Science

In a study published in the journal Science Advances, a team of European astronomers shows that water can be delivered to a terrestrial planet in the form of ‘pebble snow’ in the early phases of the planet’s growth. An artist’s impression of a water-world exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com. “All our …

  The general idea of a stellar object with such intense gravity that even light cannot escape dates back to the late 18th century. However, it wasn’t until Einstein’s contributions in the early 20th century that we had the necessary theoretical underpinnings to go looking for such an object. Cygnus …

  NASA’s Perseverance rover has been on the surface of Mars for several days, giving the team here on Earth time to run system checks and download preliminary data from the robot. The agency has now released the first large batch of media from the mission, including hundreds of still …

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured footage of its rover landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The footage was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage, a camera …

A team of geobiologists from Germany has found biologically-relevant primordial organic molecules and gases in fluid inclusions trapped in 3.5-billion-year-old barites from the Dresser mine, Marble Bar, Australia. Location of the Dresser mine in Western Australia (a) and black barite associated with originally sulfidic stromatolites at the sampling site (b) …

A team of biologists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Universidad de los Andes has identified 142,809 species of bacteriophages — viruses that infect and replicate in bacteria — living in the human gut. Camarillo-Guerrero et al. introduce the Gut Phage Database, a collection of …

  It used to be easy to know how many planets there were: nine. It had been nine planets for an entire generation before scientists started rethinking what counts as a planet. Pluto is out, but some astronomers believe there’s a real ninth planet lurking out there. Others aren’t convinced, …

  About eight and a half years ago, I stayed up until well after midnight to watch Curiosity make Marsfall. At the time, all eyes were glued to what is euphemistically referred to as the “seven minutes of terror.” It took Curiosity and will take Perseverance approximately that long to …

Quercetin and 3,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHBA), phytonutrients commonly found in apples, may help stimulate the production of new brain cells, according to a study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports. Quercetin and DHBA, natural compounds found in apples, are pro-neurogenic. Image credit: Ichwan et al., doi: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2021.01.005. Dr. Gerd Kempermann …

An international team of scientists has sequenced and analyzed DNA from three mammoth specimens, two of which are more than one million years old. The results show that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene; one of these lineages gave rise to the woolly …