Why so many mollusks sound Greek—their naming evolves at a snail's pace

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," said Juliet Capulet in William Shakespeare's famous play. And the same is ...

Water simulation of famous quantum effect reveals unexpected wave patterns

In the quirky quantum world, particles can be affected by forces that they never directly encounter. A classic example is the ...

A crowd scientist is helping the Boston Marathon manage a growing field of 30,000-plus runners

Running the Boston Marathon is tough enough without having to jostle your way from Hopkinton to Copley Square.

When AI starts shopping for you, fashion may be entering a new era of pricing

Fashion has always been a bit different to other industries. Consumers do not just buy because they need something. They buy ...

A cheaper way to fight 'forever chemicals': How pH-controlled traps could clean drinking water

Forever chemicals don't break down and don't disappear, but Florida International University scientists have developed a safer, cheaper, and reusable solution that could remove these chemicals. FIU ...

A light-controlled 'muscle' could give synthetic cells a new way to move

Engineers interested in creating artificial cells to deliver drugs to unhealthy parts of the body face a key challenge: for a ...

Archaeologists have discovered 12,000‑year‑old dice. Here's what they reveal about the history of play

Humans have always been playful. But for much of our history, play has left little trace. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely ...

Wafer-scale 2D magnetic films emerge thanks to a new low-defect growth technique

In a major advance, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have devised a method to grow high-quality 2D ...

'Protected' seagrass meadows aren't necessarily healthy, because pollution doesn't stop at the shoreline

I spent last summer wading through seagrass meadows across Northern Ireland, from the sheltered waters of Strangford Lough to ...

Sulfur-rich Mercury magmas behave differently than Earth's do

Mercury is a small, rocky planet about which researchers know relatively little. Two missions, taking readings as they passed ...

Moroccan dinosaur's fearsome tail spikes evolved much earlier than we thought—new discovery

In the heart of the Middle Atlas Mountains in central Morocco, a global team of paleontologists and geologists has discovered ...

How tiny voids could make fusion targets more stable under powerful shockwaves

Picture two materials sandwiched together. The boundary between them may appear flat, but, in reality, it is full of tiny ...