Credit: University of Liverpool. This week, researchers reported an effective way to protect working dogs from heat stress: training them to dunk their heads in cool water. A new computational technique provided a breakthrough in understanding the so-called “pseudogap” in quantum physics, a development that could lead to room-temperature superconductivity. And a bunch of scientists … Read more
A variety of microplastics extracted from corals off the coast of Si Chang Island in the Gulf of Thailand. As seen by the color, shape, and size, coral will consume a wide range of microplastics, with many of them thinner than a strand of human hair. Credit: Kyushu University/Isobe lab Researchers from Japan and Thailand … Read more
Study area in Uramba Bahía Málaga National Natural Park (shaded area), Colombia and its location on the Colombian Pacific Coast. Credit: Florida International University Researchers are advocating for a “no-take zone” off the coast of Colombia after one of the world’s smallest and most threatened hammerhead species was found to do very little traveling outside … Read more
Illustration of the tidally locked world TRAPPIST-1f. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered orbit red dwarf stars. This isn’t because red dwarfs are somehow special, simply that they are common. About 75% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, so you would expect red dwarf planets to be the most … Read more
Melting ice in the Southern Ocean. Credit: Jiuxin Shi As one of the largest heat reservoirs in the climate system, the global ocean absorbs more than 90% of the excess energy from ongoing anthropogenic warming. In the last century, the greatest warming in the ocean has occurred in the upper 500 m, with relatively weak … Read more
Artists Concept of the WASP-77 A b system. Credit: NASA Exoplanet Catalog A planet swings in front of its star, dimming the starlight we see. Events like these, called transits, provide us with bounties of information about exoplanets—planets around stars other than the sun. But predicting when these special events occur can be challenging…unless you … Read more
Graphical abstract. Credit: Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.4c01451 Scientists have devised a free AI algorithm that they believe will make finding new medicines far more efficient. DrugSynthMC can generate thousands of brand new, virtual drug molecules in seconds for screening and testing. It can adapt to whatever “target” molecule is inputted, … Read more
Norway has imposed new restrictions on fishing wild salmon. Norwegian authorities on Friday rolled out fresh restrictions on wild salmon fishing for 2025 after stocks hit record lows in recent years, with scientists blaming fish farms. “After several years of decline in the number of salmon swimming upstream to spawn…. we consider it necessary to … Read more
Credit: ACS Nano (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.4c02656 UC Irvine-led research reveals that the optical properties of materials can be dramatically enhanced—not by changing the materials themselves, but by giving the light new properties. The researchers demonstrated that by manipulating the momentum of incoming photons, they could fundamentally change how light interacts with matter. One striking example … Read more
Credit: Nature Chemical Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41589-024-01727-w Lasso peptides are natural products made by bacteria. Their unusual lasso shape endows them with remarkable stability, protecting them from extreme conditions. In a new study, published in Nature Chemical Biology, researchers have constructed and tested models for how these peptides are made and demonstrated how this information … Read more
