Atoms may not have bones, but we still want to know how they are put together. These tiny particles are the basis on which all normal matter is built (including our bones), and understanding them helps us understand the larger Universe. We currently use high-energy X-ray light to help us understand atoms and molecules and
Month: May 2023
Since its founding in 2016, Elon Musk‘s neurotechnology company Neuralink has had the ambitious mission to build a next-generation brain implant with at least 100 times more brain connections than devices currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company has now reached a significant milestone, having received FDA approval to begin
The potent cocktail of toxins in the venom of one of the world’s deadliest spiders seems to vary depending on context. A new analysis of how funnel-web spiders produce their venom shows that factors such as the spider’s heart rate and defensiveness could play a role in the proportions of chemicals delivered on the ends
In addition to everything else that winemakers have to consider in the production of a perfect bottle is the smell of the drink: In certain types of winemaking processes, that smell can end up being rather undesirable. Aromas that you might describe as “rotten eggs”, “rubber” and “canned corn” are often termed as ‘reductive’ and
Today, 80 percent of Australia is arid, but it was not always that way. In the early Pliocene, 5.4 to 3.6 million years ago, Australia had a greenhouse climate, widespread forests and diverse marsupial animals. As the climate dried out in the late Pliocene, open woodland, grassland and shrubland spread across Australia. How did large
Physicists have long puzzled over why there is more matter in the Universe than its flipped twin, antimatter. Without this imbalance, the two types of material would have canceled out, leaving nothing but a boring glow in the vast emptiness of space. Somehow, at some point, something changed in the way the Universe works on
For most of us, this would be a nightmare. Imagine being curled up inside a 90 centimeter (36 inch) fabric sphere with a small window and a small air tank while dangling from the Canadarm. As your tiny sphere shifts, you’d see Earth out your tiny window, then the Space Shuttle, damaged by some accident
The DNA of a strain of bacteria responsible for the infamous Black Death plague has been found in the teeth of three individuals found buried in the UK thousands of years before the deadly pandemics raged across Europe. Two of those individuals, determined to be young adolescents, were buried in a mass grave in Charterhouse
It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see why M64 is better known as the Evil Eye galaxy. Sitting in the abyssal vacuum of space it seems to cast a sinister glare across the cosmos, a cloud of dust framing its visible periphery like a dark bruise. The galaxy is even stranger than
Archaeologists have mapped a hidden landscape where Australia’s first people made inroads more than 60,000 years ago. This now-inland region was once a coastal mangrove swamp and, before that, a semi-arid savannah plain hundreds of kilometers from the seashore. During the late Pleistocene epoch, sea levels were so low that Australia was connected to its
Parrots can get a lot out of video calls with their feathered friends just like we can from Zoom meetings with our favorite humans. Findings from a recent study by researchers from Northeastern University and MIT Media Lab in the US and the University of Glasgow in the UK could point to ways to better
A harness-wearing Beluga whale that turned up in Norway in 2019, sparking speculation it was a spy trained by the Russian navy, has appeared off Sweden’s coast, an organization following him said Monday. First discovered in Norway’s far northern region of Finnmark, the whale spent more than three years slowly moving down the top half
Glaciers in the Arctic are not nearly as devoid of life as they might appear at first sight. In fact, carpets of ice and snow in Greenland and Iceland are practically crawling with microscopic life forms. Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms lie dormant in winter, waking from their frozen slumber only with the
A refined hunt for the extremely rare transformation of the Higgs boson has delivered results, providing the first evidence of a process that could hint at unknown particles. Reconciling the results of several years’ worth of proton crashes inside two different detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists
