The Earth’s oceans are crisscrossed with roughly 1.2 million km of fiber optic telecommunication cables — enough to girdle the planet 30 times. Researchers have now succeeded in using a fiber in a submarine cable as a passive listening system, enabling them to listen to and monitor whales.

Satellite-tracking of the largest fish in the ocean offered insight into their migratory and feeding behavior, but their breeding grounds are still a mystery.

While rovers traverse the Martian surface and spacecraft watch from orbit, much of the planet's atmosphere and geology is left unexplored. A team of engineers is developing a motorless sailplane to explore and gather data about these areas. The sailplane imitates the flight of the albatross by taking advanage of wind patterns to maintain flight for long periods.

Although most fundamental mathematical equations that describe electronic structures are long known, they are too complex to be solved in practice. This has hampered progress in physics, chemistry and the material sciences. Thanks to modern high-performance computing clusters and the establishment of the simulation method density functional theory (DFT), researchers were able to change this situation. However, even with these tools the modelled processes are in many cases still drastically simplified. Now, physicists at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) and the Institute of Radiation Physics at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) succeeded in significantly improving the DFT method. This opens up new possibilities for experiments with ultra-high intensity lasers, as the group explains in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jctc.2c00012).

In a recent paper published in National Science Review, Chinese scientists report an optoelectronic device with a new signal processing behavior named photon-controlled diode. It can change the output current from a fully-off state to a rectified state after illumination, leading to the first anti-crosstalk photomemory array without using any selectors, paving the way for the development of highly integrated and low-power optoelectronic systems.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Songbirds learning from nearby birds that food supplies might be growing short respond by changing their physiology as well as their behavior, research by the Oregon State University College of Science shows.

An international team of scientists has developed an accurate record of preindustrial sea level utilizing precisely dated phreatic overgrowths on speleothems that provide a detailed history of Late Holocene sea-level change in Mallorca, Spain, an island in the western Mediterranean Sea. The results provide an unprecedented picture of sea level over the past 4,000 years, putting the preindustrial and modern global mean sea level (GMSL) histories in context.