A clean energy future hinges on minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements. But the race to secure them puts pressure on the places where they are mined. With some supply and processing concentrated in just a few countries, these critical raw materials (CRMs) have also become a geopolitical flashpoint.
In storytelling, even small visual details can become unforgettable. In the globally popular anime "Demon Slayer," one such detail is the short bamboo muzzle worn by a central character. It looks simple and believable, just a piece of green bamboo tied across the mouth. But a new study suggests that this familiar object could not exist in nature as shown in the anime.
Coan says practicing kindness, be it big or small, is a one-two punch for your health and for those around you. That includes "weak ties," the casual, micro-relationships people form. "People often deride small talk as shallow," he said. "Well, it's not. Small talk and weak ties are really important. These are the connections we have with people in our community—like the person who runs the coffee shop we visit. Small acts of kindness become more likely when we engage with people at all, and engaging often means making small talk."
Temporary overshoot of global temperature targets—particularly the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement—is no longer just a modeling concept. New research, published in Nature Climate Change and led by the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change (CMCC) in collaboration with 14 research institutions from 10 countries, traces how overshoot has evolved over the past three decades, from a scenario tool used to explore ambitious targets to a structural feature of climate scenarios, reflecting the tension between more ambitious temperature targets and continued emissions growth. What began as a modeling tool to explore climate goals has become an almost inevitable outcome in pathways compatible with the Paris Agreement.
Our planet plunged into one of the most dramatic climate states in its long history, approximately 720–635 million years ago. During a period geologists call Snowball Earth, ice sheets crept from the poles all the way to the tropics, covering the oceans and continents in a nearly global freeze.
Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have conducted the most detailed simulation of the interior of stars and disproved a theory scientists have believed for 45 years: that stars switch their rotation patterns as they age, with poles rotating faster than the equator in older stars. Scientists have now found that this switch may not occur. Stars maintain solar-type rotation, spinning fast at the equator and slow at the poles throughout their lifetime. The findings are published in Nature Astronomy.
A Stanford Law report reveals California's inadequate monitoring of dairies and feedlots, highlighting the need for stronger regulatory enforcement to protect groundwater quality and community health.
In a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers Dr. Giovanna M. X. Paixão and her colleagues analyzed the fossilized remains of three Upper Cretaceous egg clutches. One of these clutches, totaling 47 eggs, is the largest known Mesozoic crocodyliform egg clutch ever found. The discovery indicates new evolutionary implications for one of the most diverse fossil crocodylomorph faunas, providing insight into their complex and successful reproductive habits and adaptations.
Neutron stars harbor some of the most extreme environments in the universe: their densities soar to several times those of atomic nuclei, and they possess some of the strongest gravitational fields of any known objects, surpassed only by black holes. First observed in the 1960s, much of the internal composition of neutron stars is still unknown. Scientists are beginning to look to gravitational waves emitted by binary neutron‐star inspirals—pairs of mutually orbiting neutron stars—as possible sources of information about their interiors.
When it comes to research on habitats for pollinating insects, villages have so far received relatively little attention. The project Summende Dörfer (Buzzing Villages), based at the Chair of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology (Zoology III) at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), aims to change that. In the Würzburg region and the Rhön, researchers examined a total of 40 villages to investigate which habitats within village environments are particularly insect-friendly and species-rich—and where improvements could be made. The results have now been published in the journal Ecological Applications.