Scientists observed unusual behavior in an octopus that they said looked similar to it waking up from a nightmare. The cephalopod, named Costello, was filmed 24 hours a day in a laboratory at The Rockefeller University in New York over the course of a month. On four occasions, the animal awoke “abruptly” before engaging “in
A new study challenges the idea that marsupials are more ‘primitive’ than mammals by showing their development has changed more than mammals since they last shared an ancestor. “For a long time, people have treated marsupials as ‘lesser mammals,’ which represent the intermediate stage between placental mammals and egg-layers,” explains evolutionary biologist Anjali Goswami from
There’s a harsh, brutal reality to the poultry industry, which in 2021 alone supplied about 286 eggs per person in a growing US population: Billions of male chicks are routinely culled by being crushed alive or gassed at hen hatcheries worldwide. Chick culling arises from the fact that chicks from egg-laying hens are not typically
Astronomers studying black holes have serendipitously found another rarity: A dead star rocketing away from its birth supernova, leaving a comet-like trail of radio emission in its wake. Named PSR J1914+1054g, the star is just the fourth known of its kind: a radio pulsar kicked at high velocity across space, for which astronomers have observed
Can a computer learn from the past and anticipate what will happen next, like a human? You might not be surprised to hear that some cutting-edge AI models could achieve this feat, but what about a computer that looks a little different – more like a tank of water? We have built a small proof-of-concept
Tigers may not change their stripes, but Jupiter sure does. The giant planet’s surprisingly neat, alternating bands of dark and light clouds periodically change their appearance, but the reason for these cyclic variations is a mystery. Now, after studying data on Jupiter’s magnetic field collected by the Juno probe, a team of scientists from Japan,
Engineers have demonstrated something marvelous. Almost any material can be used to create a device that continuously harvests energy from humid air. It’s not a development that’s ready for practical application, but it does, its creators say, transcend some of the limitations of other harvesters. All the material needs is to be pocked with nanopores
Ask anyone living in a coastal area of the UK and they’ll confirm that seagulls can be a nuisance. These birds’ pilfering of food knows no bounds, and no one is safe from one of their thieving attacks. For many people, this behavior is the result of the gulls’ inherent aggression. But in reality, gulls
A reconstruction of oral microflora genomes spanning a whopping 100,000-year period of human history may have revealed a surprising shift in the kinds of bacteria that like to call our mouths home. Researchers from across Germany and the US teamed up to decode DNA extracted from the dental plaque of human and Neanderthal remains, using
Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun, and so that last time that planet’s north polar region was pointed at Earth, radio telescope technology was in its infancy. But now, scientists have been using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA) the past few years as Uranus has slowly revealed more and more
The pressure to publish or perish has led some desperate researchers to pay for fake papers to pad their resumés. Worse still, some of these sham papers are getting published in official scientific journals. A computer program designed to detect these made-up studies suggests far too many are slipping past peer review. The study was
Fungi pose a significant threat to crops worldwide, scientists warn in a new commentary, with increasingly “devastating” effects on our food supply. We tend to worry more about pathogens that sicken humans directly, especially viruses and bacteria. But while corn smut and stem rust might not scare us like Ebola or E. coli, maybe they
Astronomers have found a planet a mere 87 light years away that is almost exactly the same size as Earth, orbiting its star at a distance that is neither roasting nor frozen. Sounds perfect for Earth 2.0, right? Not so fast. The exoplanet known as LP 791-18d has been tugged so far out of an
Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and flooffiness), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you’re just not speaking their language. Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the
Diplomats from 175 countries gathering in Paris for plastics treaty talks on Monday may want to pack an umbrella, but not just because there’s a chance of rain. France’s capital will also be showered during the five-day talks by billions of microplastic particles falling from the sky, according to the first-ever plastics pollution weather forecast.
