General science & research news
People with denser chest and back muscles are significantly less likely to have a heart attack, not because the muscles themselves protect the heart, but because their density signals an overall active lifestyle. That is the conclusion of a new analysis of the SCOT-HEART trial, published June 30 in Radiology by a team led by […]
Whales spend most of their time not making a sound. Vocalization-based tracking, the standard tool for studying cetacean movement and behavior, leaves a blind window covering the majority of their lives. A new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has found a way to fill that gap, using a network of sensors […]
The brain’s most sophisticated cognitive functions are powered by the same metabolic machinery that, over decades, creates the conditions for their destruction. A new study from the Technical University of Munich provides direct evidence for this trade-off, using a novel imaging approach that simultaneously measures where brain regions connect and how much energy they consume. […]
Whales spend most of their time not making a sound. Vocalization-based tracking, the standard tool for studying cetacean movement and behavior, leaves a blind window covering the majority of their lives. A new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has found a way to fill that gap, using a network of sensors […]
Forty years ago this spring, two researchers at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory mixed barium, lanthanum, copper, and oxygen and measured something that should not have been possible. J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller found that their ceramic began losing electrical resistance at 35 kelvin , 50% higher than the previous record, in a […]
For 23 years, the Silverpit Crater, a 3.2-kilometer-wide depression beneath the North Sea, about 130 kilometers off the coast of Yorkshire, sat in geological limbo. Discovered in 2002 by petroleum geoscientists Simon Stewart and Philip Allen, who proposed an impact origin in Nature, the structure was met with skepticism. In 2009, the Geological Society of […]
A 24-hour fast before a potentially lethal dose of abdominal radiation was enough to save every mouse in a new study from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, while every fed mouse died within nine days. The difference came down to what was living in their guts. The study, published June 23 in […]
The Green Revolution saved a billion lives. It also made people less nourished. That uncomfortable trade-off, yield at the expense of nutritional quality, is the starting point for a sweeping review published in Nature on June 24. Fifteen plant scientists from 14 institutions across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States argue that the tools […]
The mRNA vaccines that turned the COVID-19 pandemic worked with astonishing speed and efficacy. But the molecular details of why they work so well remain surprisingly incomplete. The lipid nanoparticle is not a passive delivery vehicle, it is a potent adjuvant in its own right. The mRNA is not immunologically silent despite its nucleoside modifications. […]
A team of researchers from Nanjing University and Tsinghua University has demonstrated a fundamentally new way to cool nanoscale devices using nothing more than a laser beam and a pair of atomically thin semiconductor layers. The approach, described in Nature on June 24, creates a temperature difference of more than 100 kelvin across a gap […]
