Astronomers have succeeded for the first time in quantifying the proton and electron components of cosmic rays in a supernova remnant. At least 70% of the very-high-energy gamma rays emitted from cosmic rays are due to relativistic protons, according to the novel imaging analysis of radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray radiation.
Heavens
A team at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London is paving the way for future rovers to search for meteorites on Mars. The scientists are using the NHM's extensive meteorite collection to test the spectral instruments destined for the ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, and develop tools to identify meteorites on the surface of the red planet. The project is being presented today (23 July) at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting 2021.
Using information obtained from around a dozen earthquakes detected on Mars by the Very Broad Band SEIS seismometer, developed in France, the international team of NASA's InSight mission has unveiled the internal structure of Mars.
Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
The arrival of plants on land about 400 million years ago may have changed the way the Earth naturally regulates its own climate, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Yale.
The carbon cycle, the process through which carbon moves between rocks, oceans, living organisms and the atmosphere, acts as Earth's natural thermostat, regulating its temperature over long time periods.
Rare-earth compounds have fascinated researchers for decades due to the unique quantum properties they display, which have so far remained totally out of reach of everyday compounds. One of the most remarkable and exotic properties of those materials is the emergence of exotic superconducting states, and particularly the superconducting states required to build future topological quantum computers.
The aconitase superfamily currently contains four functional enzymes including the archetypical aconitase (referred to as "other aconitase enzymes"), and one hypothetical aconitase X (AcnX). The aconitase enzymes catalyze the homologous stereospecific isomerization, and their three-dimensional structures and catalytic mechanisms including the [4Fe-4S] iron-sulfur cluster are very similar each other (Fig. 1a).
The plates of the Earth's crust perform complicated movements that can be attributed to quite simple mechanisms. That is the short version of the explanation of a rift that began to tear the world apart over a length of several thousand kilometers 105 million years ago. The scientific explanation appears today in the journal Nature Geoscience.
An affordable lab system that uses grass blades to turn cells into cultured meat has been developed at the University of Bath in the UK.
Researchers have successfully taken grass from the university's campus and used it to create a scaffold that animal cells can attach to and grow on. The resulting tissue has the potential to be used both as lab-made meat and as human muscle tissue to repair or replace tissue which has been damaged or lost through injury or disease.
For the first time, scientists detected gravitational waves caused by mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Researchers from LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detected the two gravitational wave events--from distances of more than 900 million light-years away--within a span of 10 days in January 2020 during the second half of LIGO and Virgo's third observing run.
The invention of the laser has opened the era of nonlinear optics, which today plays an important role in many scientific, industrial and medical applications. These applications all benefit from the availability of compact lasers in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The situation is different at XUV wavelengths, where very large facilities (so called free-electron lasers) have been built to generate intense XUV pulses. One example of these is FLASH in Hamburg that extends over several hundred meters. Smaller intense XUV sources based on HHG have also been developed.
While exploring two exoplanets in a bright nearby star system, ESA's exoplanet-hunting Cheops satellite has unexpectedly spotted the system's third known planet crossing the face of the star. This transit reveals exciting details about a rare planet "with no known equivalent", say the researchers.
The discovery is one of the first results from ESA's Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), and the first time an exoplanet with a period of over 100 days has been spotted transiting a star that is bright enough to be visible to the naked eye.
Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars. New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds.
HOUSTON - (June 23, 2021) - Bone cancer is hard to treat and prone to metastasis. Research teams at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have a new strategy to attack it.
Chemist Han Xiao at Rice and biologist Xiang Zhang at Baylor and their labs have developed an antibody conjugate called BonTarg that delivers drugs to bone tumors and inhibits metastasis.
Their open-access study, which appears in Science Advances, shows how Xiao's pClick technology can be used to link bone-targeting antibodies and therapeutic molecules.
All plant cells obtain their energy mainly from two organelles they contain - chloroplasts (responsible for photosynthesis) and mitochondria (responsible for the biochemical cycle of respiration that converts sugars into energy). However, a large number of a plant cell's genes in its mitochondria and chloroplasts can develop defects, jeopardising their function. Nevertheless, plant cells evolved an amazing tool called the RNA editosome (a large protein complex) to repair these kinds of errors.