Month: May 2024

Important scientific finds don’t always come in the biggest, buzziest packages. Sometimes new discoveries come in little ugly rocks. Such is the case of a 6-centimeter-wide, nondescript mass of bone and teeth that helped a scientist at The University of Texas at Austin expand the geographic footprint of a large cat that roamed the Earth…

Over the last two years, scientists have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (also called Webb or JWST) to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn — the period in the first few hundred million years after the big bang where the first galaxies were born. These galaxies provide vital insight into the ways…

Joint research led by Yutaro Shuto, Ryoya Nakagawa, and Osamu Nureki of the University of Tokyo determined the spatial structure of various processes of a novel gene-editing tool called “prime editor.” Functional analysis based on these structures also revealed how a “prime editor” could achieve reverse transcription, synthesizing DNA from RNA, without “cutting” both strands…

Skin grafting is an essential procedure used to treat severe skin wounds. In the case of extensive wounds, however, it can be challenging to harvest enough donor skin, and generating artificial skin substitutes that include hair follicles and sweat glands and can engraft on deep wounds has not been successful. Now, researchers from Japan report…

About a third of the food produced globally each year goes to waste, while approximately 800 million people suffer from hunger, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. A new University of Michigan study concludes that nearly half of the food waste, about 620 million metric tons, could be eliminated by fully refrigerated food…

Switching food and drink purchases to very similar but more environmentally friendly alternatives could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from household groceries by more than a quarter (26%), according to a new Australian study from The George Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London published today in Nature Food. Making bigger changes — like…

Organisms, including humans, follow a schedule that coordinates important bodily functions such as sleep-wake cycles, metabolism, hormone production, cognitive function, and feeding habits to environmental cycles. While most organisms possess circadian rhythms synchronized with the 24-hour day-night cycle, they have also developed other internal clocks to suit their local environments. Marine animals have evolved circatidal…

Boilers are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. In a recent study, researchers from Japan and Poland developed a method to convert CO2 emissions from small boilers into methane, which makes use of an optimized reactor design that evenly distributes the CO2 feed. This, in turn, results in significantly lower temperature increments and a…

Nuclear physicists have long been working to reveal how the proton gets its spin. Now, a new method that combines experimental data with state-of-the-art calculations has revealed a more detailed picture of spin contributions from the very glue that holds protons together. It also paves the way toward imaging the proton’s 3D structure. The work…

A team of international scientists, including Virginia Tech entomologist Warren Booth, have solved the 250-year-old origin puzzle of the most prevalent indoor urban pest insect on the planet: the German cockroach. The team’s research findings, representing the genomic analyses of over 280 specimens from 17 countries and six continents, show that this species evolved some…

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances. Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers…

Scientists have pinpointed genetic changes that can leave children born with little to no immune defence against infection. In a new study of 11 affected individuals, researchers from Newcastle University, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Great North Children’s Hospital, and their collaborators were able to link mutations in the NUDCD3 gene to Severe Combined Immunodeficiency…

A long-standing debate among evolutionary scientists goes something like this: Does evolution happen in a predictable pattern or does it depend on chance events and contingency? That is, if you could turn back the clock, as celebrated scientist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) described in his famous metaphor, “Replaying the Tape of Life,” would life on…

Noise-canceling headphones have gotten very good at creating an auditory blank slate. But allowing certain sounds from a wearer’s environment through the erasure still challenges researchers. The latest edition of Apple’s AirPods Pro, for instance, automatically adjusts sound levels for wearers — sensing when they’re in conversation, for instance — but the user has little…

UPV/EHU researcher Irantzu Vergara has managed to analyse, simultaneously, several families of antibiotics in vegetables and earthworms. Sampling carried out in various locations of the Basque Autonomous Community has yielded data on the existence of antimicrobial agents and their derivatives in vegetables. In this respect, Vergara stresses the need for further research to address the…

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. The sensational discovery contributes important knowledge about the universe and is now published in the journal Science. For the first time in…