In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of volunteer labor . This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serious human rights issue .
There are three species of bats that eat birds. We know that because we have found feathers and other avian remains in their feces. What we didn't know was how exactly they hunt birds, which are quite a bit heavier, faster, and stronger than the insects bats usually dine on. To find out, Elena Tena, a biologist at Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, and her colleagues attached ultra-light sensors to Nyctalus Iasiopterus, the largest bats in Europe. What they found was jaw-droppingly brutal.
Two companies, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and China's LandSpace, could join SpaceX's exclusive club as soon as next month. (Bezos might claim he's already part of the club, but there's a distinction to be made.) Each company is in the final stages of launch preparations-Blue Origin for its second New Glenn rocket, and LandSpace for the debut flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket.
After analyzing its trajectory, scientists concluded that the object maintains a 1:1 resonance with the Earth. In other words, it orbits the sun at the same time as our planet. From a distant perspective, this synchronicity makes it look as if the Earth is accompanied by a tiny asteroid-as if it had an additional moon. Unlike the moon, quasi-lunar moons are not gravitationally bound to the Earth. They are ephemeral companions, in cosmological terms, following their own path around the sun. Only at certain times do they come close enough to appear bound.
If you watch sci-fi movies, you'd think that flying a spaceship is just like driving a slightly more complicated car (or a Winnebago in Spaceballs). And George Lucas gave us those galactic battles with pilots who look like they're flying fighter jets on Earth. Well, bad news: Space is really, really different. In particular, moving a vehicle in orbit around Earth is way more complicated than that. The maneuvers you might make with a plane sometimes have the opposite effect in orbit.
The first Trump administration unveiled its Artemis lunar landing program in 2017, aiming for astronaut boots on the moon in 2024 and an eventual Artemis Base Camp a decade later. These would not be Apollo-style flags-and-footprints sorties but rather longer-duration missions meant to support the construction of an eventual Artemis Base Camp lunar outpost; as such, they require bigger rockets and spacecraftand more complex hardware for surface operations.
Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were in decline before an asteroid smacked the Earth 66 million years ago, causing mass extinction. New research suggests dinosaur populations were still thriving in North America before the asteroid strike, but it's only one piece of the global picture, independent experts say. Dinosaurs were quite diverse and now we know there were quite distinct communities roaming around before being abruptly wiped out, said Daniel Peppe, a study co-author and paleontologist at Baylor University.
Evolution rarely invents entirely new solutions. Instead, it tinkers with existing systems, repurposing and refining them for new functions. Before our ancestors developed language, they already possessed sophisticated systems for controlling movement-reaching for objects, grasping tools, navigating space. These systems shared a common architecture: a motor planning component in the frontal lobes, a sensory target component in the temporal and parietal lobes, and a translation system connecting the two.
Dog owners often treat their pets like miniature humans and now scientists are studying canines in the same way to discover more about the mystery of ageing in people. They suspect a clue to the varying rates at which both dogs and humans age may lie in the kidneys and the gut. In 2020, researchers for the Dog Aging Project in the United States began enrolling dogs in a long-term study of ageing, ending up with about 50,000 canines volunteered by their owners.
At first glance, it's a wonder that parasitic nematodes exist at all. To reproduce, these minuscule creaturesroughly the size of a pinpointmust leap 25 times their body length and land on a flying insect as it zooms overhead. Given that wind, gravity and air resistance all stand in the way of a bull's-eye, the worms' chances seem poor. But new research shows there's another force working to their advantage: static electricity.
The nature of gravity - and whether it can be reconciled with quantum mechanics - is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Most researchers think that at a fundamental level, all phenomena follow the principles of quantum physics, but those principles do not seem to be compatible with the accepted theory of gravity. For years, researchers have been proposing experiments to show whether gravity could produce a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.
Herds of hadrosaurs with huge head crests and duck bills roamed ancient New Mexico for plants to eat, making sure not to end up underfoot a long-necked titanosaur or, worse, in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus rex. None of them knew that a seven-mile-long space rock hurtling toward Earth was about to kill them all. The asteroid impact triggered one of the planet's worst mass-extinction events, wiping out all dinosaurs but birds.
Dinosaurs would not have become extinct had it not been for a catastrophic asteroid strike, researchers have said, challenging the idea the animals were already in decline. About 66m years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, a huge space rock crashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out all dinosaurs except birds. However, some experts have argued the dinosaurs were already in decline.
Do you think we should genetically modify wildlife? What if we could make seabirds resistant to the flu that has been exterminating them en masse, just by tweaking their DNA a smidgen? Or make fish that can shrug off pollution, or coral that can survive warming waters? Engineer in the sorts of change that could occur naturally, given enough time, if only the wildlife would stop dying already. Thanks to newly emerging methods, such as Crispr, these feats are within reach.
