The Soyuz 5 rocket, also named Irtysh for a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, answers to that purpose. Its first stage is powered by a single RD-171MV engine, which at sea level has three times the thrust of a single Raptor 3 engine, and is part of a family of engines that are the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engines in the world. The RD-171MV uses only Russian components.
The molecular mechanisms that enable memories to persist over long timescales from days to weeks and months are still poorly understood1. Here, to develop insights into this process, we created a behavioural task in which mice formed multiple memories but only consolidated some, while forgetting others, over the span of weeks. We then monitored circuit-specific molecular programs that diverged between consolidated and forgotten memories. We identified multiple distinct waves of transcription, that is, cellular macrostates, in the thalamocortical circuit that defined memory persistence.
As humans, we all want the same thing, a life that's full of good experiences, more time with family, with friends, more time to love, but sometimes genetic illness can cut that short or really, for all of us at some point, our body breaks down. And our bodies are genetic machines. For many diseases, the cause of the disease is a mutation in the genome. Gene therapy is a vision that many have had for decades, more than 50 years.
Consciousness does not emerge from human brains, according to Professor Maria Strømme, a professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University. Instead, she claims that it exists as a fundamental field. If this is correct, 'mysterious' phenomena such as telepathy, near-death experiences, and even life after death could finally be explained by science. According to Professor Strømme's theory, consciousness does not end when we die. Instead, when a person passes away, their consciousness simply returns to the background field.
Beagles are very popular companion dogs and also very popular among breeding facilities and research laboratories where they live highly compromised lives, all "in the name of research" to help humans. 1 Many, if not most people, have no idea what goes on behind these closed doors. I've often wondered why these wonderful dogs rather than others wound up being used for a sorts of research, and now I know because of Dr. Brad Bolman's excellent new book Lab Dog.
There's a fairy tale about Thanksgiving that gets refuted every fall. Does eating turkey really make you fall asleep? When science writers check in with the experts, they always get the same response: No, no, no, and no. Also no and no. These holiday debunkers tell you what the science says: Turkey meat is not a sedative. They tell you what the studies show: Drumsticks don't produce fatigue.
Many dog breeds are noted for their personalities and behavioral traits, from the distinctive vocalizations of huskies to the herding of border collies. People have worked to identify the genes associated with many of these behaviors, taking advantage of the fact that dogs can interbreed. But that creates its own experimental challenges, as it can be difficult to separate some behaviors from physical traits distinctive to the breed-small dog breeds may seem more aggressive simply because they feel threatened more often.
Sixteen years ago a group of anthropologists discovered 3.4-million-year-old fossilized foot bones in Ethiopia. While they suspected the foot belonged to an ancient human that likely lived alongside the species we know as Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, without a skull or teeth to analyze, they couldn't be sure. What they did know is that unlike Lucy, which walked upright on arched feet like our own, the mystery foot had a grasping toe that was adapted for climbing trees.
He was thrilled; this was the first leopard seal he'd ever seen in Chile, where he is from. As he peered through his binoculars, he noticed another, smaller seal: a pup. "I got so excited, and then we got there, and it's dead," he said. As the boat drew nearer, he could see the pup was still haloed in downy white hairs, suggesting it was less than a week old. Its head was submerged and its limp body was frozen to the ice.
In a statement, NASA revealed that it agreed to modify Boeing's existing 2014 Commercial Crew contract to have Starliner carry cargo only for its first operational flight, Starliner-1, which is tentatively scheduled for "no earlier than April 2026." "Following Starliner certification, and a successful Starliner-1 mission, Starliner will fly up to three crew rotations to the International Space Station," NASA's statement reads.
Around 410 million years ago, terrestrial life was relatively simple. There were no forests or prairiesland was largely dominated by slimy microbial mats. The types of plants that would eventually give rise to trees and flowers had only just evolved and would take another several million years to fully flourish and diversify. A new discovery is rewriting the story of how these vascular plants, as they are called, spread onto land.
Specifically, it's going to zip right past Jupiter's Hill radius, the boundary inside which the gas giant can keep an object in its own orbit without it being stolen by the Sun. In the Earth's vicinity, Lagrange points L1 and L2 are close to the boundary of our planet's Hill radius, a perfect place of equilibrium for satellites and other human-made objects, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, to orbit the Sun while using minimal amounts of fuel.
What is the road system that connects all four towns using the smallest total length of road? What perhaps feels like the right answer is a network where opposing towns are connected in straight lines. If the square has side length 1km, the total length is about 2.83km In fact, the minimal network is the one below, which shaves off about 4 per cent of the length of the X solution.
In cancer biology, there's a conundrum known as Peto's paradox: Large animals have lots of cells, which in theory should mean more chances to develop cancer. And long-lived organisms have more time to acquire the mutations needed to transform healthy cells into cancerous ones. And yet "that's not what happens," says Vera Gorbunova, a biologist at the University of Rochester. "It suggests that these large and longer-lived animals have additional protections from cancer that they evolved."
The gravitational forces of a primordial black hole would be so strong that they would tear the cells of your brain apart from the inside out. Professor Scherrer says: 'A sufficiently large primordial black hole, about the size of an asteroid or larger, would cause serious injury or death if it passed through you. 'It would behave like a gunshot.'
The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, announced today that one of its Asian elephants, Nhi Linh (pronounced NEE-lin), is pregnant and could give birth to the first baby calf born at the facility in nearly a quarter century. If the pregnancy continues on track, the calf should be born between mid-January and early March. According to a press release, the zoo's 44-year-old male elephant, Spike, mated with 12-year-old Nhi Linh in April 2024.
Beneath the idyllic resort towns of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, daring explorers have uncovered a hidden world of grand chambers and twisting tunnels. The Ox Bel Ha, Mayan for 'Three Paths of Water', is a sprawling water 'web' that makes up the world's longest underwater cave system. In this vast network, researchers have found giant sink holes, huge crystal chambers known as ice palaces, and 38 unique species of cave-dwelling animals.
What can an elephant seal - a 4,000 pound, bellowing monstrosity that looks like a melted Yankee Candle - teach us about the world? Plenty, it turns out. "The animals are amazing. I mean, everything they do is extreme," says Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "They're the deepest-diving pinniped and they dive for longer than any other seal or sea lion. They also fast for longer. Everything they do is just pushing the limits."
Science is a slaughterhouse. We rarely acknowledge the degree to which animal life underwrites the research that provides us with medicines, or the regulation that keeps us safe. Live animals were used in 2.64m officially sanctioned scientific procedures in the UK in 2024, many of them distressing or painful and many of them fatal. But the government's new strategy to phase out animal testing published earlier this month suggests that in the near future emerging technologies
NASA officials are facing that exact predicament as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is set to fall from its orbit at the end of 2026, - but the agency has green lit an audacious plan that's one for the history books: a plane drops a rocket in mid air that's carrying a robotic satellite, which will then blast into space and boost the telescope's altitude, thereby saving it.
So in a lot of country music, you might describe the singer's voice as bright or brassy or sharp. But I bet the word you really want to use is twangy. TZU-PEI TSAI: Twangy voice, it refers to a bright timbre that sounds like a children's taunting - nya na nya na nya na nya - or a witch's cackling (cackling).
