Sulfur signals in the Antarctic snow have revealed the importance of overlooked atmospheric chemistry for understanding climate, past and future.

The element sulfur is everywhere and occurs in four stable forms, or isotopes, each with a slightly different mass. Ordinary reactions incorporate sulfur isotopes into molecules according to mass. But sometimes sulfur divvies up differently so that the relative ratios of the different isotopes is anomalous. The authors of a new paper measured the direction and degree of that anomaly for individual layers of snow representing a single season's snowfall.

When soccer games are determined by penalty kicks, it's part technical and part psychological. Players at the highest levels have good technical skills but among them, a few players on each team really stand out - and whenever possible, they are taking the kicks. But they will likely be tired and they know if they miss completely there is no chance to score regardless of what the goalie does, so they approach the shot a little more conservatively than they otherwise would, so goalies know if they can simply guess left or right they stand a decent chance of blocking the shot.

Materials that are firmly bonded together with epoxy and other tough adhesives are ubiquitous in modern life — from crowns on teeth to modern composites used in construction. Yet it has proved remarkably difficult to study how these bonds fracture and fail, and how to make them more resistant to such failures.

Now researchers at MIT have found a way to study these bonding failures directly, revealing the crucial role of moisture in setting the stage for failure. 

Autism is not caused by a deficiency of oxytocin,  according to new findings from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford.

Fires and the resultant smoke that comes from them are both just as widespread and heavy as they were in the month of July. Hundreds of fires dot the landscape and the Northwest Territories Live Fire map shows the extent of the wildfires and hot spots that have been reported. Fire danger around this area of the Northwest Territories remains in either the high or extreme range.

On the live fire map, notated detections of new fires number in the dozens. These fires are ones having been detected within the last 24 hours. Residents of Yellowknife were witness to red lightning recently due to the amount of smoke in the atmosphere coloring the lightning strikes.

There's a new wave of sound on the horizon carrying with it a broad scope of tantalizing potential applications, including advanced ultrasonic imaging and therapy, acoustic cloaking, and levitation and particle manipulation. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a technique for generating acoustic bottles in open air that can bend the paths of sound waves along prescribed convex trajectories.