Collaborate Disseminate
When looking for other planets that could be hosting life, astronomers tend to focus on those that are very Earth-like. But doing so might be limiting our scope too much and underselling life’s hardiness. A new study has used simulations to s… Continue reading Snowball planets may still have habitable hotspots
Antibiotics are one of the most important medical marvels of the modern age, letting us easily treat infections that would have once been lethal. The problem is they aren’t picky, blasting good and bad bacteria alike and messing up the delica… Continue reading Selective antibiotics target specific bacteria to spare the microbiome
Under the right conditions, DNA has been known to last for thousands of years, allowing scientists to study the genomes of ancient Egyptians, the very first Brits, and even early human ancestors. RNA, on the other hand, degrades much more qui… Continue reading RNA recovered and sequenced from 14,000-year-old mummified wolf
It’s not unusual to find rust around saltwater, but now the pairing might actually be useful. Researchers at Caltech and Northwestern University have found that electricity can be produced when saltwater flows over the top of thin films of ru… Continue reading Salt water flowing over thin layers of rust generates electricity
When scientists need to learn about something, recreating it in the lab is often one of the best ways – and now that even applies to the Sun itself. Physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have built a mini-Sun in the lab, and use… Continue reading Lab-made "Mini-Sun" sheds light on the real thing
Human lives are just blips on the cosmic time scale, which makes it impossible for us to witness the full life cycles of stars, planets and galaxies. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, astronomers might be able to catch crucial moments playing ou… Continue reading Red giant star spotted in its death throes
Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, but nature sometimes has room for improvement. Now a team from the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has created a new … Continue reading Artificial protein can reprogram cells to become self-regulating "smart cells"
As a flat sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a lattice, graphene is pretty simple, and yet it keeps surprising scientists with new properties. For the latest in this long line of breakthroughs, a team from Stanford has shown that graphene arra… Continue reading Twisted graphene exhibits previously-unseen form of magnetism
One of the main reasons cancer can be so difficult to beat is because of its ability to spread through the body, even after the primary tumor has been surgically removed. But now researchers from Vanderbilt University have developed a new tec… Continue reading Coating immune cells in nanoparticles helps seek and destroy rogue cancer cells
Particle accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have made some groundbreaking discoveries for physics, like measuring the spectrum of antimatter or discovering the Higgs boson – but it’s hard to tell how exactly that benefits th… Continue reading The Large Hadron Collider will soon help heat nearby homes