Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The first SpaceX launch of 2024, which took place Tuesday night, included something that none of the company’s prior launches did. The Falcon 9 rocket carried 21 low-orbit satellites for its sister company, Starlink, including six that—for the first time—feature direct-to-cell communications. The satellites are designed to eliminate cellphone service “dead … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain After a record 2023, SpaceX is not slowing down its launch plans for 2024 with the first launch of the year from Florida slated for Wednesday evening. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying a telecom satellite for private Swedish company Ovzon is slated to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s … Read more
Shorebirds forage in kelp wrack on a beach in California. Credit: Jenny Dugan, UC Santa Barbara The Santa Barbara Channel’s kelp forests and its sandy beaches are intimately connected. Giant kelp, the foundation species of rocky reefs, serves as a major part of the beach food web as fronds of the giant seaweed break away … Read more
Credit: iScience (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108533 Africa is on fire. It has been for thousands of years. The continent contains more than 50% of the total area on Earth that is burning, on average, and there is no sign of it stopping; indeed, the migrating, hemisphere-hopping African wildfire season is steadily increasing. The fire is essentially … Read more
Developmental stage-specific downregulation of chlorophyll using ethanol inducible promoter. (a) Biosynthesis pathway of chlorophyll and the model structure of Mg-chelatase with three subunits (red rectangle). (b) Design of ethanol inducible CHLI sRNA construct. (c) Location of T-DNA (red triangle) in two tobacco mutants (mt1 and mt2). (d) Changes in leaf color phenotype after 100 mL 1% … Read more
The percentage of words preserved in story retelling task by grammatical category. The text label from top to bottom respectively represents the percentages of word preservation, number of word types and number of word tokens in the corresponding grammatical categories. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220898120 New research from the … Read more
Orbit computed for VVV CL002 (black line), overlaid on the probability densities of orbits projected on the galactic plane (left) and height above the plane z versus galactocentric radius (right). Lighter colors indicate more probable regions of space, that are more frequently sampled by the simulated orbits. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2312.16028 Using the Magellan … Read more
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Researchers at the University of Maryland and National Institutes of Health have identified the microbial enzyme responsible for giving urine its yellow hue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Microbiology. The discovery of this enzyme, called bilirubin reductase, paves the way for further research into the gut … Read more
A landslip of old mining debris hit Tylorstown in south Wales in 2020. It was nearly four years ago but the memory of the landslip that sent 60,000 tons of old mining debris sliding down a Welsh hillside still haunts former miner Jeff Coombes. First the river he was walking along with his dog in … Read more
Air Supply: Coined by astrophysics Adam Frank and Amedeo Balbi, the “oxygen bottleneck” describes the critical threshold that separates worlds capable of fostering technological civilizations from those that fall short. “Without a ready source of fire, you’re never going to develop higher technology,” says Frank . Credit: University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw In … Read more
