Black holes are one of the more well-known features of space, a science fiction staple, and something we still don’t know much about. We do know…
How Do Black Holes Die?
Posted in cosmology
Water Droplets Hold the Secret Ingredient for Building Life. Chemists uncover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock paths to speed up chemical synthesis for…
Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged thousands of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. Some of these are massive and gaseous, while others are tiny and rocky like our home world. But a recent analysis suggests that some of these exoplanets might be more dense and have more water than previously thought, which has big implications for alien life.
I wonder how South Korea will respond to this.
Russia fires vengeance missiles, with dozens of people killed or injured and various civilian buildings and infrastructure destroyed today. It’s reportedly Putin’s revenge for the Crimea bridge attack.
A team of researchers condensed one billion years of Earth’s evolution and tectonic plate movements into a short forty-second video.
“It’s akin to cutting holes or carving gullies in a super thin sheet of diamond, to ensure light travels and bounces in the desired direction,” he said.
To overcome the “etching” challenge, the researchers developed a new hard masking method, which uses a thin metallic tungsten layer to pattern the diamond nanostructure, enabling the creation of one-dimensional photonic crystal cavities.
Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.
In a study of the relative effects of genetics, aging and the environment on how some 20,000 human genes are expressed, the researchers found that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation in affecting the expression profiles of many of our genes as we get older. The level at which genes are expressed — that is, ratcheted up or down in activity — determines everything from our hormone levels and metabolism to the mobilization of enzymes that repair the body.
“How do your genetics — what you got from your sperm donor and your egg donor and your evolutionary history — influence who you are, your phenotype, such as your height, your weight, whether or not you have heart disease?” said Peter Sudmant, UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology and a member of the campus’s Center for Computational Biology. “There’s been a huge amount of work done in human genetics to understand how genes are turned on and off by human genetic variation. Our project came about by asking, ‘How is that influenced by an individual’s age?’ And the first result we found was that your genetics actually matter less the older you get.”
Red dwarf stars may be the key.
Until now, models of planetary formation pointed to most planets forming with either too much or too little water. This was especially prominent around the most common type of stars in the galaxy – red dwarves.
A new study finds that drinking two to three cups of ground, instant, or decaffeinated coffee each day is associated with a longer lifespan and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with avoiding coffee.