Tag: Science

The Arizona sunshine hits like a blowtorch. The pavement radiates heat like a stove burner. To make hot-weather walking less of an ordeal, Arizona State University researchers have created a web-based app that finds the coolest, shadiest ways to reach destinations on foot.

For many dads, talking with their teenager about sex and relationships can feel like a minefield.

No matter the time or vantage point, from a pre-Neolithic cave to a post-lockdown London high-rise, the predictability of the night sky has always been humanity's symbol of permanence and reassuring stability.

While scientists have studied how bacteria move toward food using a chemical radar known as chemotaxis, they have only watched single species swim in isolated environments over distances of only a few centimeters.

The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot's spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.

Growing evidence suggests that excessive outdoor lighting at night may be harming wildlife.

The quest to identify a new way to potentially counter one of the world's most widely discussed solar geoengineering proposals has taken a new, exciting turn—raising questions about how future climate interventions could be governed.

Conventional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, often lack specificity and can damage both cancerous and healthy cells, leading to severe side effects. With this in mind, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) have developed DNA nanostructures called tetrahedrons and modified them by attaching a vitamin E-derived molecule called alpha-tocopherol succinate (αT), which can disrupt vital functions inside cancer cells while acting protectively in healthy cells. By incorporating αT into the DNA tetrahedrons, the researchers significantly enhanced cellular uptake and improved anticancer efficacy, resulting in more selective and effective elimination of cancer cells.

Researchers have uncovered new insights into how phosphorus from recycled materials moves through soil—offering guidance to support more sustainable fertilizer use. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth, yet many soils lack enough of it to support strong crop yields. Farmers often rely on fertilizers made from mined phosphorus, a limited, nonrenewable resource.

Human-caused sea-level rise has significantly increased the frequency of extreme coastal flooding worldwide, according to a new study led by a Tulane University researcher. The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that coastal flooding events expected only once every 100 years are now, on average, about 12 times more likely to occur.

The Conversation is a media partner of the think tank Vision’s seventh ‘Europe of the Future’ conference in Siena, Italy.

Professor Jeremy Howick, University of Leicester, receiving the 2025 Professor Sir Paul Curran award from Lady Curran, at a celebration of authors’ work.

The Conversation invites academics across the UK and Ireland to write a poem inspired by climate change research.

The Conversation Prize is back in 2026.

The Conversation UK is delighted to announce that Professor Paul Boyle, Vice-Chancellor of Swansea University, will be the new Chair of its Board of Trustees.

December 16 marked 250 years since the writer’s birth – but at The Conversation, we have been celebrating all year.

There is a gap between the affection of graduates for universities and the relative scepticism of those that have not attended higher education.

Prototypes For Humanity brings in research talent from more than 800 universities around the world.

Prof Nishan Canagarajah, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, is to step down as Chair of The Conversation UK’s Board of Trustees.

Conferences that bring people of different backgrounds together and propose solutions are more likely to create change.

A new study projects the intertwined relationship between fires and the money spent fighting them.

Measurable characteristics can be used to develop archetypes of complex agricultural systems, helping stakeholders to assess where different adaptation strategies are more likely to succeed.

To date news reports suggest two fatal landslides with a combined toll of 17 people. There are various news reports trickling in about the landslides triggered by the 8 June 2026 M=7.8 earthquake offshore Mindanao in the Philippines. As usual, the remote locations of many of the landslides means that the information is a bit […]

Solid-state fuels—recently used to help launch astronauts to the Moon for the first time in decades—appear to be the fuel type with the most detrimental effects on the ozone.

Initial analyses suggest that the earthquake this morning has the potential to have triggered significant numbers of landslides and areas of liquefaction. At the time of writing, the impacts of the M=7.8 earthquake that occurred offshore the south coast of Mindanao in the Philippines remain unclear. Initial reports in the local press suggest 15 fatalities […]

Locally, mangroves can sometimes adapt to rising seas, but global trends look troubling.

Frequent impacts from asteroids and planetesimals in Earth’s earliest days shaped the planet’s crust and created environments that may have supported prebiotic chemistry, and possibly even early life.

New research has revealed that significant amounts of excess nitrogen in coastal waters are buried as oyster reefs grow and that some reefs trap more nitrogen than others.

With unique monsoon, mesoscale and submesoscale processes, the Indian Ocean offers critical insights and new challenges to achieving a full understanding of marine environments and the Earth system.

