Science

Science

In a classroom in the Sherman Fairchild Laboratory Building, 6-year-old Marianne Cullen was starting to get the jitters. She was about to meet her favorite scientist, regenerative biologist and axolotl researcher Jessica Whited. "You might have to hold me up, in case I faint," the Springfield first-grader told her parents, Kat Demetrion and Robert Cullen, as she clutched her pink axolotl stuffie tightly in her lap.

"Emotionally, it stings," said Whited, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, fighting back tears. "It feels very personal. It took me 19 years to build this axolotl colony and research program with a goal to ultimately help human lives. It couldn't have come at a worse time."

Scientists have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth to the Moon can turn lunar minerals into hematite, also known as rust. The discovery adds to researchers' growing understanding of the deep interconnection between Earth and the Moon - and shows how the Moon keeps a geological record of those interactions, says Ziliang Jin, a planetary scientist at Macau University of Science and Technology in China. He and his colleagues reported their findings earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Academic research that includes most dictionaries defines self-belief as having a positive attitude, personal confidence and a willingness to engage. Self-efficacy involves an individual having the belief and self-confidence in their ability to succeed at tasks. Self-esteem is about having a favorable self-impression and self-respect. In relation to opinion, an opinion is a personal point of view that is not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

Yes, this big map depicts the realm of the humble mushroom, which "shares the forest with the plants and the animals, but it's not a plant, and it's not an animal." And the mushroom itself, like we're used to seeing sprouting beneath our feet, is only a small part of the organism: the rest "lives hidden, out of sight, below ground. Beneath every mushroom is a fungal network of hair-like strands called the mycelium," which begins as a spore.

I was a bit uncertain as to what to exactly expect. Surely the spectacular actual spaceships that were on display before would not be binned? They have not! With a few relatively small tweaks, features the same items as Exploring Space did when it closed. But it's also worth pointing out that Exploring Space changed considerably over its lifespan, with items like Tim Peake's space capsule and a spacesuit belonging to the first Brit in space, Helen Sharman, being added way after its 1986 opening.

A pair of diamonds that formed hundreds of kilometers deep in Earth's malleable mantle both contain specks of materials that form in completely opposing chemical environmentsa combination so unusual that researchers thought their coexistence was almost impossible. The substances' presence provides a window into the chemical goings-on of the mantle and the reactions that form diamonds. The two diamond samples were found in a South African mine. As with plenty of other precious gemstones, they contain what are called inclusionstiny bits of surrounding rocks captured as the diamonds form.

Think of them like pesky little genomic robots that hijack our biology to replicate, since they don't generate their own energy and can't reproduce on their own. They aren't made of cells, and are driven by a ruthless set of programmed instructions to multiply at all costs. Since their genomes are pretty simple, they're easier to tinker with and less ambitious for a human or machine to recreate. Remember: a genome is the DNA in an organism, not just a few strands.

"As part of a study into how the astronauts of tomorrow could sustain themselves for long periods of living and working on the Moon, researchers from the University of Kent have demonstrated how it's possible to grow tea in lunar soil. Led by Professor Nigel Mason of Kent's School of Physics and Astronomy and Dr Sara Lopez-Gomollon of the university's School of Biosciences,"

Millennia ago a piece of the sky fell toward East Africa, streaking overhead, born of an ancient collision of asteroids. The meteorite landed, probably with more of a thud than a boom, in a river valley where camels now forage near the village of El Ali in Somalia. Known locally as Shiid-birood (the iron rock), the El Ali meteorite is 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel.

MethaneSAT, which its builders say is the most advanced methane-imaging satellite ever put in orbit, sought to globally map, then track emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Their aim is to spur action to plug leaks, initially from the oil and gas industry, as a way to significantly lower near-term warming of the atmosphere. The satellite's main instrument, a highly sensitive spectrometer that can detect methane sources from space with unparalleled precision.

Deep underneath a granite hill in southern China, an enormous detector is sniffing out the secrets of the universe. This futuristic underground observatory has been built with the sole purpose of detecting neutrinos - tiny cosmic particles with a mind-bogglingly small mass. To date, nobody knows what these 'ghost particles' are or how they work. But scientists hope this $300 million lab will be able to answer these questions - vital to understanding the building blocks of the universe.

Known by scientists as 'parthenogenesis', this natural form of asexual reproduction lets healthy offspring develop from a female's unfertilised eggs. Only last month, a female lizard at a zoo near Birmingham gave birth to eight hatchlings, despite never having been in contact with a male. But virgin births have already occurred in a wide range of animals such as sharks, snakes, crocodiles, crustaceans, scorpions and wasps.

Recently I was invited to participate in a podcast on risky decisions. The specific incident was the death of a hiker who had deliberately chosen a route that was known to be really dangerous. Why would any rational person choose to expose himself or herself to this degree of risk? That's what my interviewer asked me. But beyond the question was the interviewer's mindset - you have to be crazy to voluntarily put yourself in a position where you are risking your life.

"drunken Germans usually pronounce Dutch better than sober Germans," they said in a statement read at the ceremony.

Enjoying a beer or two - but not too many - can help you speak a foreign language more clearly, a prize winning scientific study claims. It's a study aid that many language learners have turned to over the years, but now it's been confirmed by scientists - drinking a little booze can help you speak a foreign lingo more clearly.

For one thing, the systems he imagines process data relatively slowly compared to those on terra firma. They'd be constantly bombarded by radiation, and "obsolescence would be a problem" because making repairs or upgrades would be confoundingly difficult. Hajimiri believes that data centers in space could, someday, be a viable solution but hesitates to say when that day might come. "Definitely it would be doable in a few years," he said. "The question is how effective they would be, and how cost-effective they would become."

"When I did this experiment, I hoped that I would win the Ig Nobel. It's my dream. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable," said Tomoki Kojima, whose team put tape on Japanese beef cows and then spray-painted them with white stripes. Kojima appeared on stage in stripes and was surrounded by his fellow researchers who harassed him with cardboard flies.

With IVF, prospective parents already have options to screen embryos, not just for sex or severe genetic diseases, but increasingly for a full range of genetic traits. Thanks to whole genome sequencing (WGS), the choice isn't science fiction; we can now analyze all 20,000+ human genes in an embryo with better than 99.9 percent accuracy for many mutations and chromosomal problems (assuming parents are willing to forego natural conception, and instead supply their eggs and sperm to a lab for embryo creation and analysis).

It sounds like something from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But scientists in Massachusetts have revealed the terrifyingly high odds a black hole will explode in the next 10 years. In a new paper, they say there's a 90 per cent chance of at least one black hole exploding by 2035. If and when it happens, telescopes positioned in space and here on Earth should be able to capture the event - which fortunately won't be dangerous for Earthlings.

This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences", says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, California. "The next step is AI-generated life", says Hie, but his colleague Samuel King adds that "a lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism". The study, by Hie, King and colleagues, was posted on the preprint server bioRxivon 17 September and is not yet peer reviewed,

This week, the France-based ArianeGroup aerospace company announced that it had completed the integration of the Themis vehicle, a prototype rocket that will test various landing technologies, on a launch pad in Sweden. Low-altitude hop tests, a precursor for developing a rocket's first stage that can vertically land after an orbital launch, could start late this year or early next.

When you start thinking about it, the possibilities are endless. But how does it work? And how much power can it generate? Obviously one person wouldn't make much difference, but convert the teeming sidewalks of New York and you might really have something. Could we put this all over the world and stop using fossil fuels? Let's find out! Follow the Bouncing Ball