Detailed exploration of tiny insect brains has become much easier using new methods for imaging and 3D image reconstruction. The researchers used this X-ray imaging to produce hundreds of image slices that can be re-constructed by a standard laptop computer into a high resolution 3D model.
A study published Feb. 10 in the journal Small describes how engineers used a modified 3-D printer and frozen water to create three-dimensional objects made of graphene oxide. The structures could be an important step toward making graphene commercially viable in electronics, medical diagnostic devices and other industries.
By pushing the Hubble to its limits, astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by viewing the farthest galaxy ever seen. This galaxy existed just 400 million years after the big bang and provides new insights into the first generation of galaxies. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Join a live Hubble Hangout discussion with the astronomers at 3:00 p.m. EST today (Thurs., March 3, 2016) at http://hbbl.us/y6H.
Neuroscientists at Duke Health have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows primates to use only their thoughts to navigate a robotic wheelchair.
As scientists look for replacements for our dwindling stock of antibiotics, the evolution of resistance is never far from their minds. Washington University in St. Louis biologist R. Fredrik Inglis explored the ability of bacteria to become resistant to a toxin called a bacteriocin by growing them for many generations in the presence of the toxin.
Volumes under internal tension crack hierarchically, revealing how gravity created the universe's wide variety of body sizes.
Scientists from Vanderbilt and George Washington universities have worked out a way to make electric vehicles not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative by demonstrating how the graphite electrodes used in the lithium-ion batteries can be replaced with carbon recovered from the atmosphere.
One of the world’s top particle accelerators has reached a milestone, achieving its “first turns” – circulating beams of particles for the first time. Japan’s SuperKEKB accelerator is at the forefront of the “intensity frontier” and is designed to deliver more than 40 times the rate of collisions between particles than its predecessor.
Using coal to produce chemicals could lock China into high-carbon investments.
As scientists step up their search for other life in the universe, two astrophysicists are proposing a way to make sure we don’t miss the signal if extraterrestrial observers try to contact us first.
Research from the University of Washington-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory published Feb. 26 in Astrophysical Journal Letters will help astronomers better identify — and thus rule out — "false positives" in the search for life beyond Earth.
In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests. In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.
When venom from animals such as spiders, snakes or cone snails is injected via a bite or harpoon, the cocktail of toxins delivered to its victim tends to cause serious reactions that, if untreated, can be lethal. But even venom has a therapeutic upside: Individual peptide toxins are being tapped to target receptors in the brain to potentially serve as painkillers.
The development of every animal in the history of the world began with a simple step: the fusion of a spermatozoon with an oocyte. Despite the ubiquity of this process, the actual mechanisms through which fertilization occurs remain poorly understood. A new tool developed by a team of French biophysicists may soon shed light on this still-mysterious process, and has already captured highly detailed images of what happens when sperm and egg first touch.
A survey of shark scientists reveals that a majority favor sustainable fishing of the predators rather than a ban on shark fishing.
University of Delaware researcher Mark Moline recently co-authored a paper in Robotics on the advantage of linking multi-sensor systems aboard autonomous underwater vehicles to enable the vehicle to synthesize data in real-time so it can independently make decisions about what action to take next.
APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way.
X-ray scans reveal that dodo's relative brain size was similar to pigeons, likely had enhanced sense of smell.
A team of national laboratory and university researchers led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory is growing large test plots of switchgrass crops with the farmer in mind. For the first time, researchers have mixed different genetic varieties of switchgrass on production-size plots, hypothesizing this could increase yield by extending the growing season, varying the size of the switchgrass plants to produce a fuller crop and potentially reducing the crop’s vulnerability to weather fluctuations. A seven-year study showed the switchgrass variety mixture was, most consistently, the highest yielding crop, as measured by the harvested dry weight from each plot.
Employing cutting edge bioinformatics & next generation sequencing techniques, scientists have reconstructed the spider ‘tree of life’ to come to intriguing new conclusions about the evolution of the web, something which has important implications for the overall story of spider evolution.
The types of beneficial fungi that associate with tree roots can alter the fate of a patch of tropical forest, boosting plant diversity or, conversely, giving one tree species a distinct advantage over many others, researchers report.
Sharks have a reputation for having voracious appetites, but a new study shows that most coral reef sharks eat prey that are smaller than a cheeseburger.
Ever since it was realized that asteroid and comet impacts are a real and present danger to the survival of life on Earth, it was thought that most of those objects end their existence in a dramatic final plunge into the Sun. A new study published on Thursday in the journal Nature finds instead that most of those objects are destroyed in a drawn out, long hot fizzle, much farther from the Sun than previously thought. This surprising new discovery explains several puzzling observations that have been reported in recent years.
