Shocked quartz grains, with cracks filled with molten glass. Credit: UC Santa Barbara Researchers continue to build the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea holds that a fragmented comet slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 12,800 years ago, triggering widespread climate change that led to, among other things, an abrupt reversal of Earth’s warming … Read more
As NASA prepares for long-duration missions to the moon and Mars for the benefit of all, a habitat growing concept selected by the agency on Wednesday could help “grow” homes using fungi for future explorers. A team of researchers from NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley will receive new funding under NASA’s Innovative … Read more
Memories are stored through the interaction of two proteins: a structural protein, KIBRA (green), which acts as a persistent synaptic label, and a synapse-strengthening enzyme, protein kinase Mzeta (red). Drugs that disrupt memory-maintaining interaction (other colors) erase pre-recorded long-term and distant memories. Credit: Changchi Hsieh, Ph.D. Whether it’s our first visit to a zoo or … Read more
Concentrations of ozone-damaging aluminum oxides in Earth’s atmosphere could increase by 650% in the coming decades due to a rise in the number of defunct satellites catching fire during re-entry, a unique study has found. And as mega-satellite constellations continue to pique the interests of private companies, this could be pretty bad news for our … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 public domain Years after questions were raised about their integrity, two of the University of Minnesota’s most prominent scientific discoveries have been retracted in the space of one week: one that offered hope for the therapeutic potential of stem cells and the other that offered a promising path to treating Alzheimer’s disease. The … Read more
Oldowan core, Koobi Fora, Kenya (First period, below baselines). Credit: Curry, Michael. 2020. Oldowan core, Koobi Forums. Museum of Stone Tools. Retrieved June 10, 2024. From: https://une.pedestal3d.com/r/DGHMTdkn4_ Our modern culture and technology emerge from millennia of cultural knowledge that has been continually collected and reinterpreted. We are all the culmination of thousands of generations that … Read more
This article was reviewed according to Science fact checked peer-reviewed publication trusted source proofread OK! Building compact behavioral programs. (A) Above: The space of strategies for solving a task can be wide, with many strategies yielding good performance. Bottom: Studying relationships between strategies can provide insight into behavioral variability between animals and tasks. (B) General … Read more
Building compact behavioral programs. (A) Above: The space of strategies for solving a task can be wide, with many strategies yielding good performance. Bottom: Studying relationships between strategies can provide insight into behavioral variability between animals and tasks. (B) General task design: an animal makes inferences about hidden properties of the environment to guide actions. … Read more
This article was reviewed according to Science fact checked peer-reviewed publication trusted source proofread OK! Artist’s impression of a microlensing event caused by a black hole observed from Earth towards the Large Magellanic Cloud. The light from a background star in the GMC is diffracted by a putative primordial black hole (lens) in the Milky … Read more
You may be familiar with the ‘arrow of time’, but did you know there could be a second one? Dr. Robert Hazen, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, DC, thinks a single time arrow may be too restrictive. A second arrow, which he calls ‘the law of increasing functional … Read more