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Rain that falls miles beyond the national park can sink into the ground through sinkholes, travel through hidden underground passages and eventually emerge within the Mammoth Cave system. A major groundwater-tracing programme helped scientists uncover this hidden connection, mapping the cave's underground plumbing and revealing that much of the water flowing into it originates beyond the park's protected boundaries.

Imagine, what if a protein's complex 3-D structure could be converted into a simple string of numbers--and that string could help scientists understand what the protein does? That's the premise of an innovative AI model developed by 17-year-old Jerry Xu of Lexington, Massachusetts, who earned $90,000 in the Regeneron Science Talent Search for his research, states an online report by the Society for Science.

For years, environmental groups and residents near Lahaina, Maui, suspected that treated wastewater pumped underground was somehow finding its way into the Pacific Ocean, a concern later confirmed by a University of Hawaii tracer study that Earthjustice and other groups cited in their legal campaign against Maui County's disposal practices. Divers had documented unusual submarine springs bubbling up off Kahekili Beach Park as early as 2007, and elevated nitrogen isotope readings in nearby macroalgae hinted that these springs carried something other than ordinary groundwater, according to USGS-led research on nearshore groundwater discharge at the site.

A newly described snake from the forests of New Guinea has been given a name familiar to rock fans around the world. Scientists have named the non-venomous species Lielaphis slashi, or Slash's groundsnake, after Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, whose real name is Saul Hudson.

Scientists at IIT Madras have built the IntelliSeat, a smart driver's seat that senses fatigue from the way a person sits and warns them before a crash. Here is how the wireless seat works, the science of muscle fatigue behind it, and why it could make India's roads safer.

Thousands of hours of rainforest recordings are helping scientists teach artificial intelligence to recognise Amazonian birds that can be difficult to identify by sound alone. In Colombia, Cornell researchers have been collecting acoustic data from cattle ranches, rubber agroforestry plots and forest to build a clearer picture of which species are using each landscape.

For more than a century, a frog living across the forests of western Ecuador and southern Colombia carried the wrong scientific name. It was not hidden in some unexplored corner of the rainforest, either.

For centuries, lake sturgeon have moved quietly through the rivers and lakes of the Great Lakes region, growing slowly and aging in a way that has been difficult to measure. Their lives can stretch far beyond those of most freshwater fish, but just how far has remained uncertain.

A $12 million research project at Penn State is trying to give drones a new way of making decisions, drawing inspiration from the small brains of insects and other animals. Funded by the US Army's Army Research Laboratory, the project aims to develop an onboard sensing system that can pick out useful information without sending large amounts of data to external computers.

Dry air is not completely without water. There is moisture suspended in the atmosphere even when rainfall is scarce, and 13-year-old Aniket Sarkar wanted to find out whether some of it could be recovered for agriculture.