The first comprehensive analysis of the woolly mammoth genome reveals extensive genetic changes that allowed mammoths to adapt arctic life, including skin and hair development, insulin signaling, fat biology, and even traits such as small ears and short tails. A mammoth gene for temperature sensation was resurrected in the lab as a functional test.
As floodwaters surge along major rivers in the midwestern United States, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis suggests federal agencies are underestimating historic 100-year flood levels on these rivers by as much as five feet, a miscalculation that has serious implications for future flood risks, flood insurance and business development in an expanding floodplain.
New research led by the University of Adelaide hopes to close the debate on whether a major mud volcano disaster in Indonesia was triggered by an earthquake or had man-made origins.
In the human body, small wounds are easily treated by the body itself, requiring no further care. For bigger wounds to be healed, the body may need outside assistance. Concrete is like a living body, in that it can self-heal its own small wounds (cracks) as an intrinsic characteristic.
A new study led by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego indicates a steady population trend for blue whales and an upward population trend for fin whales in Southern California.
The first species of Yeti Crab from hydrothermal vent systems of the East Scotia Ridge in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, has been described by a team of British scientists.
A giant cloud escaping from a warm, Neptune-mass exoplanet is reported in this week’s Nature. Depicted in an image by Mark Garlick and issued by the University of Warwick, it has been suggested that low-mass exoplanets orbiting close to their parent stars could have had some fraction of their atmospheres ‘burnt off’ by extreme irradiation from the star, but confident measures of such losses have been lacking until now.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dispersing from a warm, Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous comet-like tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The findings will be published in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.
In late 2013, when the neutron star at the heart of one of our galaxy’s oddest supernovae gave off a massive burst of X-rays, the resulting echoes — created when the X-rays bounced off clouds of dust in interstellar space — yielded a surprising new measuring stick for astronomers.
The same gene that creates elaborate head crests in domestic rock pigeons also makes head and neck feathers grow up instead of down in domesticated doves to give them head crests, although theirs are much simpler and caused by a different mutation, University of Utah researchers found.
Our brains track moving objects by applying one of the algorithms your phone’s GPS uses, according to researchers at the University of Rochester. This same algorithm also explains why we are fooled by several motion-related optical illusions, including the sudden “break” of baseball’s well known “curveball illusion.”
A team of researchers from Stony Brook University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have discovered 854 “ultra-dark galaxies” in the Coma Cluster by analyzing data from the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope. The new discovery, published in the June 2015 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, surpasses the 2014 discovery of 47 mysterious dark galaxies by more than 800 and suggests that galaxy clusters are the key environment for the evolution of these mysterious dark galaxies.
Astronomers have successfully commissioned a new type of optic that can reveal the image of an exoplanet next to its parent star.
Jaeyoun (Jay) Kim and his research group have developed microrobotic tentacles that can be the hands and fingers of small robots designed to safely handle delicate objects. The engineers describe their micro-tentacles in the journal Scientific Reports.
University of Florida IFAS researchers are building new homes for the feral bees to save the birds.
Astronomers used Hubble Space Telescope's near-infrared vision to uncover the mysterious early formative years of quasars, the brightest beacons in the universe. Hubble's sharp images unveil chaotic collisions between galaxies that gave birth to quasars by fueling supermassive central black holes. Join the live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3:00 pm EDT on Thurs., June 18, to learn even more about these dust-reddened quasars and the Hubble Space Telescope. To join, visit http://hbbl.us/z7F .
Scientists from the UNC School of Medicine provide the first direct experimental evidence for how primordial proteins developed the ability to accelerate the central chemical reaction necessary to synthesize proteins and thus allow life to arise not long after Earth was created.
New research conducted by archaeologists from the University of York and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with members of Tel Aviv University, reveals striking insights into the living conditions and dietary choices of those who lived during the Middle Pleistocene some 300,000 - 400,000 years ago.
Astronomers using ALMA have measured the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 1097 -- a barred spiral galaxy located approximately 45 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Fornax
To sort out the biological intricacies of Earth-like planets, astronomers have developed computer models that examine how ultraviolet radiation from other planets’ nearby suns may affect those worlds, according to new research published June 10 in Astrophysical Journal.
New research in theoretical physics shows that black holes aren't the ruthless killers we've made them out to be, but instead benign--if imperfect--hologram generators.
Researchers have developed tiny, diamond-based probes that optically transmit detailed temperature information and can operate in conditions ranging from 150 - 850 degrees Kelvin.
Routine communications blackouts, between a re-entry spacecraft and ground control, can cause anxiety, as there is no way to know or control the location and state of the spacecraft from the ground, but researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China have proposed a new way to maintain communication with spacecraft as they re-enter the atmosphere. The approach might also be applied to other hypersonic vehicles such as futuristic military planes and ballistic missiles.
Improving air quality — in clean and dirty places — could potentially avoid millions of pollution-related deaths each year. That finding comes from a team of environmental engineering and public health researchers who developed a global model of how changes in outdoor air pollution could lead to changes in the rates of health problems such as heart attack, stroke and lung cancer. The researchers were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world — which they expected to find — but also in cleaner environments like the United States, Canada and Europe.
Climate and plant community instability may have hampered the success of dinosaurs in the tropics during the Late Triassic Period (235-201 million years ago), according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This finding was reached by co-author Alan H. Turner, PhD, of Stony Brook University, and an international team of scientists by examining the sedimentary rocks and fossil record preserved in the Chinle Formation in northern New Mexico to investigate the environment in tropical latitudes during the Late Triassic.
