In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday has released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, with ...

Rivers are Earth’s arteries. Water, sediment and nutrients self-organize into diverse, dynamic channels as they journey from the mountains to the sea. Some rivers carve out a single pathway, while ...

Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green lifeforms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon ...

Groundwater is rapidly declining across the globe, often at accelerating rates. Writing in the journal Nature, UC Santa Barbara researchers present the largest assessment of groundwater levels around ...

Touchdown airbursts — a type of cosmic impact that may be more common than the crater-forming, dinosaur-killing kind — remain somewhat less understood. UC Santa Barbara Earth Science Emeritus ...

Sometimes simple solutions are better. It all depends on the nature of the problem. For humpback whales, the problem is the rope connecting a crab trap on the seafloor to the buoy on the surface. And ...

Listen to the first notes of an old, beloved song. Can you name that tune? If you can, congratulations — it’s a triumph of your associative memory, in which one piece of information (the first few ...

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. In this case, the “job” is the breakdown of lignin, the structural biopolymer that gives stems, bark and branches their signature woodiness. One of the ...

Humans have engineered climate change by manipulating the environment. There’s a hope that we may also be able to mitigate this, predominantly through reducing emissions, but in some cases by ...

It remains an open question when a commercial quantum computer will emerge that can outperform classical (non-quantum) machines in speed and energy efficiency while solving real-world combinatorial ...

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impacts are fully understood. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada are doing their part to change that. Researchers ...

According to long-standing canon in evolutionary biology, natural selection is cruelly selfish, favoring traits that help promote reproductive success. This usually means that the so-called “force” of ...