Science

A new genetic cause of an autosomal-dominant corneal endothelial dystrophy has been discovered in a study led by University College London scientists. Posterior polymorphous corneal dystrophy is a rare autosomal-dominant disorder, primarily affecting the corneal endothelium and Descemet membrane. Image credit: Pexels. Corneal endothelial dystrophies are a group of inherited …

University of Lincoln researcher Malgorzata Pilot and colleagues have found small blocks of dog ancestry in the genomes of 62% Eurasian grey wolves. Published in the journal Evolutionary Applications, their work suggests that wolf-dog hybridization has been geographically widespread in Europe and Asia and has been occurring for centuries; the …

China didn’t intend for the Tiangong-1 space station to last forever, but it also didn’t want the station to plummet into the atmosphere randomly. After China lost control of the aging space platform, scientists around the world set to work tracing its position to find out when and where it …

Our solar system has just the one star, but astronomers now have good reason to think a second star paid us a visit about 70,000 years ago. That’s when Scholz’s Star is believed to have skimmed the edge of our solar system on its way out to deep interstellar space. …

A mutation in the leucine rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) gene — the most common cause of inherited Parkinson’s disease — alters cells circulating outside the brain, not within, offering a new understanding of what causes the disease. The most common Parkinson’s gene mutation may change how immune cells react …

An international team of scientists has sequenced the genomes of five Neanderthals who lived around 47,000 to 39,000 years ago (that is, late Neanderthals), and found that these individuals are all more closely related to the Neanderthals who contributed DNA to early modern humans than an approximately 120,000-year-old Neanderthal from …

Humanity has made significant progress understanding the cosmos in recent decades thanks to amazing instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope. There are still some phenomena that defy explanation, though. For example, fast radio bursts. Astronomers only noticed these mysterious signals in 2007, and their unpredictable nature makes it difficult to …

As SpaceX ramps up rocket production and rehabilitation, it’s going to need new facilities. That can be tricky for any company, but it’s a particularly difficult problem when you need to build enormous rockets suitable for interplanetary missions with large payload fairings like SpaceX’s upcoming BFR (Big Falcon Rocket). SpaceX …

A team of researchers from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology in China has unearthed a bronze kettle with liquor dating back to the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC). 2,200-year-old liquor. Image credit: Li Yibo, Xinhua. The 2,200-year-old bronze kettle is a sacrificial vessel among 260 other items found in Qin …

How empathic we are is partly a result of our genes, according to the results of the largest genome-wide association study of its kind. Empathy is the ability to recognize and respond to the emotional states of other individuals. Image credit: John Hain. Empathy is the ability to identify other …