Lifeboat Foundation

Research utilizing the James Webb Space Telescope highlights the destructive power of ultraviolet “winds” on the gas in protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars, shedding light on the intricate dynamics that limit the formation of gas giants in the cosmos.

Ultraviolet “winds” from nearby massive stars are stripping the gas from a young star’s protoplanetary disk, causing it to rapidly lose mass, according to a new study. It reports the first directly observed evidence of far-ultraviolet (FUV)-driven photoevaporation of a protoplanetary disk. The findings, which use observations from the James Web Space Telescope (JWST), provide new insights into the constraints of gas giant planet formation, including in our own Solar System.

Insights into gas giant planet formation.

The mysteries of photosynthesis have been unveiled at the atomic level, providing significant new insights into this plant super-power that transformed the Earth into a green landscape over a billion years ago.

John Innes Centre researchers used an advanced microscopy method called cryo-EM to explore how the photosynthetic proteins are made.

The study, published in Cell, presents a model and resources to stimulate further fundamental discoveries in this field and assist longer-term goals of developing more resilient crops.

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University –led research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

The team presented their findings on March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Roger Guillemin identified the molecules in the brain that control the production of hormones in endocrine glands such as the pituitary and thyroid. His work led to a torrent of advances in neuroendocrinology, with far-reaching effects on studies of metabolism, reproduction and growth. For his discoveries on peptide-hormone production in the brain, Guillemin shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow. He has died at the age of 100.

In the autumn of 1969, after analysing millions of sheep brains for more than a decade, Guillemin and his colleagues determined the structure of thyrotropin-releasing factor (TRF). This small peptide is produced in the hypothalamus, a small region at the base of the brain, and is transported to the anterior lobe of the nearby pituitary gland, where it triggers the release of the hormone thyrotropin. Thyrotropin, in turn, stimulates the thyroid gland to produce the hormone thyroxine, which regulates metabolic activity in nearly every tissue of the body. More than two dozen drugs use such hypothalamic hormones to treat endocrine disorders and cancers, and the worldwide market for these drugs is worth several billion dollars.

Guillemin was born in Dijon, France, and came of age at the end of the Second World War. He graduated from medical school in the University of Lyon, France, in 1949 and worked as a country doctor in the small commune of Saint-Seine-l’Abbaye in Burgundy. He found the work satisfying but intellectually limiting, noting that “in those days I could take care of all my patients with three prescriptions, including aspirin”. Fascinated by how the brain and pituitary gland control the body’s response to stress, he attended lectures in Paris by the Hungarian–Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye, after which Selye accepted Guillemin’s request to spend a year doing research in his laboratory at the University of Montreal, Canada.

Summary: Researchers provided new insights into brain development, revealing that different brain regions share a similar organizational structure in early stages rather than being pre-specialized. This finding, supported by advanced optical imaging, suggests a universal blueprint for brain development, which has significant implications for understanding neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

By observing synchronized activity in nerve cell networks across various brain regions, the study highlights a potential common foundation for brain disorders, offering a new perspective on their widespread impact. Future research will further explore how this shared developmental pattern evolves over time and across different brain areas.

The facility will extract the equivalent carbon of 40 million trees annually from Scotland.

The answer may have been hiding in our own bodies all along.

Now, astronauts who witness solar eclipses do so from the International Space Station (ISS). But instead of looking at the sun, they look down at the Earth to observe a solar eclipse. “ISS astronauts can see the [moon’s] shadow but not the eclipse itself, because their windows don’t point toward the sun,” says Levasseur. Rather, remotely operated equipment on the station collects data from the eclipse, while astronauts peer at the darkened ground on the planet below.

The first time anyone got this unique view was in 1999, when Russian cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Sergei Avdeyev, as well as French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré, witnessed the 20th century’s final total solar eclipse from the former Russian space station, Mir. On August 11, they saw the moon’s shadow pass over England.

What can Titan’s methane-rich atmosphere teach us about finding life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Planetary and Space Science hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated the photochemistry of Saturn’s largest moon, which is also the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, to ascertain if the moon’s methane-rich atmosphere can support life. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the conditions necessary for life to emerge, along with where to search for it beyond Earth.

“Titan’s atmosphere works like a planetary-sized chemical reactor, producing many complex carbon-based molecules,” said Rafael Rianço-Silva, who is a master’s degree student at the University of Lisbon and lead author of the study. “Of all the atmospheres we know in the Solar System, the atmosphere of Titan is the most similar to the one we think existed on the early Earth.”

For the study, the team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (VLT-UVES) to conduct high resolution analyses of Titan’s hazy and methane-rich atmosphere. Using this data, the team identified possible traces of the tricarbon molecule (C3), which is known for being a building block for the development of complex molecules and has been previously identified in cometary comas and interstellar clouds, the latter of which was found using VLT-UVES. If confirmed, Titan will be the first planetary body to possess tricarbon either in its atmosphere or on its surface.