Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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Let’s wind back the clock and take a look at the lead-up to RHIC’s first collisions with these excerpts from the Brookhaven Bulletin. As you’ll see, getting a complicated particle collider up and running takes a lot of teamwork and coordinated effort. And it isn’t always a straight-line path!

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The U.S. Department of Laboratory's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory will lead the design and construction of several diagnostics for ITER, the international fusion experiment. At the same time, engineers are completing design work on a microwave reflectometer diagnostic called a low field side reflectometer.

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Skip the salt! Three species of sea vegetables could just be the new kale with the added benefit of a salty flavor. The 10-week study was designed to determine the optimal growing conditions for these sea vegetables that could soon be a great addition to salads, soups, pasta, rice and other dishes in the continental U.S. These nutritious plants for human consumption do not require fresh water and instead are grown in salt water.

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A new computational approach developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory offers a high-tech yet simple method for estimating groundwater: it pairs high-resolution images derived by satellite with advanced computer modeling to estimate aquifer volume change from observed ground deformation.

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The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have led to a record crash in emissions. But it will be emission levels during the recovery—in the months and years after the pandemic recedes—that matter most for how global warming plays out

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Researchers discovered that Earth's oceans started becoming oxygenated millions of years earlier than previously recognized.

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Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought—and will likely lead to faster sea level rise—thanks to the continued, accelerating warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, a new study has found.

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A study by researchers from Sweden and Hungary shows that white, painted stripes on the body protect skin from insect bites. It is the first time researchers have successfully shown that body-painting has this effect. Among indigenous peoples who wear body-paint, the markings thus provide a certain protection against insect-borne diseases.

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The overabundance of fast fashion — readily available, inexpensively made clothing — has created an environmental and social justice crisis, claims a new paper from an expert on environmental health at Washington University in St. Louis.“From the growth of water-intensive cotton, to the release of untreated dyes into local water sources, to worker’s low wages and poor working conditions, the environmental and social costs involved in textile manufacturing are widespread,” said Christine Ekenga, assistant professor at the Brown School and co-author of the paper “The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion,” published in the journal Environmental Health.

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The first high-quality ancient DNA data from Central and South America reveals two previously unknown genetic exchanges between North and South America, one representing a continent-wide population turnover Findings link the oldestCentral and South American samples with the Clovis culture, the first widespread archaeological culture of North America; however, this lineage disappeared within the last 9,000 years Analyses show shared ancestry between ancient Californians from the Channel Islands and groups that became widespread in the southern Peruvian Andes by at least 4,200 years ago

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Beatboxing is a musical art form in which performers use their vocal tract to create percussive sounds, and a team of researchers is using real-time MRI to study the production of beatboxing sounds. Timothy Greer will describe their work showing how real-time MRI can characterize different beatboxing styles and how video signal processing can demystify the mechanics of artistic style. Greer will present the study at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, Nov. 5-9.

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Researchers at Binghamton University, State University at New York have used a new image-based analysis technique to identify once-hidden North American mounds, which could reveal valuable information about pre-contact Native Americans.

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For the first time, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and five other organizations have shown that human influences significantly impact the size of the seasonal cycle of temperature in the lowest layer of the atmosphere.

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Fossils of a new genus and species of an ankylosaurid dinosaur—Akainacephalus johnsoni-- have been unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, U.S.A., and are revealing new details about the diversity and evolution of this group of armored dinosaurs.

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In a study that challenges scientists preconceptions about the global carbon cycle, researchers find that tiny organisms deep in the ocean's twilight zone may play an outsize part in the circulation of carbon.

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Fish that ‘farm’ their own patches of seaweed alter their ‘cropping’ practices under high CO2 conditions, researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have found.

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Using ancient dog DNA and DNA from modern village dogs, University of Michigan researchers find new genetic sites that may be responsible for important domestication traits--sites that are also connected to rare genetic syndromes in people.

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Those cute little whiskers you see on your pet do more than just twitch adorably. Intrigued by the hairs’ versatility, University of Texas at Dallas researchers used shape-memory polymers to create artificial, electronic versions called e-whiskers, which mimic the properties of the real thing.

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A new University of Washington-led paper pinpoints starvation as the cause of death for hundreds of thousands of Cassin's auklet seabirds in late 2014 to early 2015.

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A new study that reconstructs the deep history of our planet’s relationship to the moon shows that 1.4 billion years ago, a day on Earth lasted just over 18 hours. This is at least in part because the moon was closer and changed the way the Earth spun around its axis.

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A study in Science offers an explanation for a mysterious and sometimes deadly weather pattern in which the jet stream, the global air currents that circle the Earth, stalls out over a region. Much like highways, the jet stream has a capacity, researchers said, and when it’s exceeded, blockages form that are remarkably similar to traffic jams—and climate forecasters can use the same math to model them both.

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Sweet potatoes may seem as American as Thanksgiving, but scientists have long debated whether their plant family originated in the Old or New World. New research by an Indiana University paleobotanist suggests it originated in Asia, and much earlier than previously known.

