A research team from the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has clarified how deposited nitrogen is retained in forest ecosystems and how this process contributes to carbon sequestration across China. The findings were published in Global Change Biology on January 30.
The stunning Sierra Nevada red fox is one of the nation's rarest and most critically threatened mammals, with fewer than 50 believed to remain in the Sierra. And now, for the first time, a specimen has been successfully GPS-collared and released back into the region—marking a major victory for conservation efforts to protect the elusive vulpine.
What happens to soft matter when gravity disappears? To answer this, UvA physicists launched a fluid dynamics experiment on a sounding rocket. The suborbital rocket reached an altitude of 267 km before falling back to Earth, providing six minutes of weightlessness.
About a decade ago, author Mandy Len Catron wrote an essay for the New York Times about "36 questions that lead to love." The idea suggests that two people can grow closer—and even fall in love—by answering a series of increasingly intimate questions.
One of the longest stellar dimming events ever observed was likely caused by the gigantic saucer-like rings of either an unseen brown dwarf or "super-Jupiter" blocking its host star's light, astronomers say. For decades, the star—which sits 3,200 light-years from Earth and is about twice as big as our sun—had been observed as stable, but at the end of 2024 it faded dramatically.
A multinational research team led by Professor Tong Zhang from the Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU Engineering), in collaboration with an international team, has developed a new framework to assess and track antimicrobial resistance (AMR) connectivity across human, animal, and environmental sectors. The study systematically examines the connectivity of AMR and proposes an assessment framework along with mitigation strategies.
NASA's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was built for the ambitious purpose of performing an all-sky survey. The data it collects from more than 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way over its two-year mission will help scientists explore the origins of the universe and its evolution over time. But that doesn't mean scientists can't occasionally take a break from investigating the deepest cosmological mysteries to take a peek at an interstellar object (ISO), right?
Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since the pre-industrial period (1850–1900). This is the conclusion presented in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published in 2021.
Phosphorus is essential for plant growth and ecosystem productivity. In many natural forests, plants rely on soil microbes to release bioavailable phosphorus from organic matter. The PhoD gene, which encodes the key enzyme alkaline phosphatase, is a central marker for this microbial process. Its role in fertilized agricultural systems is well known, but its distribution and drivers in natural forest ecosystems have remained unclear.
When severe weather strikes, the National Weather Service's (NWS) Office of Water Prediction (OWP) makes critical flood forecasts with the National Water Model. Despite improvements over time, the model's performance has plateaued in recent years, leaving researchers from the federal government, academia, and private industry searching for a better solution.
