Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small…
The 2015-2016 El Niño event brought weather conditions that triggered regional disease outbreaks throughout the world, according to a new NASA study that is the first to comprehensively assess the public health impacts of the major climate event on a global scale. El Niño is an irregularly recurring climate pattern characterized by warmer than usual…
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) led by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini from the Chair of Materials Science (biomaterials) and Prof. Dr. Ralf Dittrich from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen have taken an important step towards developing artificial ovaries for patients suffering from cancer. Together, they have been…
Brazilian researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary history of amoebae and demonstrated that at the end of the Precambrian period, at least 750 million years ago, life on Earth was much more diverse than suggested by classic theory. The study, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation — FAPESP, revealed eight new ancestral lineages of…
People fall in love for many reasons — similar interests, physical attraction, and shared values among them. But if they marry and stay together, their long-term happiness may depend on their individual genes or those of their spouse, says a new study led by Yale School of Public Health researchers. Published in the journal PLOS…
A team of researchers led by Bradley Bernstein at the Ludwig Center at Harvard has used single-cell technologies and machine learning to create a detailed “atlas of cell states” for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) that could help improve treatment of the aggressive cancer. AML is characterized by the accumulation of white blood cells in the…
The Brassicaceae plant family boasts a stunning diversity of fruit shapes. But even in this cosmopolitan company the heart-shaped seed pods of the Capsella genus stand out. An estimated 8 million years ago Capsella embarked on a different evolutionary pathway from its close relatives Arabidopsis and Camelina. This led to radically different shapes in the…
Potocki-Lupski syndrome is a condition that results from having an extra copy of a small piece of chromosome 17 in each cell. A different condition, known as Smith-Magenis syndrome, results when a similar small piece of chromosome 17 is deleted. It was thought that these conditions occurred because of the imbalance in the genetic information…
To stabilize the Earth’s climate for people and ecosystems, it is imperative to ramp up natural climate solutions and, at the same time, accelerate mitigation efforts across the energy and industrial sectors, according to a new policy perspective published today in Science. Among their findings, the researchers warn that a ten-year delay in emissions reductions…
Researchers at the San Diego branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at University of California San Diego have identified an entirely new mechanism underlying the development and structure of the nervous system during embryogenesis. The findings, publishing in the February 28, 2019 issue of Developmental Cell, focus on the dynamic coupling of microtubule…