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A team of researchers led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed a second way to use protein markers from human tissue to identify people – this time from human bones.

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Harvard Medical School researchers lead the first whole-genome analysis of ancient human DNA from Southeast Asia Study identifies at least three major waves of human migration into the region over the last 50,000 years, each shaping the genetics of Southeast Asia “to a remarkable extent” Findings reveal a complex interplay among archaeology, genetics and language

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The Clarkson Student Projects for Engineering Experience and Design Team won 1st place in a regional competition.

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Scientists are now working to take cloaking devices from the dramatic realm of science fiction and make them real. Amanda D. Hanford, at Pennsylvania State University, is taking the introductory steps to make acoustic ground cloaks. These materials redirect approaching waves around an object without scattering the wave energy, concealing the object from the sound waves. During the 175th ASA Meeting, Hanford will describe the physics behind an underwater acoustic shield designed in her lab.

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A group of researchers announced April 26 in Nature that they had managed to entangle perhaps the largest items yet, at a whopping 20 microns across—about the diameter of a single human hair.

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An international team, led by Berkeley Lab scientists, has demonstrated a breakthrough in the design and function of nanoparticles that could make solar panels more efficient by converting light usually missed by solar cells into usable energy.

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DHS S&T recently used advanced DNA sequencing to determine the identity of a 4,000-year-old mummy head found in 1915, when American explorers entered an ancient tomb cut in the parched limestone cliffs of the eastern bank of the Nile River, 155 miles south of Cairo.

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A cloud of gas 300,000 light-years long is arching around the Milky Way, shunted away from two dwarf galaxies orbiting our own. For decades, astronomers have wanted to know which of the two galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, is the source of the gas that has been expelled as the two galaxies gravitationally pull at one another. The answer will help astronomers understand how galaxies form and change over time.

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Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have cracked the evolutionary mystery of why chimpanzees and gorillas walk on their knuckles: The short explanation is that these African apes climb trees and they are mobile on the ground.

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Scientists have designed a conceptual spacecraft to deflect Earth-bound asteroids and evaluated whether it would be able to nudge a massive asteroid – which has a remote chance to hitting Earth in 2135 – off course.

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Humans not only survived a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago, they flourished during the resulting climate change that occurred, a new study by UNLV geoscientist Eugene Smith and colleagues found.

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I can still remember that giddy feeling I had seven years ago, when I first read about the “zombie ant.” The story was gruesome and fascinating

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Modern humans have brains that are more than three times larger than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Scientists don't agree on when and how this dramatic increase took place, but new analysis of 94 hominin fossils shows that average brain size increased gradually and consistently over the past three million years.

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An international team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton has confirmed the discovery of the most distant supernova ever detected – a huge cosmic explosion that took place 10.5 billion years ago, or three-quarters the age of the Universe itself.

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A mutualistic relationship between species in an ecosystem allows for the ecosystem to thrive, but the lack of this relationship could lead to the collapse of the entire system. New research from Binghamton University, State University of New York reveals that interactions between relatively small organisms are crucial to mutualistic relationships in an ecosystem dominated by much larger organisms, including trees and elephants.

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New research by the University of Delaware and other institutions reveals that water over continental shelves is shouldering more atmospheric carbon dioxide, which may have implications for scientists studying how much carbon dioxide can be released into the atmosphere while keeping warming limited.

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Tiny particles fuel powerful storms and influence weather much more than has been appreciated, according to a study in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science. The tiny pollutants – long considered too small to have much impact on droplet formation – are, in effect, diminutive downpour-makers.

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Could baboons and other mammals worldwide soon need pedometers? Not likely, but a new study to be published in Science reveals that on average, mammals move distances two to three times shorter in human-modified landscapes than they do in the wild.

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A University of Washington study has found a simple approach to look for life that might be more promising than just looking for oxygen.

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changes in humidity may determine how the contribution of snowpack to streams, lakes and groundwater changes as the climate warms. Surprisingly, cloudy, gray and humid winter days can actually cause the snowpack to warm faster, increasing the likelihood of melt during winter months when the snowpack should be growing, the authors report. In contrast, under clear skies and low humidity the snow can become colder than the air, preserving the snowpack until spring.

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A detailed study of blue salt crystals found in two meteorites that crashed to Earth – which included X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab – found that they contain both liquid water and a mix of complex organic compounds including hydrocarbons and amino acids.

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A new discovery, led by researchers at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates the existence of a new kind of magnetoresistance involving topological insulators that could result in improvements in future computing and computer storage.

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Following the chemistry, scientists develop fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun.

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Scientists have sequenced the complete genome of an ancient strain of Hepatitis B, shedding new light on a pathogen that today kills nearly one million people every year. The findings, based on data extracted from the mummified remains of a small child buried in Naples, Italy, confirm the idea that HBV has existed in humans for centuries.

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NASA has selected an APL proposal to send an innovative, instrumented rotorcraft to Saturn's largest moon for further development.

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Observations and measurements of a neutron star merger have largely ruled out some theories relating to gravity and dark energy, and challenged a large class of cosmological theories.