Around 250 million years ago, what is today scorching desert in remote northwestern Australia was the shore of a shallow bay bordering a vast prehistoric ocean. Fossils recovered from this region over 60 years ago, and almost forgotten in museum collections, have now shed new light on the earliest global radiations of land-living animals adapting to life in the sea.
The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy—ideal to spark extreme wildfires—has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows.
Nearly a month after a wastewater pipe broke and spewed hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River just north of Washington, D.C., the latest water testing results from the University of Maryland School of Public Health continue to show high levels of E. coli and S. aureus — commonly called staph, including antibiotic-resistant MRSA.
Recent investigations have uncovered forced labor in agricultural supply chains, illegal fishing feeding supermarket freezers, deforestation embedded in everyday food products, and unsafe conditions in factories producing "sustainable" fashion. These harms were not visible on labels. They surfaced only when journalists, whistleblowers or activists exposed them.
When we dream of landscapes, we might imagine rolling valleys or rugged mountains. But there is a whole landscape hidden from human view: the secret world of the seafloor.
Turning on the "For You" algorithm on X (formerly Twitter) may shift users' political opinions toward more conservative views, suggests research involving nearly 5,000 X users. These effects are shown to persist even after users return to a chronological feed, according to a new paper published in Nature.
Since the pandemic, offices around the world have quietly shrunk. Many organizations don't need as much floor space or as many desks, given many staff now do a mix of hybrid work from home and the office. But on days when more staff are required to be in, office spaces can feel noticeably busier and noisier. Despite so much focus on getting workers back into offices, there has been far less focus on the impacts of returning to open-plan workspaces.
Using commercially available technology and innovative methods, researchers at NBI have pushed the limits of how fast you can detect changes in the sensitive quantum states in the qubit. Their work allows researchers to follow rapid changes in qubit performance that were previously invisible. The study is published in the journal Physical Review X.
Data collected during a rowing challenge around the seas of Great Britain has found significantly higher concentrations of microplastic pollution than previously recorded, a new report finds. The team, which included University of Surrey academic Hannah Davies, rowed more than 2,000 miles in just 50 days as part of the GB Row Challenge 2024, while also collecting crucial data on microplastic pollution, underwater man-made sound, water temperature, salinity and biodiversity.
Over the past decade, southern Australia has suffered numerous extreme weather and climate events, such as record-breaking heat waves, bushfires, two major droughts and even flash flooding.
