GRAPES-3 indicates a crack in Earth’s magnetic shield
The GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at TIFR’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for two hours. The burst...
3-D-printed magnets: How can you produce a magnet with exactly the right magnetic field? For the first time, magnets can be made with a 3-D printer
It is, however, difficult to produce a permanent magnet with a magnetic field of a specific pre-determined shape. That is, until now, thanks to the new solution devised at TU Wien: f...
What’s inside Ceres? New findings from gravity data
This artist’s concept shows a diagram of how the inside of Ceres could be structured, based on data about the dwarf planet’s gravity field from NASA’s Dawn mission. Since gravity dom...
Time flies: Insect fossils in amber shed light on India’s geological history
Palaeognoriste orientale, a new species of Lygistorrhinidae in Indian amber, which has its closest relatives in European Baltic amber. Credit: Frauke Stebner A new species of fungus...
The science of carbon dioxide and climate
The heat trapped by carbon dioxide warms our oceans and atmosphere. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – measured in parts per million of carbon dioxide – has dr...
Scientists track the brain-skull transition from dinosaurs to birds
It is the first time scientists have tracked the link between the brain’s development and the roofing bones of the skull. Across the dinosaur-bird transition, the skull transforms en...
Scientists enlist supercomputers, machine learning to automatically identify brain tumors
Biros’ team tested their new method in the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2017 (BRaTS’17), an annual competition where research groups from around the world present me...
Scientists create electric circuits inside plants
To do this, we’d need a way of getting the energy out in the form of electricity. The Finnish researchers, whose work is published in PNAS, developed a chemical that was fed into a r...
Pulsar-based spacecraft navigation system one step closer to reality
An enhancement to the NICER mission, the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) will perform the first space demonstration of pulsar-based navigation o...
Prehistoric ancestor of leukaemia virus found in bats
It has long been thought that deltaretroviruses have infected humans since prehistoric times. Dr Robert Gifford from the MRC - University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, said: ...
Physicists prepare to detect gravitational waves from neutron star collisions
An improved equation of state describing quark matter makes theoretical predictions regarding the properties of neutron star matter that researchers will hopefully be able to test in...
Physicists enable one-dimensional atom chains to grow
For the first time, with the help of oxygen, we have managed to produce atom chains that cover the entire iridium surface, are arranged with a regular distance of 0.8 nanometres betw...
New Neandertal and archaic human genomes advance our understanding of human evolution
Five Neandertal genomes have been sequenced to date, yet only one yielded high-quality data, an individual found in Siberia known as the Altai Neandertal. Three less well-defined gen...
New nanomaterial can extract hydrogen fuel from seawater
It’s possible to produce hydrogen to power fuel cells by extracting the gas from seawater, but the electricity required to do it makes the process costly. It’s done using a photocata...
Mini NASA satellite begins environmental testing
Dellingr’s exterior is lined with solar panels. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk Construction of NASA’s Dellingr CubeSat - a miniature satellite that provides ...
Image: Majestic solar eruption larger than Earth
This remarkable image was captured on 27 July 1999 by SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. Earth is superimposed for comparison and shows that from top to bottom the loop of...
Genetic ‘fossils’ reveal long-term viral partnerships in grass: Within host cells, partner viruses may exchange genetic material and evolve together over time
Specifically, they were interested in fossils of viruses known as pararetroviruses (PRVs), which don’t integrate into host DNA as part of their normal life cycle, but may incidentall...
Genetic evidence points to nocturnal early mammals
The team, led by Liz Hadly, professor of biology and senior author on the paper, examined genes involved in night vision in animals throughout the evolutionary tree, looking for plac...
Electrocatalysis can advance green transition
Demand is not likely to fall, so we need to find a way to make the fuels and chemicals that are an integrated part of our everyday lives in a sustainable and fossil-free way. Electro...
Earliest Fungus-Like Fossils Date Back 2.4 Billion Years
An international group of scientists says it has discovered 2.4 billion-year-old fungus-like fossils — approximately 2 billion years older than any previous fungal specimen and a bil...
CO2-neutral hydrogen from biomass
From a chemical point of view, the important reactive step in the blast furnace process is the reduction of the iron ore, explains Johannes Schmid, Project Manager at TU Wien’s Insti...
Bioreactors on a chip renew promises for algal biofuels
One of many improvements necessary for sustainable production of algal biofuel is the development of better algae. A single algal cell is captured in a tiny droplet of water encapsul...
Antibiotic-resistant microbes date back to 450 million years ago, well before the age of dinosaurs: Survival of mass extinctions helps to explain near indestructible properties of hospital superbugs
Leading hospital superbugs, known as the enterococci, arose from an ancestor that dates back 450 million years – about the time when animals were first crawling onto land (and well b...
400-million-year-old fish fossil reveals jaw structure linked to humans
Credit: Australian National University A new study from ANU on a 400 million year old fish fossil has found a jaw structure that is part of the evolutionary lineage linked to humans...
4 billion years: World’s oldest fossils unearthed
Haematite tubes from the NSB hydrothermal vent deposits that represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth. Credit: Matthew Dodd Remains of microorganisms at leas...