The living cells of all organisms contain a cytoskeleton that stabilizes their internal structure and external shape. This also applies to magnetotactic bacteria. They produce magnetic nanoparticles which are concatenated into intracellular chains and enable them to orient themselves to the Earth's magnetic field. Microbiologists at the University of Bayreuth have now discovered a protein in the...

A team of Johns Hopkins University researchers has developed a new software that could revolutionize how DNA is sequenced, making it far faster and less expensive to map anything from yeast genomes to cancer genes.

Powerful winds pushed flames through Southern California canyons early Thursday as an out-of-control wildfire burned near homes and forced residents to flee.

A noon-time boom that was heard and felt from southern Ontario to Virginia on Wednesday was likely caused by a disintegrating meteor, according to an organization in western New York that keeps track of such...

It’s safe, it works, and it gives a tantalising glimpse of what else might be achieved given sufficient political willDr Charlotte Summers is a lecturer in intensive care medicine at the University of CambridgeMost of us have had endured some very dark days in 2020, whether trying to juggle working from home alongside schooling children, worrying about how to pay the bills as a consequence of...

The standard model of particle physics only accounts for 20% of matter in the universe. Physicists have theorized that the remaining 80% is made up by so-called dark matter, which consists of particles that do not emit, absorb or reflect light and thus cannot be directly observed using any existing instruments.

A new species of bat that is 16 million years old has been discovered by an international group that includes University of Valencia lecturers Francisco J. Ruiz Sánchez and Plini Montoya. The finding was made at the palaeontologic site of Mas d'Antolino B, in the town of l'Alcora, and corresponds to the lower Miocene in the Valencia region in Spain.

A fleet of next-generation, deep-diving ocean robots will be deployed in the Southern Ocean in a major study of how marine life acts as a handbrake on global warming.

The marimo is the aggregative form of the freshwater alga Aegagropila linnaei. In Japan, Lake Akan in Hokkaido is the best known habitat of the marimo. It is so emblematic of the lake and surrounding region that it has been designated as a special national monument. However, due to decades of deforestation and pollution, the marimo populations in Lake Akan have steeply dropped and have not...

As medical research progresses, traditional treatment protocols are being rapidly exhausted. New approaches to treat diseases that do not respond to conventional drugs are the need of the hour. In search for these approaches, science has turned to a wide range of potential answers, including artificial nucleic acids. Artificial or xeno nucleic acids are similar to naturally occurring nucleic acids...

Flash floods have claimed at least nine lives in southern Thailand and affected half a million people, officials said Thursday as the region braced for even more rain.

Western Sydney University researchers have discovered the 'senior citizens' of our neighboring galaxy—close to 120,000-year-old remains of exploding stars known as supernova remnants.

Rhizobia are soil-dwelling bacteria that form symbioses with legumes and provide biologically useable nitrogen as ammonium for the host plant. During symbiosis, rhizobia must adapt to several different lifestyles. These range from free-living growth in the rhizosphere, through root attachment and colonization, to passage along infection threads, differentiation into bacteroids that fix N2, and,...

On 8 November, 33 intrepid sailors set off from Les Sables-D'Olonne in western France to take part in the most extreme, solo, non-stop, race around the world: the Vendée Globe. The route of around 45 000 km takes them down through the Atlantic and into the heart of the Southern Ocean—which is where they are heading now. Thanks to information from satellites, an ice exclusion zone has been...

Using the Parkes radio telescope, astronomers have investigated a radio-loud magnetar known as Swift J1818.0−1607. Results of these observations, providing more insights into the properties of this magnetar, unveiling its highly active and dynamic magnetosphere. The findings are reported in a paper published November 25 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Necropsies of over 50 killer whales over the last decade show that more mammals are dying as a direct result of human behaviours in the Pacific Ocean than previously...

In our Milky Way, there are about 200 billion suns as well as large quantities of gas, some of which serves as raw material for star births. The gas collects in compact lumps but also appears as extended molecular clouds. Astronomers have used the Apex sub-millimeter telescope in Chile to look deep into the galactic plane and measure the interstellar medium. They studied the distribution of the...

A small-satellite mission to understand the lunar water cycle—detecting and mapping water on the lunar surface in order to investigate how its form, abundance, and location relate to geology—has received NASA approval to proceed with the next phase of its development.

Many substances with different chemical and physical properties, from diamonds to graphite, are made up of carbon atoms. Amorphous forms of solid carbon do not have a fixed crystal structure and consist of structural units—nanosized graphene particles. A team of physicists from RUDN University studied the structure of amorphous carbon and suggested classifying it as a separate type of amorphous...

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have found that graphene-based heat pipes can help solve the problems of cooling electronics and power systems used in avionics, data centers and other power electronics.

China said Thursday its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the moon's surface and sealed them within the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission has been attempted by any country in more than 40...

Researchers have used plants to produce virus-like particles (VLPs) of the dengue virus in a potential first step towards novel vaccines against the growing threat.