Iron is a micronutrient indispensable for life, enabling processes such as respiration, photosynthesis, and DNA synthesis. Iron availability is often a limiting resource in today's oceans, which means that increasing the flow of iron into them can increase the amount of carbon fixed by phytoplankton, with consequences for the global climate.

MIT physicists and colleagues have created a new material with unusual superconducting and metallic properties, thanks to wavy layers of atoms only billionths of a meter thick that repeat themselves over and over to create a macroscopic sample that can be manipulated by hand. The large size of the sample makes it much easier to explore its quantum behavior, or interactions at the atomic scale that give rise to its properties.

Birds of a feather flock together but strong pairing in geese has been shown to produce better breeding results, according to a new study.

Captive tigers in the United States outnumber those living in the wild. The World Wildlife Federation estimates around 5,000 of the big cats reside in the U.S., mostly owned by private citizens.

By cleverly applying a computational technique, scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding the "pseudogap," a long-standing puzzle in quantum physics with close ties to superconductivity. The discovery, presented in Science, will help scientists in their quest for room-temperature superconductivity, a holy grail of condensed matter physics that would enable lossless power transmission, faster MRI machines and superfast levitating trains.