week of May, 2026: A key climate tipping point is disrupting the Arctic Ocean food chain (more of a lowlight, I guess). Scuba-diving tourism may not be the benefit to coral reef systems that we once thought, and might actually be unsustainable. And an experimental mRNA vaccine showed promising results against strains of Ebola.
