Science

Last month was the hottest September on record by an "extraordinary" margin as the world flirts dangerously with breaching a key warming limit, the EU climate monitor said on Thursday.

Much of the world sweltered through unseasonably warm weather in September, in a year expected to be the hottest in human history and after the warmest-ever global temperatures during the Northern Hemisphere summer.

With a long grey beard and old-school brown suit, a Charles Darwin lookalike observes marine iguanas and the blue-footed booby - an iconic bird on the Galapagos Islands.

Two centuries after the British biologist visited the archipelago which inspired his theory of evolution, a retired US professor has tracked part of his journey all while dressed as his 19th-century hero.

Talk about bouncing back.

MIT professor Moungi Bawendi is a co-winner of this year's Nobel chemistry prize for helping develop "quantum dots" -- nanoparticles that are now found in next generation TV screens and help illuminate tumors within the body.

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on tiny quantum dots.

Moungi Bawendi, of MIT, Louis Brus, of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov, of Nanocrystals Technology Inc., were honored for their work with the tiny particles that are just a few atoms in diameter and whose electrons have constrained movement. This effects how they absorb and release visible light, allowing for very bright colors. They are used in many electronics, like LED displays.

There never used to be young great white sharks basking off the busy beaches of central California, but as climate change starts to bite, warmer waters are enticing them north -- with possibly catastrophic consequences for a whole ecosystem.

Despite their fearsome reputation, brought about in part by the "Jaws" movie franchise, the main risk from these predators is not to swimmers and surfers -- or even the local police chief -- but to otters.

To hunt the narwhal, whose long tusk was the unicorn horn of medieval myth, you need absolute silence.

So much so that the Indigenous hunters of the Scoresby Sound in eastern Greenland forbid their children from throwing pebbles into the water lest they spook the spiral-tusked whales.

Shifting weather patterns caused by climate change are limiting when controlled burns can be carried out to prevent wildfires in the western United States, a new study warns.

Controlled burns, also known as prescribed fires, are a tool to preemptively dispose of combustible vegetation with the goal of preventing larger, uncontrolled fires.

Bill Gates is emphatic: "I don't plant trees," he declared recently, wading into a debate about whether mass tree planting is really much use in fighting climate change.

The billionaire philanthropist was being probed on how he offsets his carbon emissions and insisted he avoids "some of the less proven approaches."

Amid soaring rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, US health authorities on Monday proposed that doctors begin prescribing a common antibiotic as a pill taken after sex, despite concerns over fueling more resistant strains.

DoxyPEP, or doxycycline used as a post-exposure prophylaxis, was found to cut the risk of developing these infections in clinical trials involving men who have sex with men and transgender women who engaged in condomless sex.

More than 100 dolphins have died in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the past week as the region grapples with a severe drought, and many more could die soon if water temperatures remain high, experts say.

The Mamiraua Institute, a research group of Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, said two more dead dolphins were found Monday in the region around Tefe Lake, which is key for mammals and fish in the area.

Pierre Agostini of The Ohio State University in the US; Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany; and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden won the award.

The laureates are being recognised “for their experiments, which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules. They have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy", the jury said in a statement.

From developing a one-and-done coronavirus shot to overcoming misinformation and global vaccine inequity, Nobel prize winner Drew Weissman says that at 64, he's only "speeding up."

The University of Pennsylvania immunologist was awarded the biggest accolade in medicine on Monday for his pioneering research on messenger RNA, the technology behind Covid-19 vaccines that changed the course of the pandemic.