Science

An international team of scientists from the United States and India has discovered that a component of the skin mucus secreted by a South Indian fungoid frog can destroy many strains of human influenza viruses and protect mice against influenza infection. The discovery is reported in the journal Immunity. This …

According to a study published recently in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, drinking a beetroot juice before exercise makes the brain of older adults perform more efficiently, mirroring the operations of a younger brain. Drinking a beetroot juice before exercise makes the aging brain perform more efficiently. Image credit: …

According to new research, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are able to recognize their own bodies as obstacles to success in problem-solving, further strengthening evidence of their intelligence. Once standing on the mat, elephants were instructed to pick up the stick and give it to the experimenter. Image credit: E. Gilchrist. …

An international team of marine biologists, led by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Utah, is the first to investigate a never before studied species — the giant mud-dwelling shipworm Kuphus polythalamia. According to the researchers, this marine animal doesn’t seem to eat much; instead it gets its …

An international team of physicists from the United States, Japan, and China has created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. A paper describing the research is published by the journal Physical Review Letters. Khamehchi et al created a fluid with negative effective mass. Image …

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured these images of Atlas, an inner satellite of Saturn, during a close flyby on April 12, 2017. These are the closest images ever taken of the flying saucer-shaped body — the spacecraft flew by about 7,000 miles (11,000 km) from Atlas to capture its appearance. This …

Life as we know it requires liquid water, and until recently that seemed to be in short supply outside of Earth. However, recent studies of Mars and several moons have pointed to the presence of water. In fact, some moons may contain subsurface oceans with a larger total volume of …

Recent observations of Europa by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a plume of material erupting from the moon’s surface at precisely the same location as a similar apparent plume seen in 2014. The Hubble images bolster evidence that the plumes are a real phenomenon, flaring up intermittently in …

Crystallization of Moon’s liquid metallic core may have driven its now-lost magnetic field approximately 3 billion years ago, according to new research published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Ancient Moon generated a dynamo magnetic field in its liquid metallic core; this dynamo may have been driven by …

New research led by University College London, UK, shows that on average we are worse at spotting objects in crowded environments when they are above or below eye level, although the extent to which this happens varies between individuals: some people are better at spotting things above their center of …