On October 21, 10x Genomics, Inc. and Prognosys Biosciences, Inc. filed a complaint for patent infringement against Illumina, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, asserting that Illumina's spatial technology products infringed on patents covering technology for spatial transcriptomics, which allows researchers to study gene activity within a cell's tissue. U.S. Patent Nos. 11,008,607, 11,549,138, 12,234,505, and 12,297,487 are owned by Prognosys Biosciences and have significant applications in cancer research, neuroscience and immunology.
This article very nearly didn't exist. For several weeks, it made a conspicuous effort not to. It began, or rather did not begin, when I was invited to pitch a second article for Big Think about virtually any topic in neuroscience. Triumph. I had freedom and unlimited time. What could be easier? A lot, it turns out. Weeks went by, and I did not write. My inbox began to fill with cheerful nudges from Stephen, my editor. Still keen to write something?
A team of archaeologists examined the fossilized leg bone of an extinct kangaroo and realized that instead of evidence of butchery, cut marks on the bone reveal an ancient attempt at fossil collecting. That leaves Australia with little evidence of First Peoples hunting or butchering the continent's extinct megafauna-and reopens the question of whether humans were responsible for the die-off of that continent's giant Ice Age
Immunology is at a pivotal moment. The huge successes in public health brought about by vaccines are now facing erosion, as anti-vaccination sentiments spread around the world and the United States cuts funding to domestic and overseas infectious-disease research. Measles, for example, was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 by the World Health Organization, but in July this year, there were more reported cases than in any year since 1992.
The principles of examining creativity through the lens of neuroscience reveal a lot of the same principles that exist with AI, in a sort of a stochastic sense, And it establishes a different vehicle to look at the mechanism of creativity-through a mechanistic lens, through the lens of behavioral neurology-and I think if someone who was brilliant with AI were to come and look at this, they would see a lot of similarities and it would be, I think, very useful data.
The whistleblower said that other space agency analysts are being kept in the dark, the person said the 31/Atlas is not a comet and it has an "engine like sound" and warned that "something big is about to happen." Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has previously said that 31/Atlas is emitting metallic emissions which has a strange glow, whilst the whistleblower has claimed a cover-up is ongoing between ESA and NASA.
Once the card was recovered, an exact binary image of it was made so investigators could examine its contents. They discovered, however, that the data was encrypted, and would require encryption keys stored in the camera's CPU, which was broken. Authorities contacted the manufacturers of the different hardware parts used in the camera, and with their help, were able to use surrogate parts to extract the data.
Let me start by saying I genuinely admire Andrew Huberman. His mission to popularize neuroscience to improve lives is as useful as water in the desert, and his actionable strategies have helped countless people, including me. I even use his sponsor recommendations (yes, that fancy mattress works). But expertise in ophthalmology and neuroscience doesn't automatically translate to expertise in motivation science, and that is why things get messy.
Duffy also cites "maybe others" getting involved. This refers to a third option. In recent weeks, officials from traditional space companies have been telling Duffy and the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation, Pete Meachum, that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module-like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.
This tremendously successful theory gave us everything from gravitational waves to black holes based on one profound insight: that the fabric of spacetime itself would evolve, curve, and even ripple based on the properties and behavior of the matter and energy within it. When we applied Einstein's equations to the entire Universe as a whole, along with the idea that the Universe was filled nearly uniformly with matter and energy on the largest scales, we wound up with an expanding Universe.
The human protease caspase-4 and its mouse orthologue caspase-11 defend against gram-negative bacteria3,4. Activated by bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in the cytoplasm5,6,7, caspase-4 and caspase-11 cleave and activate the pore-forming protein gasdermin D (GSDMD) to cause a lytic form of cell death called pyroptosis8,9. Eliminating infected cells in this manner denies microorganisms their replicative niche. Other bacterial components, including toxins and DNA, are sensed by intracellular inflammasome complexes that activate caspase-1, which also induces pyroptosis by cleaving GSDMD1.
The AI that powered an F-16 in a dogfight against a manned aircraft is powering a new, fully autonomous fighter jet, its maker said as it unveiled the new aircraft design. US defense tech unicorn Shield AI unveiled its new X-BAT fighter aircraft on Wednesday. The company says that it can operate without human pilots and without runways. It said it can take off from islands and ships - not just warships, but also container ships.
China's CR450 train hit 453 km/h during pre-service trials, surpassing its CR400 predecessor's 420 km/h and outpacing Deutsche Bahn's 405 km/h test record. Despite the impressive figure - particularly for British rail travelers eyeing autumn leaves nervously - operational speed will be 400 km/h, and 600,000 km of testing remains before passenger service begins. State-backed mouthpiece Science and Technology Daily (STD) called the CR450 "the world's fastest" electric multiple unit (EMU).
When the National Astronomy Meeting, organized by the UK Royal Astronomical Society, descended on Durham University in July, Martina Veresvarska saw the gathering as an opportunity not just to talk shop, but also to indulge her baking hobby. The annual conference, usually held in the British Isles, is one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Veresvarska is a PhD candidate at the UK university's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy and a co-founder of the astronomy department's charity bake-sale organization, Cakes for Good.
