Razors, scalpels, and knives are commonly made from stainless steel, honed to a razor-sharp edge and coated with even harder materials such as diamond-like carbon. However, knives require regular sharpening, while razors are routinely replaced after cutting m…

Zebrafish are a common aquarium species, of value to hobbyists and scientists alike. Researchers have now engineered an unusual change in them that has echoes of Jurassic Park—but looks alone are deceiving.

New detailed observations with NSF's NOIRLab facilities reveal a young exoplanet, orbiting a young star in the Hyades cluster, that is unusually dense for its size and age. Weighing in at 25 Earth-masses, and slightly smaller than Neptune, this exoplanet's ex…

A collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University has led to the discovery and diagnosis of an aggressive malignant bone cancer—an osteosarcoma—for the first time ever in a dinosaur. No malignant cancers (tumours that can spread th…

A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars's surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively thro…

A majority of the world population lives on low lying lands near the sea, some of which are predicted to submerge by the end of the 21st century due to rising sea levels.

Within a mere eight years, CRISPR-Cas9 has become the go-to genome editor for both basic research and gene therapy. But CRISPR-Cas9 also has spawned other potentially powerful DNA manipulation tools that could help fix genetic mutations responsible for heredi…

At the heart of every white dwarf star—the dense stellar object that remains after a star has burned away its fuel reserve of gases as it nears the end of its life cycle—lies a quantum conundrum: as white dwarfs add mass, they shrink in size, until they becom…

At least twice in Earth's history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic "Snowball Earth" events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence suggests that the consecutive global …

Passengers flying Virgin Galactic on suborbital trips into space will be able to see themselves floating weightless against the backdrop of the Earth below while 16 cameras document the adventures, the company said Tuesday.

Scientists at CERN have reported on their first significant evidence for a process predicted by theory, paving the way for searches for evidence of new physics in particle processes that could explain dark matter and other mysteries of the universe.

A new study uses satellite data over the Southern Hemisphere to understand global cloud composition during the industrial revolution. This research tackles one of the largest uncertainties in today's climate models—the long-term effect of tiny atmospheric par…

A new study led by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) provides a clearer snapshot of conditions during the last ice age—when global ice sheets were at their peak—and could even lead to better models for future climate projections.

A cave in a remote part of Mexico was visited by humans around 30,000 years ago—15,000 years earlier than people were previously thought to have reached the Americas.

A team of researchers working at Hungary's National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture, has accidentally bred a new kind of fish—dubbed the sturddlefish by some observers, it is a cross between an Ame…

Research by the University of Liverpool has revealed that strange behaviour of the magnetic field in the South Atlantic region existed as far back as eight to 11 million years ago, suggesting that today's South Atlantic Anomaly is a recurring feature and unli…

The first images from ESA/NASA's Solar Orbiter are now available to the public, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun.

An increase of 20 to 30 per cent of invasive non-native (alien) species would lead to dramatic future biodiversity loss worldwide. This is the conclusion of a study by an international team of researchers led by Franz Essl and Bernd Lenzner from the Universit…

Driving across the arid American Southwest, one views miles upon miles of scrubby creosote bushes. Well-adapted to the hot, thirsty landscape, the evergreen shrub, also known as greasewood, chaparral and gobernadora, produces tufts of fluffy, white fruit caps…

Although the current human reference genome is the most accurate and complete vertebrate genome ever produced, there are still gaps in the DNA sequence, even after two decades of improvements. Now, for the first time, scientists have determined the complete s…