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Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and James Cook University (JCU) have identified an “exquisite” natural mechanism that helps plants limit their water loss with little effect on carbon dioxide (CO2) intake—an essential process for photosynthesis, plant growth and crop yield.

Once upon a time, the only world known to have an ocean of water was Earth. Now, planetary scientists think there are many ocean worlds – albeit with their oceans covered by deep layers of ice, rather than hanging out on the surface like ours.

Top on the list is Jupiter’s moon Europa, believed to have a 100-kilometre-deep ocean beneath perhaps 10–30 km of ice. But Saturn’s moons Enceladus, Titan, and Dione are also thought to have oceans, as is Pluto.

And those may just be the tip of the iceberg. Other moons in the outer solar system are also believed or suspected to have frozen-over oceans. Still more aren’t well studied enough for scientists to be sure, but could be capable of hosting water.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken a picture of one of the strangest galaxies in the universe. The details of the Cartwheel galaxy are obscured by dust, which has made studying it difficult, but the new images from JWST peer through to reveal this weird galaxy in more detail than ever before.

The Cartwheel galaxy is about 500 million light years away and measures about 150,000 light years across. Researchers believe that it was most likely a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way before one of its companion galaxies blasted through it like a bullet through a target, sending waves of stars and gas rippling out from the galaxy’s centre and creating the nested ring shapes that we see today.

3D micro-/nanofabrication holds the key to building a large variety of micro-/nanoscale materials, structures, devices, and systems with unique properties that do not manifest in their 2-D planar counterparts. Recently, scientists have explored some very different 3D fabrication strategies such as kirigami and origami that make use of the science of cutting and folding 2-D materials/structures to create versatile 3D shapes. Such new methodologies enable continuous and direct 2-D-to-3D transformations through folding, bending and twisting, with which the occupied space can vary “nonlinearly” by several orders of magnitude compared to the conventional 3D fabrications. More importantly, these new-concept kirigami/origami techniques provide an extra degree of freedom in creating unprecedented 3D micro-/nanogeometries beyond the imaginable designs of conventional subtractive and additive fabrication.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, Chinese scientists from Beijing Institute of Technology and South China University of Technology made a comprehensive review on some of the latest progress in kirigami/origami in micro-/nanoscale. Aiming to unfold this new regime of advanced 3D micro-/nanofabrication, they introduced and discussed various stimuli of kirigami/origami, including capillary force, residual stress, mechanical stress, responsive force and focused-ion-beam irradiation induced stress, and their working principles in the micro-/nanoscale region. The focused-ion-beam based nano-kirigami, as a prominent example coined in 2018 by the team, was highlighted particularly as an instant and direct 2-D-to-3D transformation technique. In this method, the focused ion beam was employed to cut the 2-D nanopatterns like “knives/scissors” and gradually “pull” the nanopatterns into complex 3D shapes like “hands”.

Researchers find mathematical trick to combining planetary surface data.


Researchers have discovered a method for making high-resolution maps of planetary surfaces like the moon’s by combining available imagery and topography data.

Mapping the complex and diverse surface of a world like the moon in detailed resolution is challenging because laser altimeters, which measure changes in altitudes, operate at much lower resolution than cameras. And although photographs offer a sense of surface features, it’s difficult to translate images into specific heights and depths.

According to a research paper published in Nature, astronomers detected a “really weird” object 4,000 lightyears distant from Earth. Every other minute, the object vanishes from view and produces a massive burst of radio waves three times an hour. Tyrone O’Doherty, a Curtin University student, first noticed the enigmatic object while scanning the sky in […].