All Science Articles

Why are dogs such great sniffers? A new canine connection shows powerful brain links between dogs’ sense of smell and sight.

Severe drought conditions dried up a river at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas leading to the pre-eminent discovery.

Scientists in Egypt have uncovered an odd-looking dinosaur with smaller teeth, stumpy arms, and a squashed face similar to a bulldog.

Cities are the planet’s largest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, so they offer the greatest opportunity to tackle climate change. Hitting net zero emissions by 2050, a target set at the COP26 summit, could be achieved more quickly using city digital twins – working virtual replicas – that help track, manage and reduce environmental damage rapidly.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a grave environmental problem. This persistent greenhouse gas produced by fossil fuels is relentlessly warming Earth’s climate. Technologies to reduce its levels and climate impact concern us all. So can breakthroughs that use CO2 to create new fuels help solve the problem? Potentially, yes.

Canada is taking a conscientious step towards reducing plastic pollution. On Monday, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, and the Minister of Health, Jean-Yves Duclos, announced their move to prohibit single-use plastics which include: checkout bags, cutlery, food service made from hard-to-recycle plastics, ring carriers, stir sticks, and straws.

Supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI) are indispensable tools for cooking up the next generation of advanced materials. Advanced computers allow scientists to rapidly design better alloys, chemical catalysts, and plastics using millions of potential candidates. Tomorrow’s high-tech materials are being road-tested this way to cut down human trial and error.

Products made from carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from the atmosphere are part of a fast-growing trend to decarbonize nearly everything we use. Food, drink, fuel, and plastics can all be made using CO2 from the air. And recycling carbon could create a circular economy that vastly reduces pollution and waste.

About 3,600 years ago, Tall el-Hammam was a bustling city-state in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea. It thrived for 1,500 years — until a devastating event destroyed the city and contaminated the surrounding farmland with salt. What had once been an extremely fertile area became completely barren overnight. Humans left the region for at least 500 years afterward, and researchers have struggled to explain what happened.

Marine conservationists and oceanographers are increasingly using drones to help them study sea and coastal habitats. Stream SHARK WEEK on discovery+.

Solar energy is virtually unlimited and one of the cleanest forms of renewable power. So building machines driven by the sun makes perfect environmental sense.

From voices raised in protest for change to the final tender words uttered to a dying loved one, sound and hearing are primal in connecting humans to the world. Now those moments are being acknowledged in an annual award for the Sound of the Year, created to honor audible history and the art of noise.

You could be forgiven for assuming that soft robotics is simply about making robots without rough edges – a kind of warm, fuzzy android experience. If machines that hug humans are the aim, then that’s probably true, but soft robots are often designed to operate in harsh or dangerous environments where others would struggle.

Freezing temperatures in the south and warming temperatures in the north? Something isn’t adding up.

Stop. Listen. Do you hear anything? Perhaps the sound of quiet conversation or laughter, the distant thrum of traffic, the buzz of fluorescent lighting, or the whirring of a fan in your air-conditioning unit. These are all sounds that are influenced or determined by architectural design and building acoustics.