Category Science & Discovery

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.…

The Summit supercomputer revealed how damaged strands of DNA are surgically repaired by a molecular pathway called nucleotide excision repair, or NER. NER’s protein components can change shape to perform different functions of repair on broken strands of DNA (blue…

Schultz, W., Dayan, P. & Montague, P. R. A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science 275, 1593–1599 (1997). Article  PubMed  MATH  Google Scholar  Gershman, S. J. & Uchida, N. Believing in dopamine. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. (2019). Wood, A.…

The partial jawbone from a human ancestor nicknamed “Pink” is helping rewrite the history of hominin migration into Western Europe. Researchers believe that Pink represents the oldest archaic fossils ever found in this region, according to a study published in…

The three boundaries divvied up the solar system planets equally well. But the XUV and sunlight shorelines cut very different swaths through the population of rocky planets orbiting M dwarfs, with more worlds falling on the airless side of the…

Credit: Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels When a company misses an earnings target, it usually faces some backlash: a drop in stock prices, negative headlines, and sometimes even CEO turnover. But when it misses a self-imposed climate goal, most often the…