In the awful wake of an oil spill, it’s typically the smallest of organisms who do most of the cleaning up. Surprisingly, scientists know very little about the tools these tiny clean-up crews have at their disposal.
The most distant known object in the Solar System is now confirmed. FarFarOut, a large chunk of rock found in 2018 at a whopping distance of around 132 astronomical units from the Sun, has been studied and characterised, and we now know a lot more about it, and its orbit.
It’s about 400 kilometres (250 miles) across, which is on the low end of the dwarf planet scale, and initial observations suggest it has an average orbital distance of 101 astronomical units — that’s 101 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Since Pluto has an average orbital distance of around 39 astronomical units, FarFarOut is very, well, far out indeed. It has been given the provisional designation 2018 AG37, and its proper name, in accordance with International Astronomical Union guidelines, is still pending.
The giant Martian sandstorm of 2018 wasn’t just a wild ride — it also gave us a previously undetected gas in the planet’s atmosphere. For the first time, the ExoMars orbiter sampled traces of hydrogen chloride, composed of a hydrogen and a chlorine atom.
This gas presents Mars scientists with a new mystery to solve: how it got there.
“We’ve discovered hydrogen chloride for the first time on Mars,” said physicist Kevin Olsen of the University of Oxford in the UK.
After tracing the origins of schizophrenia to genes expressed in the placenta while in utero, scientists have now zeroed in on the combination of risk factors that could predict which infants are at greatest risk of developing the condition later in life.
The findings reinforce an emerging picture of schizophrenia as a genetic disorder, with a fate determined by complications that can arise during pregnancy.
Researchers from the Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina in the US analysed the relationship between key genes and cognitive development in the first few years after birth.
These two high-quality, fully rigged sample characters represent the current state of the art for real-time digital humans and they’re yours to explore, modify, and use in your Unreal Engine 4.26.1 or later projects. They serve as a showcase of what’s achievable with MetaHuman Creator: an innovative new tool that will soon be available for you to create your own MetaHumans—in minutes.
Find out more at http://www.unrealengine.com/digital-humans.
The UAE’s first interplanetary mission could help solve the mystery of what happened to the Martian atmosphere.
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From the annals of “nothing to see here,” China’s largest state physics lab is insisting it’s not helping a private company build a time machine. The strange happenings are straight out of the scientist version of TMZ, with a leaked PowerPoint presentation and gossip swirling.
So: Is the Chinese government collaborating with a startup in order to travel through time?
Three-dimensional “bio-printing” and real cow cells — an achievement that’s prompting the Israeli startup to eye other meat…The firm’s technology prints living cells that are incubated to grow, differentiate and interact to acquire the texture and qualities of a real steak. “It incorporates muscle and fat similar to its slaughtered counterpart,” Aleph Farms said, adding that the product boasts the same attributes “of a delicious tender, juicy ribeye steak you’d buy from the butcher.”
Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb thinks the astronomical research community needs to get with the program and refocus its efforts on finding and identifying intelligent life in the cosmos.
If an opinion poll were taken for the most popular component of mammalian cells, the result probably would be a 50–50 split: Half of respondents would likely vote hands down for the nucleus and the other half for the mitochondria—a decision that in no way diminishes or casts aspersions on the other hardworking constituents of cells.
