Some of Earth’s plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms — about 700 are known — flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die…. The plants not only collect the soil’s minerals into their bodies but seem to Read more about Some Farmers are Harvesting Metals From Plants[…]
A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds. […] “I think Read more about Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time[…]
This is a hugely holier than thou article written by a strident anti-abortionist, but it’s quite interesting in that a) you can clone your puppy commercially and b) it’s absolutely not a perfected science. You have five days after your pet dies to extract its genetic material for cloning, according to the Seoul-based Sooam Biotech Read more about People Are Killing Puppy Clones That Don’t Come Out ‘Perfect’ – wait you can clone your puppy?![…]
Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades. The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Read more about Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal 80% decline in number of insects in last decade[…]
It’s positively balmy in Antarctica. The National Meteorological Service of Argentina announced on Twitter that its Esperanza weather station recorded a new high for the continent: 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit). The previous temperature record for Antarctica was set on March 24, 2015, when this same weather station recorded 17.5 degrees Celsius (63.5 degrees Read more about Antarctica Just Set a New Temperature Record[…]
On Monday, researchers from Japan’s Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant. Rather than replacing their patient’s entire heart with a new organ, these researchers placed degradable sheets containing heart muscle cells onto the heart’s damaged areas – and if the procedure has the desired effect, it could eventually eliminate the Read more about Lab-Grown Heart Muscles Have Been Transplanted Into a Human For The First Time[…]
Body movement, from the muscles in your arms to the neurons transporting those signals to your brain, relies on a massive collection of proteins called molecular motors. Fundamentally, molecular motors are proteins that convert chemical energy into mechanical movement, and have different functions depending on their task. However, because they are so small, the exact Read more about Body movement is achieved by molecular motors. A new ‘molecular nano-patterning’ technique allows us to study these motors, reveals that some motors coordinate differently[…]
Rather than directions going one-way from DNA to RNA to proteins, the latest study shows that RNA itself modulates how DNA is transcribed—using a chemical process that is increasingly apparent to be vital to biology. The discovery has significant implications for our understanding of human disease and drug design. […] The picture many of us Read more about Turns out that RNA affects DNA in multiple ways. Genes don’t just send messages to RNA which then direct proteins to do stuff.[…]
A new type of immune cell which kills most cancers has been discovered by accident by British scientists, in a finding which could herald a major breakthrough in treatment. Researchers at Cardiff University were analysing blood from a bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they found an entirely new Read more about Immune cell which kills most cancers discovered by accident by Welsh scientists in major breakthrough […]
River flow is reduced in areas where forests have been planted and does not recover over time, a new study has shown. Rivers in some regions can completely disappear within a decade. This highlights the need to consider the impact on regional water availability, as well as the wider climate benefit, of tree-planting plans. “Reforestation Read more about Local water availability is permanently reduced after planting forests[…]
A little over a year ago, Caltech’s Lihong Wang developed the world’s fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It is so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion. But sometimes just being quick is not enough. Indeed, not even the fastest camera can take pictures Read more about Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena, can photograph light pulses[…]
A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday. The Netherlands-based nonprofit the Ocean Cleanup says its latest prototype was able to capture and hold debris ranging in size from huge, abandoned fishing gear, known as “ghost nets,” to tiny microplastics Read more about A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job, organizers say[…]
Expert human pathologists typically require around 30 minutes to diagnose brain tumors from tissue samples extracted during surgery. A new artificially intelligent system can do it in less than 150 seconds—and it does so more accurately than its human counterparts. New research published today in Nature Medicine describes a novel diagnostic technique that leverages the Read more about During Brain Surgery, This AI Can Diagnose a Tumor in 2 Minutes[…]
The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift. New Read more about New evidence shows that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error[…]
If you know nothing else about particle accelerators, you probably know that they’re big — sometimes miles long. But a new approach from Stanford researchers has led to an accelerator shorter from end to end than a human hair is wide. The general idea behind particle accelerators is that they’re a long line of radiation Read more about This particle accelerator fits on the head of a pin[…]
n the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of weather observations were carefully made in the logbooks of ships sailing through largely uncharted waters. Written in pen and ink, the logs recorded barometric pressure, air temperature, ice conditions and other variables. Today, volunteers from a project called Old Weather are transcribing these observations, which are Read more about How old ship logs are giving new insights into climate change[…]
The fossil fuels driving climate change make people sick, and so do impacts like extreme heat, wildfires, and more extreme storms, according to research published on Wednesday. In short, the climate crisis is a public health crisis. A new report from premiere medical journal the Lancet tallies the medical toll of climate change and finds Read more about Climate Change Is Already Making Us Sick[…]
Right now, in the Netherlands there is talk about reducing the speed limit from 130kph to 100kph in order to comply to emissions goals set by the EU (and supported by NL) years ago. Because NL didn’t put into effect any necessary legislation years ago, this is now coming to bite NL in the arse Read more about The effects of speed on traffic flow – also with a quick look at emissions and fuel consumption[…]
The first human vaccine against the often-fatal viral disease Ebola is now an official reality. On Monday, the European Union approved a vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck, called Ervebo. The stage for Ervebo’s approval was set this October, when a committee assembled by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended a conditional marketing authorization Read more about The EU Has Approved an Ebola Vaccine[…]
New research from a duo of environmental engineers at Drexel University is suggesting the decades-old claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is entirely wrong. Evaluating 30 years of studies, the research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to even come close to the air purifying effects of simply Read more about House plants have little effect on indoor air quality, study concludes[…]
Source: xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline
Last month was the hottest ever October on record globally, according to data released Friday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization that tracks global temperatures. The month, which was reportedly 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average October from 1981-2010, narrowly beat October 2015 for the top spot. According to Copernicus, most of Europe, Read more about Hottest October ever: Earth just experienced its hottest October ever[…]
It only Tuesday, but more than 11,000 scientists around the world have come together to declare a climate emergency. Their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, lays out the science behind this emergency and solutions for how we can deal with it. Scientists aren’t the first people to make this declaration. A tribal nation in the Read more about Thousands of Scientists Declare a Climate Emergency[…]
The internet has made it easier than ever to reach a lot of readers quickly. It has birthed new venues for publication and expanded old ones. At the same time, a sense of urgency of current affairs, from politics to science, technology to the arts, has driven new interest in bringing scholarship to the public Read more about Scholars Shouldn’t Fear ‘Dumbing Down’ for the Public[…]
The U.S. is slowly being gripped by a flooding crisis as seas rise and waterways overflow with ever more alarming frequency. An idea at the forefront for how to help Americans cope is so-called managed retreat, a process of moving away from affected areas and letting former neighborhoods return to nature. It’s an idea increasingly Read more about Managed Retreat Buyout Efforts Have Relocated 40,000 Households to avoid rising seawater: Study[…]