Science

With typhoon Yagi battering Asia, storm Boris drenching parts of Europe, extreme flooding in the Sahel and hurricane Helene racing towards Florida, September so far has been a very wet month.

But while scientists can link some extreme weather events directly to human-caused global warming, it remains too early to draw clear conclusions about this sodden month.

Just like people confronted with a sea of options at the grocery store, bees foraging in meadows encounter many different flowers at once. They must decide which ones to visit for food, but it isn’t always a straightforward choice.

Flowers offer two types of food: nectar and pollen, which can vary in important ways. Nectar, for instance, can fluctuate in concentration, volume, refill rate and accessibility. It also contains secondary metabolites, such as caffeine and nicotine, which can be either disagreeable or appealing, depending on how much is present. Similarly, pollen contains proteins and lipids, which affect nutritional quality.

Rabies is a deadly disease. Without vaccination, a rabies infection is nearly 100% fatal once someone develops symptoms. Texas has experienced two rabies epidemics in animals since 1988: one involving coyotes and dogs in south Texas, and the other involving gray foxes in west central Texas. Affecting 74 counties, these outbreaks led to thousands of people who could have been exposed, two human deaths and countless animal lives lost.

In 1994, Gov. Ann Richards declared rabies a state health emergency. The Texas Department of State Health Services responded by launching the Oral Rabies Vaccination Program to control the spread of these wildlife rabies outbreaks.

Norway is set to inaugurate Thursday the gateway to a massive undersea vault for carbon dioxide, a crucial step before opening what its operator calls the first commercial service offering CO2 transport and storage.

The Northern Lights project plans to take CO2 emissions captured at factory smokestacks in Europe and inject them into geological reservoirs under the seabed.

The restoration of a creek in Vienna reduced the impact of flooding caused by Storm Boris, authorities say, one of many projects experts believe helped central Europe endure the deluge better than in previous years.

Flooding unleashed by the storm burst dams and devastated entire villages in central Europe, killing at least two dozen people in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania.

Twenty years ago this October, two physicists at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, published a groundbreaking paper on the “electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films”. Their work described the extraordinary electronic properties of graphene, a crystalline form of carbon equivalent to a single layer of graphite, just one atom thick.

Around that time, I started my doctorate at the University of Surrey. Our team specialised in the electronic properties of carbon. Carbon nanotubes were the latest craze, which I was happily following. One day, my professor encouraged a group of us to travel to London to attend a talk by a well-known science communicator from the University of Manchester. This was Andre Geim.

Countless parents across the country recently dropped their kids off at college for the first time. This transition can stir a whirlwind of feelings: the heartache of parting, sadness over a permanently changed family dynamic, the uncertainty of what lies ahead – but also the pride of seeing your child move toward independence. Some might describe the goodbye as bittersweet, or say that they’re feeling mixed emotions.

In that scenario, what would you do if I asked you to rate how you felt on a scale from 1-9, with 1 being the most negative and 9 the most positive? This question seems silly given the circumstances – how should you rate this blend of bad and good? Yet, this scale is what psychology researchers often use to survey feelings in scientific studies, treating emotions as either positive or negative, but never both.

Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."

During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.

The fabled Nazca lines, a series of massive incisions on the desert floor depicting animals, plants, imaginary beings and geometric figures, have fascinated scientists ever since they were first discovered around a century ago.

Best viewed from the air, the lines situated some 220 miles (350 kilometers) south of Lima are one of Peru's top tourist attractions.

The world's oceans are close to becoming too acidic to properly sustain marine life or help stabilise the climate, a new report said on Monday.

The report by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) details nine factors that are crucial for regulating the planet's ability to sustain life.

Scientists in New Zealand said Tuesday they have discovered a new species of "ghost shark", a type of fish that prowls the Pacific Ocean floor hunting prey more than a mile down.

The Australasian Narrow-nosed Spookfish was found living in the deep waters of Australia and New Zealand, according to scientists from Wellington-based National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

The South American jungle, spanning nine countries, is seen as crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Deforestation, mainly for mining and agricultural purposes, has led to the loss of 12.5 percent of the Amazon's plant cover from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.