A Rutgers-led team of scientists has uncovered evidence of how galaxies expand by tracing the invisible scaffolding of the universe created by a mysterious substance known as dark matter.

In a newly published study in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers used what they said are the largest-ever samples of special galaxies called Lyman-alpha emitters to study how galaxies clumped together over billions of years. In doing so, they gained an improved understanding of how galaxies relate to the surrounding dark matter and how they evolve over time.

One of the great challenges of ecology is to understand the factors that maintain, or undermine, diversity in ecosystems, researchers write in a new report in the journal Science. The researchers detail their development of a new model that — using a tree census and genomic data collected from multiple species in a forest — can predict future fluctuations in the relative abundance of those species.

A new study led by Boston University marine biologists reveals that heat waves are threatening the future of the fish made famous by Finding Nemo

Researchers discovered the earliest instance in which fish took advantage of their gill bones to make a new innovation in the way they eat. A fish called Platyomus evolved a toothy, tongue-like apparatus used to bite food 310 million years ago.

Astronomers using observatories around the world, including the Gemini South telescope, the SOAR telescope and the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, have found that the asteroid 1998 KY26 is almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission, and the new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced new funding to understand and reduce grassland fire risk in the Southern Great Plains. The five-year project is being led by grassland fire expert Jon Henn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

A new study led by Purdue University researchers has uncovered why some hurricanes grow significantly larger than others and why this growth occurs rapidly under certain ocean conditions. The research shows, for the first time, that hurricanes grow in size much faster when traveling over locally warm waters where the ocean surface is significantly warmer than the rest of the tropical oceans.

Rice’s César A. Uribe is developing computational tools to help scientists better understand ecosystems with recent studies using AI to glean new insights from different kinds of ecological data — from African mammal food webs to tropical forest soundscapes.