MI weekly selection #334
Dragonfish teeth owe translucence to nanoscale structures
Nanoscale structures make the teeth of deep-sea dragonfish translucent so they’re invisible to prey. The sharp, thin teeth are obscured in the dragonfish’s mouths due to the way the nanostructures minimize the scattering of light.
10M-light-year-long magnetic field detected between galaxy clusters
Two galaxy clusters appear to be connected by a magnetic field that’s 10 million light-years long. Radio waves were detected between galaxy clusters Abell 0399 and 0401 by researchers using the Low Frequency Array network of telescopes.
Oak ancestors may have originated in southern hemisphere
Oak tree relatives may have originated in the southern hemisphere rather than the northern hemisphere. Fagaceae, a group of flowering plants that includes oaks, had previously only been found in the northern hemisphere, but researchers have found a pair of fossils in Argentina that date back about 52 million years.
Image shows ring of cool gas around Milky Way’s black hole
The ring of cool hydrogen gas encircling the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has been observed.. The findings about the accretion disk around Sagittarius A* were based on data from Chile’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.
Ancient glaciers may have kick-started Earth’s plate tectonics
Glaciers that covered the Earth about 700 million years ago, and perhaps even earlier, may have eroded a mile or more of Earth’s surface, possibly giving birth to plate tectonics. Researchers say the glaciers sloughed off a massive amount of sediment that sped up the plate tectonics process.