In February, mining company Alcoa was hit with a $55 million penalty for illegally clearing about 2,000 hectares of WA's Northern Jarrah Forest. About $40 million was earmarked for so-called "permanent ecological offsets," for Alcoa to repair the damage in terms of ecology lost.
In the exotic world of particle physics, neutrinos may be the most mysterious members. They rarely interact with other matter, have almost no mass, and have no electrical charge. These characteristics make them extremely difficult to study. Even detecting them requires specialized facilities in deep caves, in thick Antarctic ice, or on the ocean floor.
Tens of thousands of private security guards in California play a critical role in public safety, but poverty-level wages and poor training put both the guards and the public at risk, according to a new study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
A major international study involving researchers from The University of Manchester has found that education is one of the strongest predictors of how long people live. Using a new statistical approach to overcome gaps in global data, the research shows that people with more education live significantly longer—even in countries where official records are incomplete. The research is published in the journal Demographic Research.
A study published this month in Reading Research Quarterly is challenging the long-held stereotype of the sedentary gamer. In their new paper, Dr. Fiona Scott, Dr. Liz Chesworth, Dr. Cath Bannister, Daniel Kuria, Shabana Roscoe and Yao Wang argue that instead of viewing digital play as a passive or inherently unhealthy activity, educators and parents should recognize it as a complex, embodied form of literacy that can actively support a child's well-being.
April 26 marks the 40th anniversary of the explosion at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The accident caused the largest ever release of radioactive material into the environment, and at the time people predicted that the affected area would be rendered uninhabitable, devoid of life for thousands of years. But the reality is quite different.
Some innovations in physics come from entirely new technologies, others from fresh theoretical insights. Others still take shape by bringing together existing tools in new ways, working out how to combine them to outperform other solutions. The branch of particle physics that studies weakly interacting particles—such as neutrinos and some types of dark-matter candidates—could use innovative detection approaches: technological challenges in this research area quickly become practical as well as economic, as increases in detector volume and spatial resolution improve the sensitivity to the processes producing the particles of interest. Similarly, demanding targets on instrument capability apply to the calorimeters used in collider experiments.
An El Niño event is expected to develop from mid-2026, impacting global temperature and rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The latest monthly Global Seasonal Climate Update from WMO signals a clear shift in the Equatorial Pacific: sea-surface temperatures are rising rapidly, pointing to a likely return of El Niño conditions as early as May-July 2026. Forecasts indicate there is a "nearly global dominance of above-normal land surface temperatures" in the upcoming three-month period, and regional variations in rainfall patterns.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have implemented an advanced microscopy technique to visualize multiple biomolecules inside the nucleus of a cancer cell simultaneously at incredibly high resolution. The biomolecules they visualized include critical components of the cell's transcription machinery and proteins that provide structural support to the nucleus—providing one of the first detailed maps of nuclear organization.
Many important objects in the world can be divided into two categories based on their chirality or handedness, including molecules important for life such as amino acids. Such chiral objects (formally defined as objects which are not identical to their mirror images) are often characterized by a structure which twists in a given direction.
