Science X Dialog

Coordinating groups of underwater robots is difficult because communication below the surface is slow and unreliable. GPS signals do not work underwater, and radio waves fade rapidly in seawater. Most underwater communication ...

For years, the Prairie Pothole Region has bothered me in a very specific way. On a map, it looks like a normal landscape: fields, gentle slopes, small streams. But hydrologically, it behaves like something else entirely. ...

I have always been interested in how people make decisions under uncertainty—especially decisions about safety. But it was not until I began studying housing conditions and disaster risk that I realized how deeply our built ...

Imagine trying to design a key for a lock that is constantly changing its shape. That is the exact challenge we face in modern drug discovery when dealing with intrinsically disordered proteins.

When most people think about natural selection, they imagine individuals competing with one another: The fastest animal escapes predators, the strongest plant produces more seeds, and the most resistant bacteria better survive ...

We like to think that animals follow the crowd. If most of the group does something, surely the individual will copy. But what if the story is more complicated? What if the deciding factor isn't just what the majority is ...

Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since ...

If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists ...

Neural crest cells are a population of stem cells that invade the embryo in early development. They play a big role in what you look like: the pigments of your eyes, of your skin, and the bone structure of your face are all ...

The standard cosmological model (present-day version of "Big Bang," called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift ...

Can we use nothing more than sunlight and inexpensive materials to produce clean hydrogen fuel while also removing toxic pollutants from water? That question shaped our recent work with γ-In2S3, a semiconductor that has ...

I still vividly remember the first time we observed neurons responding not to audible sound, but to concentrated, precisely calibrated ultrasonic pulses. On the screen in front of us, calcium signals from brain cells began ...