Science

According to an international team of scientists from New Zealand and Australia, up to 76% of the world’s population is overfat. This amounts to an astonishing 5.5 billion people. Estimated number and percentage of overfat and underfat adults and children worldwide (based on 2014 world population numbers of 7.2 billion). …

Mars is many millions of miles away, but it’s not always as far away as you think. The powerful scientific instruments we’ve deployed to the Red Planet can occasionally give us a glimpse of our own humble planet from a different perspective. NASA has just released a new image that …

According to new research published in the journal Current Biology, a key area of the hummingbird brain processes motion in a unique, unexpected way. The Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna). Image credit: Kevin Cole / CC BY 2.0. The brain area in question is called the lentiformis mesencephali (LM), known in …

A novel method of stimulating the renewal of living stem cells in tooth pulp using an Alzheimer’s drug called Tideglusib has been discovered by scientists at King’s College London, UK. Tideglusib treatment shows complete repair with vital dental pulp after 6 weeks. Image credit: V.C.M. Neves et al, doi: 10.1038/srep39654. …

Retroviruses (Retroviridae) — a family of viruses that includes pathogens such as HIV, feline leukemia, and several cancer-causing viruses — have an ancient marine origin and originated together with, if not before, their jawed vertebrate hosts nearly 450 million years ago in the Ordovician period, according to a new study …

Hubble is nearing the end of its mission, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been under construction for years. Now that the telescope has been built and is undergoing final testing, NASA has turned its attention to the future — namely, what the Webb Telescope is going to …

NASA is preparing for a pair of new asteroid-exploration missions, which will launch in the early 2020s. These missions are part of the Discovery Program, which seeks to investigate remnants of the early solar system in a somewhat low-cost way. Past Discovery missions include Mars Pathfinder, Stardust, and Dawn. The …

An international team of biologists led by Washington State University Professor Haluk Beyenal has discovered a new type of cooperative photosynthesis that could be used in microbial communities for waste treatment and energy production. A false-color scanning electron micrograph of G. sulfurreducens-P. aestuarii co-culture. Scale bar – 5??m. Image credit: …

Attempts to investigate the origin of giant wedge-shaped sedimentary structures on Saturn’s moon Titan using analogues in Death Valley, California has thrown up new questions about the surface processes and intense rainfall that might have formed them. A vast alluvial fan in the XinJiang province of China. The right side …

The universe is a big place, and we know from targeted observations that there are a lot of black holes out there. These collapsed husks of dead stars have such intense gravity that nothing escapes them, not even light. That makes it tricky to actually observe them, but NASA’s Chandra …