128 articles from MONDAY 26.9.2022

Space station flies over Hurricane Ian – video

Footage released by Nasa shows a view of Hurricane Ian that can be seen from the International Space Station as it flies over the storm. Hurricane Ian moved near the Cayman Islands and closer to western Cuba early on Monday on course to hit Florida as a major hurricane this week. A surge of up to 2.4 metres (8ft) of ocean water and 25cm (10in) of rain, with as much as 38cm (15in) in...

Female fruit flies enter the ring of sexual competition

When it comes to sexual competition, males have the star role. Clashing bodies, locking horns, biting and kicking are all considered fair play. Since these behaviors are so salient and robust, most studies focus on male behavior, leaving females aside.

New theory upends what we know about how charged macromolecules self-assemble

In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uniformly charged macromolecules—or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge—can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends our...

Federal fraud charges crumble in cases against scientists with China ties

The U.S. government overplayed its hand in prosecuting U.S. academics under the controversial China Initiative, three federal courts ruled last week. In separate cases, attorneys for the Department of Justice (DOJ) had maintained that chemist Franklin Tao, materials scientist Zhengdong Cheng, and mathematician Mingqing Xiao jeopardized the nation’s security and defrauded the...

The asteroid that formed Vredefort crater was bigger than previously believed

About 2 billion years ago, an impactor hurtled toward Earth, crashing into the planet in an area near present-day Johannesburg, South Africa. The impactor—most likely an asteroid—formed what is today the biggest crater on our planet. Scientists have widely accepted, based on previous research, that the impact structure, known as the Vredefort crater, was formed by an object about 15 kilometers...

The neighbors of the caliph: Archaeologists uncover ancient mosaics on the shore of the Sea of Galilee

With the help of geomagnetic surface surveys and subsequent hands-on digging, an excavation team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has revealed new insights into the area in which the caliph's palace of Khirbat al-Minya was built on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. According to these findings, there had already been a settlement occupied by Christian or Jewish inhabitants in the...