A remarkably detailed picture of the climate and ecology during the Triassic Period explains why dinosaurs failed to establish dominance near the equator for 30 million years.
The computer brains inside autonomous vehicles will be fast enough to make life-or-death decisions. But should they? A member of UAB's national championship-winning Bioethics Bowl team — and the team's coach, a renowned bioethicist — weigh in on a thorny problem of the dawning robot age.
Chemists have witnessed atoms of one chemical element morph into another for the first time ever—a feat that produced an unexpected outcome that could lead to a new way to safely treat cancer with radiation.
Led by James Hone’s group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, SNU, and KRISS demonstrated—for the first time—an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up. (Nature Nanotechnology AOP June 15)
New release reports correlation between incidences of rheumatoid arthritis and giant cell arteritis with solar cycles.
Humans are unlikely to be the only animal capable of self-awareness, a new study has shown.
Deciding how often and when to use prescribed fire can be tricky, especially when managing for rare butterflies, University of Florida scientists say. That realization stems from a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural study in which researchers experimented with pupae -- insects in their immature form between larvae and adults -- of butterflies known to frequent fire-prone habitats of Florida.
An international team of scientists has found that the climatic events that ended the ice age before last are surprisingly different to those of the last ice age.
A colorful Hubble telescope image of galaxy NGC 6503 shows bright red patches of gas scattered through its spiral arms, blue regions containing newly forming stars, and dark brown dust lanes snaking across its arms and center. The galaxy lies at the edge of what some astronomers call the Local Void.
In a study published today in ACS Central Science, a research team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison Chemistry Professor Timothy Bertram peels back the mysteries of the structures of tiny aerosol particles at the surface of the ocean. The work shows how the particles’ chemical composition influences their abilities to take in moisture from the air, which indicates whether the particle will help to form a cloud — a key to many basic problems in climate prediction.
ALMA’s Long Baseline Campaign produced spectacular images of the distant, gravitationally lensed galaxy called HATLAS J090311.6+003906, otherwise known as SDP.81. New analyses of these images reveal details never before seen in a galaxy so remote, including phenomenally massive yet concentrated clumps of star-forming material.
A team of IBM researchers in Zurich, Switzerland with support from colleagues in Yorktown Heights, New York has developed a relatively simple, robust and versatile process for growing crystals made from compound semiconductor materials that will allow them be integrated onto silicon wafers -- an important step toward making future computer chips that will allow integrated circuits to continue shrinking in size and cost even as they increase in performance.
Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology are giving new meaning to the term “read the fine print” with their demonstration of a color printing process using nanomaterials. In this case, the print features are very fine – visible only with the aid of a high-powered electron microscope.
Scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator exploring nuclear physics and the building blocks of matter at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, have new evidence for what's called a "chiral magnetic wave" rippling through the soup of quark-gluon plasma created in RHIC's energetic particle smashups. The findings are described in a paper that will be highlighted as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review Letters.
When it comes to the three-horned dinosaur called the Triceratops, science is showing the ancient creatures might have been a little more complex than we thought. In fact, their teeth were far more intricate than any reptile or mammal living today.
A team of scientists have taken quantum teleportation – a method of communicating information from one location to another without having to physically move it – to a higher level by using certain high-dimensional states (which they dubbed “donut” states) for teleportation. Stony Brook University physicist Tzu-Chieh Wei, PhD, and colleagues nationally demonstrated that their method works, is more reliable than previous teleportation schemes, and could be a stepping stone toward building a quantum communications network. Their findings appear in Nature Communications.
Archaeologists at the University of Southampton have found evidence of an ancient gold trade route between the south-west of the UK and Ireland. A study suggests people were trading gold between the two countries as far back as the early Bronze Age (2500BC).
New research has revealed that parasitic ‘vampire’ plants that attach onto and derive nutrients from another living plant may benefit the abundance and diversity of surrounding vegetation and animal life.
An artificial intelligence system has reverse-engineered the regeneration mechanism of planaria, a common model in regenerative medicine. This is the first reported model of regeneration discovered by a non-human intelligence, and the first comprehensive model of planarian regeneration, which has long eluded human scientists.
In a breakthrough for computer vision and for bird watching, researchers and bird enthusiasts have enabled computers to achieve a task that stumps most humans—identifying hundreds of bird species pictured in photos.
What is it with cheating? Cheaters seem to have an immediate advantage over cooperators, but do they have an evolutionary advantage? A study published in Current Biology suggests the benefits of cheating change with its prevalence,in a population. Cheaters may succeed, for example, only when they are rare, and fail when they become so numerous they push out cooperators.
At times during the past 10,000 years, cottontails and hares reproduced like rabbits and their numbers surged when the El Niño weather pattern drenched the Pacific Coast with rain, according to a University of Utah analysis of 3,463 bunny bones.
Comprehensive analysis of data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows that two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, wobble unpredictably. The results appear in the June 4 issue of the journal Nature. To learn even more, join the Hubble Hangout with Pluto scientists at 3pm EDT on Thurs., June 4 by visiting http://hbbl.us/y6E .
Though people can distinguish among millions of colors, we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we’ve seen as one of just a few basic hues.
New research suggests that methanogens – among the simplest and oldest organisms on Earth – could survive on Mars.
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