Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around 4.5 billion years ago, its surface was a hellscape of magma oceans, bubbling and belching with heat from Earth’s interior. The subsequent cooling of the planet from this molten state […]
Tiny crystals inside white dwarfs may spark supernovas Tiny crystals made from uranium atoms that congregate in the middle of white dwarf stars as they age may spark Type 1a supernovas. Researchers say this could be the case in white dwarfs that have lower mass and aren’t part of a binary star pair, after observing […]
Isolated atomic planes, two-dimensional (2D) materials, like graphene can be reassembled into designer heterostructures made layer by layer in a precisely chosen sequence. Such heterostructures are often referred to as ‘van der Waals’ and the simpler one is composed of just two layers (bilayer). In 2018, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an experimentalist at MIT, found that at […]
Computer science • Genetics • Health • Medicine • Molecular biology • Pharmacy
A number of technologies and tools got a chance to prove themselves for the first time in the context of COVID-19. Three researchers working in gene-based vaccines, wearable diagnostics and drug discovery explain how their work rose to the challenge of the pandemic, and their hopes that each technology is now poised to continue making […]
Inherited or somatic mutations targeting genes which encode essential cell growth regulatory proteins favor the emergence of cancer. Cells carrying these mutations acquire growing and survival advantages that trigger the emergence of the tumor. A large number of tumor-associated mutations, as well as many mutations found in the germline of hereditary cancer patients, are single-nucleotide […]
Massive space storm over the North Pole A huge storm in space rained electrons on Earth’s atmosphere above the North Pole in an event scientists are calling a space hurricane. A global team of researchers spotted the space storm while reviewing satellite data from the last six years. NBC Nearby exoplanet may help scientists study […]
Molecules when excited from their ground state (S 0 ) to their lowest electronically excited states often change their electronic structure considerably, which impacts on a range of important molecular properties. For example, the reactivity of a molecule in its excited state often differs markedly from that in its S 0 state. Also, the charge […]
Nearly a century after dark matter was first proposed to explain the motion of galaxy clusters, physicists still have no idea what it’s made of. Researchers around the world have built dozens of detectors in hopes of discovering dark matter. As a graduate student, I helped design and operate one of these detectors, aptly named […]
Let me make a short interruption in our series about the prehistory of philosophy of science, to discuss a completely different point. I am writing this now, just because in the last days I think I have been able to clearly formulate a specific perplexity that for many years I had felt about what we […]
Nightside of Venus seen in new Parker Solar Probe image NASA has shared a rare image of the nightside of Venus taken by the Parker Solar Probe as it swung by the planet for a gravity boost on its way to study the sun. The image, which shows a glow around Venus, was taken by […]