Best-explored planet outside our solar system WASP-39b, a boiling Saturn-like planet 700 light-years away from the sun has become the best-explored planet outside our solar system, as the James Webb Space Telescope’s observations have yielded a trove of information about the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Laura Kreidberg, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said the […]
When polar seas freeze and ice forms, it is not only due to cold air chilling the surface of the water. Even more important is that warm water is prevented from rising to the surface from the depths of the ocean, due to the much lower salinity of the surface water. Sea ice forms in […]
Meteorites may have brought water to Earth Analysis of fragments of a meteorite that landed in the driveway of a British home in 2021 revels the space debris originated in the outer solar system and held water chemically similar to the water found on Earth. The meteorite came from an asteroid in Jupiter’s orbit some […]
Bringing together concepts from electrical engineering and bioengineering tools, scientists have produced genetic “devices” designed to perform neuromorphic computations like artificial neural circuits in bacterial cells. The genetic material was inserted into bacterial cells in the form of a plasmid: a relatively short DNA molecule that remains separate from the bacteria’s “natural” genome. Plasmids also […]
Layered rocks may be Earth’s oldest known fossils Researchers have found fossil evidence of what may be the first known life on Earth with the discovery of stromatolites, layered rocks formed by photosynthetic microbes, in Western Australia’s Dresser Formation that date back 3.48 billion years. Full Story: Live Science Sharks face rising extinction risk, other […]
Our brains “time-stamp” the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers . “To understand speech, your brain needs to accurately interpret both the speech sounds’ identity and the order that they were uttered to correctly recognize […]
Gene editing to combat the negative effect of climate change in plants Plant biology experts agree that gene editing is a tool that has great potential for use in combating the negative effect of climate change in plants and that the technology “will be a relevant approach as soon as the genetic determinants of this […]
An unprecedented study of brain plasticity and visual perception found that people who, as children, had undergone surgery removing half of their brain correctly recognized differences between pairs of words or faces more than 80% of the time. Considering the volume of removed brain tissue, the surprising accuracy highlights the brain’s neuroplasticity– and its limitations […]
Magma may bubble below Mars’ surface A new study of quake data from Mars rover InSight suggests the red planet may experience underground volcanism. Characteristics of 20 quakes in the Cerberus Fossae region of the planet are consistent with movement generated in a warm subsurface locale. Full Story: Space Spiderwebs do more than simply catch […]
Astronomy • Biology • Evolution • Geosciences • Planetary Science
An Earth-like planet named GJ 1252b orbiting an M dwarf — the most common type of star in the universe — appears to have no atmosphere at all. This discovery could cause a major shift in the search for life on other planets. Because M-dwarfs are so ubiquitous, this discovery means a large number of […]