A tardigrade is given a dose of CRISPR tools to change one of its genes, and those of the eggs it will produce. Credit: 2024 Tokiko Saigo et al. Some species of tardigrades are highly and unusually resilient to various extreme conditions that are fatal to most other life forms. The genetic basis for these … Read more
This map, superimposed on an image from NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, shows Perseverance’s path between January 21 and June 11. White dots indicate where the rover stopped after completing a trip along the Neretva Vallis river channel. The light blue line shows the rover’s route within the canal. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Originally considered little … Read more
In orange the location of the Barmaz site, looking south. It is located on the plain, at the foot of the Chablais massif, which rises to an altitude of 2,500 meters. The site is divided into two contemporary cemeteries called Barmaz I (dark blue) and Barmaz II (light blue) (Honegger and Desideri 2003, modified). Credit: … Read more
How it works: A proton (far left) from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at CERN collides with carbon nuclei (small gray spheres). This creates a shower of various elementary particles, including a large number of neutral pions (orange spheres). As the unstable neutral pions decay, they emit two high-energy gamma rays (yellow squiggly arrows). … Read more
Artist’s rendering of a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate (yellow) in a bath of dye molecules (red) disturbed by an external light source (white flash). Credit: A. Erglis/Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg Researchers from the University of Bonn have shown that superphotons, or photon Bose-Einstein condensates satisfy fundamental physics theorems and enable insights into properties that are often … Read more
The intensity map and geographical location of the 2023 Turkey earthquake. A black star indicates the epicenter of the earthquake (https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes). Credit: Journal for Applied Geodesy (2024). DOI: 10.1515/jag-2024-0024 Earthquakes may reveal their impending presence much earlier than previously thought due to a variety of anomalies in the ground, atmosphere and ionosphere that can be … Read more
Detecting anomalous wavefronts in fluorescence microscopy. Credit: Optics (2024). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.518559 A team led by researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus has adapted a class of techniques used in astronomy to defocus images of distant galaxies for use in the life sciences, giving biologists a faster and cheaper way to get clearer and sharper images. … Read more
Garnet washed up as pink sand on a beach in the Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park. Credit: University of Adelaide Deposits of deep pink sand washing up on the coast of South Australia shed new light on when the Australian tectonic plate began to subduct beneath the Pacific plate, as well as on the presence of … Read more
Credit: CC0 Public domain About 2.5 billion years ago, free oxygen, or O2first began accumulating to meaningful levels in Earth’s atmosphere, paving the way for the emergence of complex life on our evolving planet. Scientists call this phenomenon the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE for short. But the initial accumulation of O2 on Earth was … Read more
Marmalade hoverfly. Credit: Will Hawkes More than 17 million insects migrate every year through a single mountain pass on the border between France and Spain, new research shows. Scientists from the University of Exeter have studied migrating insects in the Pass of Bujaruelo, a 30-metre gap between two high peaks in the Pyrenees. Their article, … Read more