Science

Science

"Essentially, these filaments are typically considered as the most non-dynamic component of the cytoskeleton," Gelfand said. "People generally believe that filaments just help cells to keep their shape and prevent mechanical damage. But a long time ago, we started to suspect that the filaments are more dynamic than people think." Contrary to long-held beliefs that these filaments are rigid and bundled, Gelfand and his laboratory found that vimentin filaments are highly mobile and travel individually along microtubules, the cell's internal highways.

In 2003, when Roman was working at KALW in San Francisco a book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach came across his desk. The book was a deeply researched and deeply funny exploration of human cadavers and their contributions to science. Roman booked Mary Roach for her first media interview. Over the years Roach has continued to release some of the funniest science books on the market.

Feinberg investigators now have access to one of the most advanced super-resolution imaging systems in the world, thanks to the installation of the MIRAVA Polyscope at the Center for Advanced Microscopy (CAM) at Northwestern University. This groundbreaking instrument-developed by Nobel Laureate Stefan Hell-is the first of its kind in the United States and among the first fully operational systems worldwide. The MIRAVA Polyscope combines two powerful technologies: 3D STED (stimulated emission depletion) and 2D MINFLUX (minimal photon flux), enabling investigators to achieve localization precision down to three nanometers. That's a 30-fold improvement over most super-resolution technologies and nearly 70 times better than confocal microscopy.

As the moon continues to move further away, the number of seconds, minutes and eventually hours in a day will also gradually increase - but it's likely none of us alive today will be around to notice it. 'Don't worry, these effects are so small,' he wrote on The Conversation. '1.5 inches per year compared to a distance of 239,000 miles (384,000 km) is just 0.00000001 per cent per year. 'We'll keep having eclipses, tides and days that last 24 hours for millions of years.'

Ask any astronaut who has spent extended periods in the International Space Station what the most challenging part was, and they will probably say missing friends and family. While there are plenty of amazing and unique experiences, life in space comes with other little challenges, too - try getting your hair to stay flat without gravity or wearing the same outfit for days on end.

The dating of the shocked quartz coincided with the rapid disappearance of the Clovis people, a technologically advanced hunter-gatherer culture that had dominated much of North America for centuries. Archaeological evidence has shown that their distinctive stone tools vanish abruptly from the record shortly after this period. This timing also marked the beginning of the Younger Dryas, a sudden and dramatic cooling event that lasted about 1,200 years.

Here's how the technology works: To store energy, electricity from the grid heats blocks of carbon inside insulated chambers filled with argon gas. When power is needed, the system pumps molten tin heated to a scorching 2,400°C (4,352°F) through graphite pipes - the only cost-effective material that can withstand those temperatures. Special solar panel-like devices called thermophotovoltaic cells then convert the heat back into electricity by capturing the white-hot tin's infrared light.

The Arctic Tern is not the only bird that spends its breeding season in the Arctic. Billions of birds belonging to nearly 200 speciesfrom small sparrows such as the Smith's Longspur to large waterfowl such as the Greater White-fronted Goosemake their way to the far north every spring to reproduce and then make the return flight south for the winter.

This week in Manchester, UK, scientists will be deliberating whether to restrict research that could eventually enable 'mirror life' - synthetic cells built from molecules that are mirror images of those found in the natural world. Over the past year, many scientists have voiced concerns over experiments that might lead to the creation of such cells, suggesting that they would pose an enormous risk to human health and the environment.

The feat, accomplished by physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder, and published in Nature Materials on 4 September, involved liquid crystals - bar-shaped molecules with properties between those of a liquid and those of a solid. Simply by shining a light on the liquid crystals, the team created ripples of twisting molecules through them. The ripples kept moving for hours, undulating with a distinct beat, even when the researchers changed the conditions.

According to the program's stated goals, DARPA is looking to "engineer red blood cells to contain novel biological features that can safely and reliably modify human physiology." In the short term, DARPA wants these bio-engineered red blood cells to improve human performance (think faster recovery times, more resistance to lactic acid buildup that causes muscle soreness, improved cardiovascular fitness, and the like) and "enhanced hemostasis," i.e., better blood clotting.

