Lake Mendota in Wisconsin is transformed by the changing seasons – covered by ice in winter, and by algae in summer – and a new study shows how these cyclical shifts are putting the lake’s bacteria into evolutionary loops. Led by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the team behind the study analyzed […]
A little over a year ago, Meta created Facebook and Instagram profiles for “28 AIs with unique interests and personalities for you to interact with and dive deeper into your interests.” Today, the last of those profiles is being taken down amid waves of viral revulsion as word of their existence has spread online. The […]
Spectral energy distribution fits for the pre-white dwarfs. Black dots correspond to observed photometry, and the red lines are the best-fit models corrected for interstellar reddening. Credit: Werner et al., 2024. Using the X-shooter instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), German astronomers have detected three new pre-white dwarfs, which turned out to be strongly […]
Probing a distant galaxy like a “cosmic crime scene” with the Hubble Space Telescope after a “tip-off” from the Chandra X-ray telescope, NASA scientists have discovered a strange black hole that is tipped onto its side. The sideways black hole was discovered in the galaxy NGC 5084, a lenticular (lens-shaped) galaxy located around 80 million […]
Astronomers have discovered a pair of young stars near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. And despite living so close to the cosmic behemoth, they are likely to remain intact for a million years. While our pocket of the universe is home to a solitary sun, that’s not the norm. More […]
Credit: Gustavo Fring from Pexels Nearly a quarter of Portuguese adults have allergies that cause a runny nose. This respiratory disease, formally called allergic rhinitis and frequently associated with asthma, is a common problem around the world, and the upper airway is a key target for research into the underlying disease processes. Now a global […]
Mayo Clinic researchers found that the gene expression of Il23r (depicted in red), which increases in aged blood at the protein level, is present in aged kidney and is associated with the senescence marker p16 (shown in green). When IL-23R signaling is overactive, it can lead to inflammation and tissue damage. Mayo Clinic researchers found […]
Illustration of the Kepler-51 system and its inner three planets, which have unusually low density. New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope suggest that at least one more planet is in the system. Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Hustak, J. Olmsted, D. Player and F. Summers (STScI) An unusual planetary system with three known […]
A quirk in scientific 3D modeling has led to the discovery that laser light can — under the right circumstances — cast its own shadow. The finding challenges our current understanding of what a shadow is, researchers wrote in a new paper published Nov. 14 in the journal Optica. “Laser light casting a shadow was […]
A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a new study finds. Archaeologists discovered the site near the city of Al-‘Ula in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and called it “al-Natah.” […]
