Although most Americans believe they know what brought down the World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, civil engineers are still seeking answers to questions that could save lives in the future.

Structural engineers need to know from a scientific perspective what happened to the buildings during the terrorist attacks in order to prevent future failures.

The search for answers continues with the help of a state-of-the-art animated visualization created by researchers at Purdue University.

A team of Canadian and U.S. researchers have uncovered evidence that ragged, kilometre-high undulating features on the surface of Mars were shorelines of massive ancient oceans that once covered one-third of the planet in water.

Mars’ oceanic past has been debated since Viking spacecraft images from the 1970’s pinpointed features that seemed similar to shorelines on the Earth. However, in the 1990s, NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor revealed that peaks and dips along these features had topographic differences of nearly 3 kilometres. Since old shorelines on Earth remain nearly flat relative to sea level, there was widespread skepticism that these features represented ancient shorelines.

A unique discovery of two celestial explosions at exactly the same position in the sky has led astronomers to suggest they have witnessed the death of one of the most massive stars that can exist.

A global collaboration of astronomers, led by Queen’s University Belfast teamed up with Japanese supernova hunter Koichi Itagaki to report an amazing new discovery. This is the first time such a double explosion has been observed and challenges our understanding of star-deaths.

Sandia National Laboratories is pioneering the future of superalloy materials by advancing the science behind how those superalloys are made.

As part of Sandia’s nanoscale research, a group of experts specializing in inorganic synthesis and characterization, modeling, and radiation science have designed a radical system of experiments to study the science of creating metal and alloy nanoparticles.

A young star’s strange elliptical ring of dust likely heralds the presence of an undiscovered Neptune-sized planet, says a University of Rochester astronomer

Stars in the early stages of life are surrounded by dust clouds that thin out and dissipate as the star reaches maturity, becoming rings in their final stages. One star, however, has a dust ring that has long puzzled astronomers because it is not centered around the star as usual. Instead, the ring is elliptical, with the parent star off to one side.

It's no secret that humans can recognize siblings on a biological level. Now it turns out plants can also, according to biologists at McMaster University. Even more, they get downright competitive with strangers of the same species.

“The ability to recognize and favour kin is common in animals, but this is the first time it has been shown in plants” said Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. “When plants share their pots, they get competitive and start growing more roots, which allows them to grab water and mineral nutrients before their neighbours get them.