Between 1947 and 1956, John Curtis and his colleagues and students conducted their prairie relic study, surveying more than 200 undisturbed prairie remnants in Wisconsin. Today [Feb. 19, 2016] UW-Madison graduate student Amy Alstad and a team of researchers have published a third survey based on Curtis’ legacy work. They found that human influence has accelerated the rate of species change in these prairies.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have measured the rotation rate of 'super-Jupiter-class' exoplanet 2M1207b by observing the varied brightness in its atmosphere. This is the first rotation rate measurement of a massive exoplanet using direct imaging. The observations also confirm that the planet's atmosphere has layers of patchy, colorless clouds.
New research explores the impact of hunter-gatherers on north Pacific marine food webs and the behaviors that helped preserve their network of food sources. The findings hold implications for modern food webs.
Two new Cornell University studies show how diverse marine organisms are susceptible to diseases made worse by warming oceans. The first study warns that warm sea temperatures in 2015 may increase the levels of epizootic shell disease in American lobster in the northern Gulf of Maine in 2016. The second provides the first evidence linking warmer ocean temperatures with a West Coast epidemic of sea star wasting disease that has infected more than 20 species and devastated populations since 2013.
UW astronomers Breanna Binder and Ben Williams have identified a rare type of 'supernova impostor' in a nearby galaxy, with implications for how scientists look at the short, complex lives of massive stars.
A single toe bone found on Ellesmere Island in the 1970s is described for the first time.
As the Arctic continues to change due to rising temperatures, melting sea ice and human interest in developing oil and shipping routes, it’s important to understand belugas’ baseline behavior, argue the authors of a new paper.
Yesterday saw the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, in what is being described as the most important breakthrough in physics for decades. Now scientists from Queen’s University Belfast are leading the hunt for the source of these ripples in space.
Ancient immigrants to Rome included young children, men.
Scientists have shown that the chemical signal dopamine plays an unexpected role in social interactions. In mice, nerve cells in the brain that release dopamine became particularly active in animals kept on their own for a short time.
For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. A UAH researcher was at the center of action.
The ocean’s power to rein in carbon and protect the environment is vast but not well-understood. But now, an international team of scientists has begun to illuminate how the ocean plucks carbon from the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, and shuttles it to the bottom of the sea.
Study on Kuhl's pipistrelle shows why bats have moved across Europe since the 1980s.
The whooping crane, with its snowy white plumage and trumpeting call, is one of the most beloved American birds, and one of the most endangered. As captive-raised cranes are re-introduced in Louisiana, they are gaining a new descriptor: natural killer. A new study from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, suggests Louisiana cranes are faring well thanks in part to their penchant for hunting reptiles and amphibians.
A 10-year collaborative project led by biologists from Kansas State University and Washington State University has discovered how the Atlantic molly is able to live in toxic hydrogen sulfide water.
An international team of scientists have discovered two new plankton-eating fossil fish species of the genus called Rhinconichthys from the oceans of the Cretaceous Period, about 92 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet.
New close-up images of the proteins that copy DNA inside the nucleus of a cell have led a team of scientists to propose a brand new mechanism for how this molecular machinery works. The scientists studied proteins from yeast cells, which share many features with the cells of complex organisms such as humans, and could offer new insight into ways that DNA replication can go awry.
Research published in 2012 garnered international attention by suggesting that a possible early human ancestor had lived on a diverse woodland diet including hard foods mixed in with tree bark, fruit, leaves and other plant products. But new research by an international team of researchers now shows that Australopithecus sediba didn’t have the jaw and tooth structure necessary to exist on a steady diet of hard foods.
By chance, scientists have discovered a malaria parasite that infects white-tailed deer. It’s the first-ever malaria parasite known to live in a deer species and the only native malaria parasite found in any mammal in North or South America.
Underwater sound linked to human activity could alter the behaviour of seabed creatures that play a vital role in marine ecosystems, according to new research from the University of Southampton.
For the first time ever, researchers from the University of Adelaide have been able to non-invasively study the inner workings of wombat warrens, with a little help from ground-penetrating radar.
Bursts of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy are not likely to be signals of dark matter but rather other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, according to two new studies, one from a team based at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another based in the Netherlands.
While academic awareness of African peoples' hunting with poison-tipped arrows extends back for centuries, knowledge of the ingenious practice has been scattered among chemistry, entomology and anthropology texts.
When an endangered orca is in hot pursuit of an endangered salmon, sending out clicks and listening for their echoes in the murky ocean near Seattle, does the noise from the nearby shipping lane interfere with them catching dinner? To find out scientists measured underwater noise as ships passed their study site 3,000 times. This unprecedented characterization of ship noise will aid in the understanding of the potential effects on marine life, and help with possible mitigation strategies.
A multi-institution team of researchers has successfully mapped the genome of Cimex lectularius, the common bed bug. Among the findings, scientists discovered more than 800 instances of genes being transferred from bacteria to the bed bug’s chromosomes.
An international group of physicists led by the University of Arkansas has created an artificial material with a structure comparable to graphene.
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