Researchers have found that the reason there are more undergraduate men than women majoring in physics, engineering and computer science is not because men are higher achievers. On the contrary, the scholars found that men with very low high-school GPAs in math and science and very low SAT math scores were choosing these math-intensive majors […] More
Australia’s most recent wildfire season was so severe that smoke from the fires reached new heights in the atmosphere — and showed some very weird behavior while it was up there. A particularly intense series of bushfires in southeastern Australia from December 29 to January 4 spurred the formation of huge pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCb, clouds […] More
Last year marked the third year in a row of when Indonesia’s bleak rate of deforestation has slowed in pace. One reason for the turnaround may be the country’s antipoverty program. That initiative is associated with a 30 percent reduction in tree cover loss in villages, researchers report June 12 in Science Advances. In 2007, […] More
On the International Space Station, astronauts are weightless. Atoms are, too. That weightlessness makes it easier to study a weird quantum state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Now, the first Bose-Einstein condensates made on the space station are reported in the June 11 Nature. The ability to study the strange state of matter […] More
Mangrove forests can only take so much. The famously resilient, salt-tolerant and twisty trees have so far managed to keep pace with rising sea levels, providing a valuable buffer to coastal communities against pounding storm surges. Now, researchers have found the forests’ limit. Mangroves cannot survive in seas rising faster than about 7 millimeters per […] More
Someday, shadows and light could team up to provide power. A new device exploits the contrast between bright spots and shade to create a current that can power small electronics. “We can harvest energy anywhere on Earth, not just open spaces,” says Swee Ching Tan, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore. Tan […] More
Tree StoryValerie TrouetJohns Hopkins Univ., $27 Once you look at trees through the eyes of a dendrochronologist, you never quite see the leafy wonders the same way again. Peel away the hard, rough bark and there is a living document, history recorded in rings of wood cells. Each tree ring pattern of growth is unique, […] More
For some corals, going bright may be part of their fight against bleaching. Higher-than-normal ocean temperatures can cause some corals to bleach and lose the beneficial algae that dwell within their cells. Those algae help feed the corals and give them their color, so bleached corals can become bone white, and may struggle to survive […] More
