Science X Dialog

Have you ever walked across a salt flat so expansive it feels like another planet? That's what it's like standing in Egypt's coastal sabkhas—those otherworldly landscapes where the ground crunches beneath your feet and the ...

One of the central ideas in modern physics is the phase transition—a sudden transformation of the state of a material. We encounter phase transitions throughout everyday life: water freezes into ice, wax melts in the warmth ...

Despite the importance and dominance of angiosperms ("flowering plants") in the current ecosystem, it is rather surprising that we know so little about their origin and early evolution. Paleobotanists have been making efforts ...

Gold has been the safe choice for perovskite solar cells. We found a way to stop needing it.

In a new study in Environmental Research: Ecology, I analyzed how fires were able to burn into communities and how fire-resistant land uses could be combined with fuel treatments to reduce fires burning into communities. ...

Tall trees are generally associated with high-biomass forests. This is particularly true for forests dominated by Sequoia sempervirens (hereafter redwood), the world's tallest tree species. Extreme decay resistance, the ability ...

Fibrinogen, the abundant plasma protein best known for forming blood clots, may play a second and far less benign role during SARS-CoV-2 infection: acting as a molecular bridge that simultaneously hides the virus from neutralizing ...

When I first arrived in Peru's Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve in 2005, a local youth surprised me with an offer to sell me a live owl, despite the fact that we were in a protected area where commercial hunting was prohibited. ...

Each person has a unique gut microbial population, with variation shaped by diet, lifestyle and disease. We are seeing a rapid rise in metabolic disorders, obesity and inflammatory diseases that cannot be explained by our ...

When we watch a metal part being built by laser-based metal additive manufacturing (AM), we're only seeing part of the story. In one kind of metal AM process, a high-powered laser sweeps across a bed of metal powder, creating ...

When one mentions "waves," we immediately think of a perturbation that propagates. This applies to waves on the shore, sound waves in the air or electromagnetic waves that we use to transmit information via optical fibers. ...

For decades, neuroscientists have thought about communication between the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia in a fairly linear way. The cortex sends information into the basal ganglia, where that information is processed ...