Ticks travel light, but they carry pathogens with them. When they parasitize migrating birds, these journeys can take them thousands of miles away from their usual geographic range. Historically, they haven't been able to establish themselves due to unsuitable climate conditions at the other end of their long journeys. But now, thanks to the climate crisis, it's getting easier for ticks to survive and spread, potentially bringing novel tick-borne pathogens with them.

Shifting our diets to be more sustainable can be a powerful way for each of us to address both climate change and global food insecurity. However, making such adjustments on the large scales necessary to make a difference globally can be a delicate matter.

We all start our lives as symmetric balls of cells. In humans, during the first few weeks after fertilization, embryonic cells undergo several rounds of division, increasing their mass. Then comes gastrulation, the process that changes everything and establishes our body plan. During gastrulation, the collection of uniform cells that make up the early embryo break symmetry and reorganize into a multi-layered structure with distinct cell types.

The throat of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans might seem like an odd place for exploring the complexity of life's mechanisms, until one realizes how much information has been collected on these tiny nematodes over the past several decades.

Researchers in the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have used machine learning and supercomputer simulations to investigate how tiny gold nanoparticles bind to blood proteins. The studies discovered that favorable nanoparticle-protein interactions can be predicted from machine learning models that are trained from atom-scale molecular dynamics simulations. The new methodology opens ways to simulate the efficacy of gold nanoparticles as targeted drug delivery systems in precision nanomedicine.

New research from RMIT University found confined and isolating environments changed the way people smelled and responded emotionally to certain food aromas.

In a new study, researchers at Osaka University have created the world's first compact, tunable-wavelength blue semiconductor laser, a significant advancement for far-ultraviolet light technology with promising applications in sterilization and disinfection.

As energy from the sun reaches Earth, some solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, leading to chemical reactions like the formation of ozone and the breakup of gas molecules. A new approach for modeling these reactions, developed by a team led by scientists at Penn State, may improve our understanding of the atmosphere on early Earth and help in the search for habitable conditions on planets beyond our solar system.

Scientists have identified many types of bacteria in the mouth, but many problems remain in understanding how they work with one another. One of the problems is that microbes assemble themselves into densely packed multi-species biofilms. Their density and complexity pose acute difficulties for visualizing individual cells and analyzing their interactions at single-cell level.

NASA's Curiosity rover is preparing for the next leg of its journey, a months-long trek to a formation called the boxwork, a set of weblike patterns on Mars's surface that stretches for miles. It will soon leave behind Gediz Vallis channel, an area wrapped in mystery. How the channel formed so late during a transition to a drier climate is one big question for the science team. Another mystery is the field of white sulfur stones the rover discovered over the summer.