Category Science & Discovery

Poor sleep can make you susceptible to a wide range of physical and mental health issues, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and anxiety. But new research indicates it may also increase the chances of yet another unwanted outcome: embracing…

Understanding the seabed is crucial for laying undersea cables, calculating tsunami paths and projecting sea level rises. It covers nearly three-quarters of our planet but the ocean floor is less mapped than the moon, an astonishing fact driving a global…

A ‘quantum processor’ has solved a physics problem on the behaviour of magnetism in certain solids that would take hundreds of thousands of years to calculate on the largest conventional supercomputers. The result is the latest claim of machine showing…

During a cataclysmic mass extinction event, there are typically not many places to hide. However, a region of the mountainous Turpan-Hami Basin in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in Western China may have been an oasis for some living organisms during…

Recently restored grasslands (top row) are visited mostly by flies and hoverflies that are generalists and thus often carry pollen from one plant to flowers of a different species (from left to right: Syrphus torvus on Galium verum, Eristalis tenax…

Rice, J. R. & Ruina, A. L. Stability of steady frictional slipping. J. Appl. Mech. 50, 343–349 (1983). Article  MATH  ADS  Google Scholar  Dieterich, J. H. in Treatise on Geophysics 2nd edn (ed. Schubert, G.) Vol. 4, 93–110 (Elsevier, 2007).…

A large boulder used as decoration in a rural Australian high school’s foyer is actually covered in dinosaur footprints—it just took around 20 years for anyone to notice. After examining the ancient rock, paleontologists at the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur…

Credit: KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA from Pexels Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research…

Band representation theory for SSGs Band representations are constructed from the atomic limit as introduced by Zak52. Building on Zak’s theory, the theory of topological quantum chemistry and symmetry indicators were used in electronic topological diagnosis, where thousands of materials…

AI-generated “deepfake” materials are flooding the internet, sometimes with dangerous results. In just the last year, AI has been used to make deceiving voice clones of a former US president and spread fake, politically-charged images depicting children in natural disasters.…