Amanda Morris

Bufflehead mason bee visits Penstemon digitalis. Credit: Nick Dorian For gardeners who love colorful, tidy flower beds, helping pollinators doesn't have to mean going fully wild.

For gardeners who love colorful, tidy flower beds, helping pollinators doesn’t have to mean going fully wild.

Sticking with the same people might feel safe and comfortable. But a new Northwestern University study suggests it can actually trap new ideas and behaviors inside tight echo chambers. By contrast, the research, published in Communications Physics, shows that when interactions shift away from familiar contacts—and toward new ones—activity can spread more widely.

Northwestern University engineers have developed a small, wireless polygraph system you can wear, designed to sense underlying stress hidden deep within the body.

Northwestern University scientists have developed a new liquid material that charges like a battery, transforms like a living organism and then resets itself in open air. Traditionally, harvesting energy, storing it and using it require separate materials or devices. The new platform merges all three functions into a single material, opening the door for adaptive, clean, renewable systems that don't require plastics or metals.

Astronomers have uncovered long-sought evidence that the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole is producing a wind, revealing a previously hidden aspect of how it interacts with its surroundings. Credit: Shutterstock

Researchers have shown that quantum entanglement can survive a journey through a busy metropolitan fiber network carrying powerful conventional data traffic. Credit: Shutterstock

Faint bow shocks around the Helix Nebula expose stellar fragments being stripped apart before rejoining the galaxy.

A ghostly ribbon of stars winding around a faint galaxy 115 million light-years away is giving astronomers a rare new way to trace one of the universe’s most elusive ingredients: dark matter.

A new image of the Helix Nebula reveals how dying stars return material to the galaxy.