Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
Researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Baker Institute of Animal Health have published the first molecular characterization of Marfan syndrome in domestic cats in a paper in the Sept. 19 issue of Scientific Reports.
Tiny insects called aphids inject hundreds of mysterious proteins into plants, hijacking the plants' own genomes to build galls: structures made of plant tissue but constructed to the insects' specifications to house and feed their offspring.
During NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission aboard the International Space Station, astronauts will support a series of biomedical and human performance investigations, including a new collaborative effort to study how spaceflight affects blood flow and clotting. NASA also is testing crew members' manual piloting skills, evaluating methods to counter vision and brain changes, gathering essential health data to inform future missions, and measuring forces astronauts experience during their return to Earth to help refine re-entry hardware and procedures.
Superconductors can carry electrical current without resistance, but only up to a maximum value known as the critical current. The critical current is a crucial figure of merit for applications, and materials science has long been focused on increasing this limit. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have now shown that, in type-II superconductors, this conventional limit can be exceeded when the current is applied for only a few picoseconds.
New analyses of ancient cattle, sheep and goat bones on Madagascar suggest the rapid spread of introduced livestock on the island 1,200 years ago coincided with forest loss and population declines of large native herbivores.
Rocket launches are among the most violent ways humans have devised to travel. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and subject passengers to intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those forces, while machines must be designed to survive them. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multibillion-dollar satellite even begins its mission, the years of effort that went into its design and assembly could be lost. Now, researchers in Switzerland have come up with an ingenious way to make that less likely.
On the surface, the arid expanses of the Mojave Desert may seem inhospitable and largely removed from the global carbon cycle. But beneath the surface, its mineral-rich soils are running a carbon cycle of their own—one that could account for a surprisingly large share of the planet's annual carbon exchange.
In a win for pollinator conservation, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a machine learning-based method to identify chemical compounds that can safely repel honey bees from pesticide-treated crops. The research offers a potential solution to one of agriculture's most urgent ecological challenges: the ongoing decline in honey bee populations, driven in part by pesticide exposure. The paper is published in the journal eLife.
Gut microbiota influence multiple aspects of host physiology, including metabolic and immune functions. Many metabolites produced by gut bacteria can cross the intestinal epithelium (which the bacteria may not be able to cross) and enter host tissues, providing a pathway through which microbial activity can influence host physiology. However, determining the specific contribution of individual gut bacterial metabolites to host lifespan has remained challenging.
Quantum materials do things ordinary materials cannot. They carry current without any loss, or conduct only along their outer edge while the inside insulates. Future quantum computers and quantum sensors will run on materials like these. To improve them, researchers need to see exactly where currents and magnetic fields run at the nanoscale.
A dog being prepared for an EEG measurement by researcher Boglárka MorvaiSarolta Szilágyi When dogs hear their owners speak, they are listening for consonants in words rather than vowels, a new study suggests, apparently mimicking a similar human bias that is found across many languages. Although dogs don’t have language, they live in a speech-rich environment, says Attila Andics at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “We knew from our previous studies that dogs care about what we speak and how we speak, but until now there was no evidence that dogs’ experience with speech can actually shape how their brains function,” says Andics. Advertisement if( window?.adverts?.addToArray ) { window.ad...
A Sumatran orangutan mother uses a stick tool to extract honey from a large tree holeGuilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project Young orangutans who spend little time working out for themselves how to build a broad diet can partly compensate by watching how other orangutans choose what to eat. The findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad survival skills, says Revathe Thillaikumar at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. Young orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to find them and how ...