Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of star formation, advanced radio telescopes have given researchers new insights into the inner workings of infant stars.
Wally Funk, an aviation pioneer who was the oldest woman to launch into space, has died. She was 87.
Digital technologies—from artificial intelligence to smartphones and data centers—are often described as "clean" innovations. Yet every device depends on minerals, electricity, labor and global supply chains, raising important questions about environmental justice and development.
Professor Carola Lorea of the University of Tübingen's Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology has published a comprehensive academic study on the Matua, a community of 50 million people scattered across India, Bangladesh and 32 other nations in the wake of evictions and forced migration. Despite national borders and natural barriers such as the Bay of Bengal Delta, swamps and the sea, the community's cohesion has only grown over the decades. Lorea's work represents more than 10 years of field studies into Matua life, and she describes how religious songs, drum rhythms and shared stories play a vital role in Matua society and have even made a protest movement possible.
Adapting canonical literary classics into cinema is an inherently difficult task, as it requires walking a razor's edge between remaining faithful to the text and translating it into another medium.
Facing both climate change and a crashing pollinator population, plants may be evolving to attract pollinators rather than adapting to a warming climate, and the trade-off has resulted in a steep decline in plants' rate of adaptation, according to a University of Michigan study. The researchers, studying morning glories, observed a 96% decrease in the population's rate of adaptation over nine years. The declining rate of adaptation could affect farmers, who deal with morning glory as an agricultural nuisance. The research is published in the journal Evolution Letters.
In K–12 schools across the country, administrators are tasked with keeping everyone safe. New research shows they may be the most in need of protection.
When people think about geological faults, they usually think about earthquakes. Yet faults do not move only during earthquakes. Sometimes they slip silently, without generating noticeable shaking, releasing stress over hours or days through slow fault movements that remain largely hidden from conventional monitoring systems.
The summer heat can be unrelenting, sending pets who usually run straight to their owners after being outside in search of their water bowls instead. Rehydrating after playtime is important, so if a pet does not have proper access—or a desire to seek out—water, the owner must step in before the companion's health is at risk.
Brown University chemists have provided direct evidence that upends the textbook explanation of how triple chemical bonds work in heavy elements. In a study published in Science, the researchers show evidence that when atomic nuclei are sufficiently heavy, the principles described in Einstein's theory of relativity change the structure of triple bonds—blurring the lines between the two separate types of bonds involved in textbook triple bonding.
