Science

An international team of scientists led by Harvard Medical School’s Joslin Diabetes Center has identified four viruses that can produce insulin-like hormones. Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the discovery brings new possibilities for revealing biological mechanisms that may cause disease. Transmission electron micrograph of ranaviruses …

Most of your cells contain a complete set of instructions to build a person stored in DNA. Scientists have worked for years on developing a storage technology that could harness the incredible density of DNA to store other types of data, but it’s been slow going. Now, a team from …

An international team of marine biologists from the United States and Belize has confirmed that sixgill sharks residing in the Atlantic Ocean are a different species than their counterparts in the Indian and Pacific oceans. The team’s findings were published online this month in the journal Marine Biodiversity. An adult …

A team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the University of Turku, Finland, has investigated the personality structure of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and discovered that personality in these elephants manifests through three different factors: attentiveness, sociability, and aggressiveness. Seltmann et al studied Asian timber elephants in …

An ambitious LiDAR (light detection and ranging) survey of forested areas in Guatemala has revealed more than 60,000 previously undetected ancient structures, including isolated houses, large palaces, ceremonial centers, and stone pyramids. The ancient Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala. Image credit: Comenius University. LiDAR technology is able to pierce …

By using cryo-electron tomography, an international team of scientists has identified a completely new nanostructure — named the Tail Axoneme Intra-Lumenal Spiral (TAILS) — inside human spermatozoon tails. The human spermatozoon tail is a highly complex machine that consists of around a thousand different types of building blocks. Image credit: …

Researchers at CERN have gotten comfortable with antimatter — so comfortable, in fact, they’re planning to load a billion antimatter particles into a van for a quick field trip. Transporting the highly volatile antiprotons could help scientists understand the inner workings of neutron stars, but that’s not related to the …

Jeff Bezos and a cabal of billionaires surprised everyone last month with the announcement that they’re conspiring to disrupt the healthcare industry. They are planning to offer a “not-for-profit” system that would initially be made available to employees of their respective companies, but with the potential to be rolled out to …

Around 90 million years ago, eastern and western North America were isolated from each other by a salty sea, creating two landmasses: Appalachia and Laramidia. The ancestors of Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus strutted about on the latter in what would one day become Utah and Alberta, leaving plentiful bones behind. A …

NASA’s Juno orbiter successfully made its eleventh flyby of Jupiter on February 7, 2018. This color-enhanced image shows swirling cloud formations in the northern area of Jupiter’s north temperate belt. The image was taken on February 7 at 8:42 a.m. EST (5:42 a.m. PST), as Juno performed its eleventh close …