Australian scientists discover 500-meter-tall coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef
Scientists have discovered a massive detached coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef, measuring more than 500 meters high — taller than the Empire State Building, the Sydney Tower and the Petronas Twin Towers.
Antarctica yields oldest fossils of giant birds with 21-foot wingspans
Some of the largest birds in history, called pelagornithids, arose a few million years after the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs and patrolled the oceans with giant wingspans for some 60 million years. A team of paleontologists has found two fossils — each from individual pelagornithids with wingspans of 20 feet or more — that show this gigantism arose at least 50 million years ago and lasted at least 10 million years.
Could Bacteria Be the Key to Solving Plastic Recycling Headaches?
Think about the plastics in your home. You likely have several different kinds of the seven most common plastics in your cupboards and closets. From plastic juice bottles to detergent containers, your home has a lot of plastic in some stage of use. Once it’s empty, what happens? It’s just as likely that your waste […]
How cells use mechanical tension sensors to interact with their environment
In a painstaking experiment, scientists suspended a single protein filament between two microscopic beads. Their results have shed light on an elusive process in which cells receive and respond to mechanical cues.
Super-Earth and sub-Neptune found orbiting a red dwarf star
Astronomers using a telescope in Mexico have found two more exoplanets – a super-Earth and a sub-Neptune – orbiting a red dwarf star 120 light-years from Earth.
How the world came to understand black holes
Earlier this month, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez split the 2020 physics Nobel Prize for decades of work on black holes. Click here to learn more about their monumental achievement and about the history of our understanding of these exotic objects in space.
Gamma Cephei: A future Pole Star
About two thousand years from now, Gamma Cephei, an inconspicuous star in the constellation Cepheus, will become our North Star.
NASA to announce mysterious moon discovery on Monday
NASAâs upcoming news conference on October 26, 2020 promises “an exciting new discovery about the moon,” with references to the agency’s ambitious Artemis program, a plan to send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024.
New imaging method reveals HIV’s sugary shield in unprecedented detail
Scientists have devised a method for mapping in unprecedented detail the thickets of slippery sugar molecules that help shield HIV from the immune system. Mapping these shields will give researchers a more complete understanding of why antibodies react to some spots on the virus but not others, and may shape the design of new vaccines that target the most vulnerable sites on viruses.
Protective shield: Membrane-attached protein protects bacteria and chloroplasts from stress
Stress is present everywhere, even bacteria and plant cells have to cope with it. They express various specific stress proteins, but how exactly this line of defense works is often not clear. A group of scientists has now discovered a protective mechanism in cyanobacteria as well as in chloroplasts of plant cells.
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