The Trump administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun dismantling the infrastructure of a $368 million deep-ocean observing program critical to monitoring marine ecosystems, global currents, marine heat waves, and more, according to a 21 May announcement.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe: link It’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the ex

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson It might have seemed exotic when it first appeared, but the forecast “cone of uncertainty” used by the NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center (NHC) is now a familiar part of tropical cyclone readiness in U.S. states and territories. For 2026, NHC has made a couple of key tweaks to its standard cone product. It’s also testing an expanded version of the cone – one made feasible by a new way of understanding how and where forecast errors arise. Since its debut in 2002, the cone has become what a University of Miami writer called “arguably [the cen

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 31, 2026 thru Sat, June 6, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Policy and Politics (8 articles) Scilencing The Trump Administration would just as soon we didn't know stuff, especially about our planet The Crucial Years, Bill McKibben, May 31, 2026. Companies No Longer Report Greenhouse Gas Emissions And Climate Risk Progressive lawmakers and environmental groups strongly condemned the decision, ar

From time to time, we announce housekeeping items that cover various changes in the Skeptical Science (SkS) web site. Today, it's an important one for all people who are posting comments on our articles: an update to the Comments Policy. Reasons for the Updates The Comments Policy is an important document at SkS: not only does it provide guidance for the behaviour of commenters, but it also provides guidance to the moderators on how to deal with comment threads that are starting to go off the rails. The moderation team strives to apply a reasonably uniform level of moderation, and the Comments Policy is the set of rules we follow. We have been discussing some updates internally over the past few weeks, and now it is time to have the changes go live. The changes have been prompted by a few recent comments that started to use AI to generate text. (W

Open access notables Historical Volcanic Eruptions Mitigated the Expected Rapid Arctic Sea Ice Decline Prior to 2000, Wang et al., Geophysical Research Letters Arctic sea ice has declined at sharply contrasting rates over the past four decades—modest before 2000 and rapid thereafter. Using observational and model evidence, we show that large tropical volcanic eruptions can trigger decade-long Arctic sea ice recoveries, and that without the 1982 El Chichón and 1991 Pinatubo eruptions, Arctic sea ice would have declined approximately 1.5 times faster before 2000. We further show a model's sensitivity to volcanic aerosol forcing scales with its sens

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler I’ve long been struck by how hard it is to predict the evolution of our energy system, even a few years in advance, never mind 25 or 30 years. I still remember the “peak oil” craze in the mid 2000s, when people were telling me the end of oil was nigh. It sounded convincing right up until it turned out to be wrong. In this post, let me show you how bad previous predictions have been for the electricity sector. evolution of our energy system in 6 charts Each plot below shows annual predictions of how a particular source of electricity will evolve as well as what actually happened. The data come from the Energ

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Do electric vehicles almost always have a lower carbon footprint than gasoline-powered cars? The EPA, IPCC, and many independent studies have found that electric vehicles have lower lifetime emissions than gas-powered vehicles in nearly all cases. “Lifetime” calculations include emissions released during EV manufacture, as well as the generation o

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Thanks to the transition from fossil fuels to clean technologies, what used to be considered the worst-case climate change scenario now appears to be outside the realm of plausibility, climate scientists said in a recent study. That study made headlines in May when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that climate scientists had admitted that their projections had been wrong, a claim akin to an anti-vaxxer gloating that the official end of the pandemic proved that COVID was never a problem. And the study contained sobering news: The best-case climate scenario is close to slipping out of reach, and a business-as-usual scenario is still a very dangerous one, with high risks of

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 24, 2026 thru Sat, May 30, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts (7 articles) Malnourished Gray Whales of the Eastern North Pacific Are in `Serious Trouble` The population has plummeted over the past seven years as climate change triggers mass starvation in warming Arctic waters. Inside Climate News, By Blaine Harden, May 24, 2026. An Unusually Early Heat Wave Breaks Temp

Open access notables Climate Change Communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Schäfer et al., Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Chang Artificial intelligence (AI), and especially generative AI (GenAI), is rapidly reshaping climate change communication (CCC). Once dominated by news coverage and public campaigns, CCC now extends across scientists, NGOs, corporations, journalists, influencers, and citizens—all increasingly encountering and adopting AI tools. This article provides a comprehensive review of scholarship on the nexus of AI and CCC, synthesizing insights scattered across disciplines from social and computer science, and inter