Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago

As space agencies and private companies look toward a sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth. New research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution—transforming one of the moon's most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource. The study demonstrates that lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial stand-in for the moon's fine, abrasive dus

The South Asian summer monsoon sustains billions of people today. For a long time, the prevailing scientific view has held that the formation and intensification of the South Asian summer monsoon were primarily controlled by the rapid uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. However, geological records present a long-standing puzzle from the Early to Middle Miocene (25 to 15 million years ago): the South Asian monsoon rainfall was remarkably strong, even though the Somali Jet—the primary wind system trans

Researchers have developed a new methodology that uses artificial intelligence tools to identify and count target viruses more efficiently than previous techniques. The new approach can be used in applications such as pharmaceutical biomanufacturing.

How did the earliest life on Earth build complex biological machinery with so few tools? A new study explores how the simplest building blocks of proteins—once limited to just half of today's amino acids—could still form the sophisticated structures life depends on.