Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality. These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been found in meteorites on Earth and comets in our Solar System. None, however, has been detected in the vast reaches of interstellar space, until now.
Heavens
Chiral molecules--compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands--are crucial to life as we know it. Living things are selective about which "handedness" of a molecule they use or produce. For example, all living things exclusively use the right-handed form of the sugar ribose (the backbone of DNA), and grapes exclusively synthesize the left-handed form of the molecule tartaric acid.
A new study reports the first detection of chiral molecules in space, paving the way to understanding why chirality is "biased" on Earth. Our planet is home to a puzzle involving chiral molecules, those that, despite being mirror images of each other, don't exactly match; imagine a left-handed and right-handled glove, for example. They aren't interchangeable. Life on Earth is made of groups of such molecules that overwhelmingly share just one type of handedness, a phenomenon known as homochirality. The amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies, for example, are all left-handed.
URBANA, Ill. - Invasive plants are often characterized as highly aggressive, possessing the power to alter and even irreversibly change the ecosystems they invade. But a recent University of Illinois study shows that one such invader, garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), actually becomes less aggressive over time.
"One of the things we've seen over the last 20 to 30 years is that garlic mustard becomes less of an issue, and actually balances out over time," says University of Illinois and USDA Agricultural Research Service ecologist Adam Davis.
Plant pollens vary in quality as food sources for bees, and pollen from the sunflower family (the family that includes dandelions, daisies, and thistles) is known to have some unpleasant qualities. Bees fed exclusively sunflower pollen often develop poorly, slowly, or not at all. Yet many bee species collect pollen exclusively from this family; in fact, specialization on sunflower pollen has evolved multiple times in bees. Research by Dakota Spear and colleagues suggests that parasites could be part of the explanation.
The protoplanetary disc around the young star TW Hydrae is the closest known example to Earth, at a distance of only about 170 light-years. As such it is an ideal target for astronomers to study discs. This system closely resembles what astronomers think the Solar System looked like during its formation more than four billion years ago.
The so-called artificial pancreas -- an automated insulin delivery system for people type 1 diabetes mellitus -- uses an advanced control algorithm to regulate how much insulin a pump should deliver and when. Regulating glucose is challenging because levels respond to a wide-array of variables, including food, physical activity, sleep, stress, hormones, metabolism and more.
Penn State College of Medicine faculty are helping shape the "third science" of medical education by defining what health systems science is and how student perception of it should be addressed in designing curriculum.
An ancient basin hidden beneath the Greenland ice sheet, discovered by researchers at the University of Bristol, may help explain the location, size and velocity of Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland's fastest flowing outlet glacier.
The research also provides an insight into what past river drainage looked like in Greenland, and what it could look like in the future as the ice sheet retreats.
An abundance of aerosol particles in the atmosphere can increase the lifespans of large storm clouds by delaying rainfall, making the clouds grow larger and live longer, and producing more extreme storms when the rain finally does come, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.
Although astronomers often refer to brown dwarfs as "failed stars," scientists at the University of Delaware have discovered that at least one of these dim celestial objects can emit powerful flashes of light.
A research team led by John Gizis, professor in UD's Department of Physics and Astronomy, discovered an "ultracool" brown dwarf known as 2MASS 0335+23, with a temperature of only 4400°F that can generate flares stronger than the sun's. Gizis reported on the finding on June 13 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.
San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane is among a team of researchers who have discovered a new planet that orbits two suns simultaneously. The discovery was announced today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.
Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them.
The pair pieced together the huge C-shaped structure from much smaller images of cosmic radio waves shown to them as part of the web-based program Radio Galaxy Zoo.
The discovery surprised the astronomers running the program, said the lead author of the study Dr Julie Banfield of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at The Australian National University (ANU).
SAN DIEGO (June 13, 2016)--If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647 b. The discovery was announced today in San Diego, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California, used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b.