New research reveals that mushrooms and other fungi can keep themselves cooler than their surroundings. The discovery could tell us more about these organisms’ evolution and how they might respond to continued global warming. Like some of the best scientific discoveries, this temperature regulation was discovered accidentally, as one of the researchers was testing out
With technology increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, it is becoming more important to understand space weather and its impacts on tech. When one hears “space weather“, one typically thinks of huge explosions on the Sun – coronal mass ejections hurled towards Earth, creating beautiful displays of aurora. However, not all space weather starts at
At the heart of a glob of stars drifting through the Milky Way lurks a beast. Located some 6,000 light-years away, a globular cluster known as Messier 4 appears to be clumped around a black hole some 800 times the mass of our Sun. That’s no featherweight, but it’s far from a colossus either. In
Orcas living off Europe’s Iberian coast recently struck and sunk a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar. Scientists suspect that this is the third vessel this subpopulation of killer whales has capsized since May 2020, when a female orca believed to be the originator of this behavior suffered a traumatic encounter with a boat. In
We don’t know what the first stars in the Universe were like. Peering into the distant reaches of the early Universe, we’ve seen only traces of their presence. But a new line of evidence traced in images from the James Webb Space Telescope seems to agree with a recent idea that is gaining traction: that
What started as a single cell in 2018, invisible to the human eye, has now evolved into a multicellular beast about the size of a flea. An ongoing study on a brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) mutated to remain attached in clusters as ‘snowflake’ yeast shows what can happen to microscopic single-celled organisms after thousands of
A sunspot four times the size of Earth is lined up with the Sun right now and it’s so big that an astronomer said it could be seen with the naked eye – provided you’ve got the right equipment to observe it safely. Astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom from South Korea advised amateur astronomers to reach for
‘Flesh-eating’ bacteria have been found thriving on seaweed blooms and plastic pollution in the open Caribbean Ocean, and researchers worry the potential pathogens could come back to bite us. Vibrio bacteria are known to feast on marine plant and animal tissues on the coastline. When humans consume seafood or seawater infected with these pathogens, they
Nurturing a forest ecosystem back to life after it’s been logged is not always easy. It can take a lot of hard work and careful monitoring to ensure biodiversity thrives again. But monitoring biodiversity can be costly, intrusive, and resource-intensive. That’s where ecological acoustic survey methods, or “ecoacoustics”, come into play. Indeed, the planet sings.
Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star’s regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time
A decades-old global environmental pact has averted huge amounts of sea ice loss in the Arctic, new research shows. Banning ozone-depleting gases under the historic 1987 Montreal Protocol has delayed the first, feared ice-free Arctic summer by as much as 15 years, the study found – once again demonstrating that global treaties can work to
Current policies to limit global warming will expose more than a fifth of humanity to extreme and potentially life-threatening heat by century’s end, researchers warned Monday. Earth’s surface temperature is on track to rise 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by 2100, pushing more than two billion people – 22 percent of
Scientists using ultraviolet photography say they have found an old version of a chapter of the Bible that was hidden underneath a different section of text for more than 1,500 years. Historian Grigory Kessel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences announced the discovery in an article in the journal, New Testament Studies, earlier this year.
There’s a fair amount of water in the Solar System. Several moons and planets are loaded with it, while comets from the far reaches are packed with the stuff. Where it warms in the heat of the Sun, it sublimates into a gas that drifts into the vacuum of space. While water ice has been
The next time you whisper sweet-nothings into someone’s ear, you might want to target their left side. Neuroscientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered a strange bias in our perception of pleasing voices. According to the brain scans of 13
The largest and most powerful solar telescope on Earth has just given us breathtaking new views of the surface of the Sun. In a series of new images, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope’s observations reveal the intricate details of sunspot regions, the roiling convective cells, and the motion of plasma in the solar atmosphere
France is preparing for temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in the country by century’s end as the world falls short in meeting climate change targets, a cabinet minister warned Sunday. Christophe Bechu, minister for ecological transition, told the weekly JDD paper that his government was no longer banking on
The Tyrannosaurus rex is dinosaur royalty, an iconic and instantly identifiable species – and according to a new study, as many as 1.7 billion of these beasts roamed Earth before an unfortunate meeting with an asteroid. It takes a lot of number crunching to figure this out, everything from average lifespan to sexual maturity to
The feathers, fur, and scales that adorn different members of the animal kingdom may look quite different, but they’re all made of the same basic stuff. And, as it turns out, it only takes a relatively simple genetic tweak to produce one instead of the other. By targeting the sonic hedgehog (Shh) gene, geneticists Michel
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