In the classic rubber hand illusion, illusion, a participant is tricked into experiencing a fake arm on the table in front of them as their own: their brain feels the tickle of a feather or other stimuli they see applied to the fake arm. (The real arm is behind a partition.) Until now, only some mammals, such as humans and mice, were known to be susceptible to this illusion.

The reports began with a man identifying himself as Kin, who says he discovered a small, silver-colored space rock in a fiery crater in Panama's Pedregal district on August 29. Since then, Kin has shared a series of videos on TikTok showing what he described as the meteorite burning leaves on contact and a fungus-like organism sprouting from its surface.

The twin robotic spacecraft launched in 1977, the same year as the Apple II, the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet, making the spacecraft the patron saints of the modern computer age. By the time Voyager's primary mission ended with Voyager 2's 1989 Neptune encounter, earthlings had the 80486, the Gameboy and the Apple Macintosh Portable. As Voyager 2 was nearly three billion miles (4.7 billion kilometers) away at that point, however, hardware upgrades were ruled out by the cost of delivery.

A vaccine has been approved to help protect koalas against chlamydia, a measure researchers are hailing as a world-first in fighting the disease that is a leading cause of death for the beloved marsupials.

'Brown eyes contain a high concentration of melanin, which absorbs light and creates their darker appearance,' she wrote on The Conversation. 'Blue eyes contain very little melanin. 'In blue eyes, the shorter wavelengths of light - such as blue - are scattered more effectively than longer wavelengths like red or yellow. 'Due to the low concentration of melanin, less light is absorbed, allowing the scattered blue light to dominate what we perceive. This blue hue results not from pigment but from the way light interacts with the eye's structure.'

For the last 4.5 billion years our planet has had a reliable celestial companion - the moon. Its orbit around the Earth has a profound effect on life here, from influencing the tides to stabilising our seasons. But astronomers have now discovered another sidekick that may have been following our planet around for some time. Experts at the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii have spotted a quasi-moon, called '2025 PN7', that has been tagging along after Earth since the 1960s.

Back then, volcanoes were in the zeitgeist. Two years prior, the Mount Saint Helens volcano in the United States spectacularly blew half of its flank away. It would go down as one of the most iconic and studied eruptions in history, and an inflection point for modern volcanology. The fact that the blast was sideways was unexpected and killed 57 people, but the eruption itself was anticipated through monitoring, and authorities evacuated more than 2,000 people in advance.

In his 1963 scifi story "The Invincible," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Unlike the story's human protagonists, the "black cloud" of bots was incapable of reasoning beyond the simple logic of animal instincts.

About 10.6 percent of people are left-handed ( Papadatou-Pastou and co-workers, 2020). It has been known for a long time that left-handedness runs in families. Two left-handed parents have a higher chance of having a left-handed child than two right-handed parents. Therefore, genes likely play a role in determining whether someone is born left-handed or right-handed. For a long time, scientists believed that there was just one handedness gene, but recent research has proven that this idea is wrong.

When you learned about the history of human evolution in school, there's a good chance you were shown one all-too-familiar image. That picture probably showed a conga line of human-like creatures, from a primitive ape at one end to a modern man proudly strolling into the future at the other. For many people, this iconic image captures evolution's slow but inevitable march from the simple to the complex.

When an unfamiliar pink fish appeared more than 10,000 feet down in the outer reaches of Monterey Canyon in 2019, scientists with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute were able to document the moment via their remotely operated vehicle, but they weren't sure what to make of it. But after years of meticulous research, teams of scientists, including MBARI senior scientist Steven Haddock, who led that 2019 expedition, have confirmed what that footage suggested: The deep-sea creature was a never-before-seen species.

The findings shed light on how rats have adapted to city lifeand how chatty they are. There's this kind of secret language that rats are communicating in with each other that we don't hear, says Emily Mackevicius, a neuroscientist and a co-author of the study. They're very social, adds Ralph Peterson, another study co-author. They're rugged, and they're New Yorkers themselves: persistent and resilient and able to thrive in a very extreme environment.

"This event is unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations,"