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This marine marriage has been going strong for 273 million years.

Paleontologists have rediscovered a symbiotic relationship between two deep-sea animals that were previously thought to have disappeared from fossil record hundreds of millions of years ago.

The ancient pair identified in a new report — published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology — are two types of non-skeletal coral and crinoid, or sea lilies, an animal whose cousins in the phylum Echinodermata include starfish and sea urchins.

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Samsung has detailed its next-gen LED module for intelligent headlights, PixCell LED, in a fresh official introduction video. In Samsung’s own words, PixCell LED is the perfect solution for energy efficient lamps fit for the sleek and stylish vehicles of the future. It’s an Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB) solution that leverages Samsung’s advanced semiconductor technology to improve upon the ADB concept in several ways. More so, PixCell LED is a product that strengthens the Korean tech giant’s ambitions of becoming a bigger component of the automotive market and its supply chain.

It sounds a lot like PixCell LED uses technologies similar to ISOCELL, or at least it relies on principles that have been used by Samsung’s mobile camera division for many years. The new LED headlamp uses what Samsung calls Silicon Wall technology to create a solid wall structure between pixels. Isolating each pixel allows for more refined light control, which is what ADB is mostly about.

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An international team of physicists has shown experimentally for the first time how a Bose-Einstein condensate — tens of thousands of quanta of ‘liquid light’ — is formed in the thinnest monatomic film of a semiconductor crystal. The team includes the head of the Spin Optics Laboratory at St Petersburg University, Professor Alexey Kavokin. This discovery will help create new types of lasers capable of producing qubits — the main integral parts of quantum computers of the future.

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After nearly five years in space, a NASA spacecraft is nearing the end of its historic mission, beginning its journey home to Earth with a plethora of asteroid samples.

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft began its journey back to Earth on Monday — a trip that’s expected to take around two-and-a-half years. It’s returning from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and it marks NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample return mission.

The spacecraft is only about 200 million miles away, but it will have to circle the sun twice to catch up to Earth — making the journey a total of 1.4 billion miles.

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Using the Harlan J. Smith Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the star HD 47127 has a substellar companion. The newly identified object, designated HD 47127 B, appears to be a brown dwarf or a brown dwarf binary. The finding is reported in a paper published May 4 on arXiv.org.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and . Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with effective temperatures between 500 and 1500K) is known as T dwarfs, and represents the coolest and least luminous substellar objects so far detected.

Located some 86.8 away, HD 47127 is an old sun-like main sequence star of spectral type G5. The star is slightly metal-rich and has a mass of about 1.02 solar masses. Its age is estimated to be between 7 and 10 billion years.

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Researchers in Singapore have found a way of controlling a Venus flytrap using electric signals from a smartphone, an innovation they hope will have a range of uses from robotics to employing the plants as environmental sensors.

Luo Yifei, a researcher at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), showed in a demonstration how a signal from a smartphone app sent to tiny electrodes attached to the plant could make its trap close as it does when catching a fly.

“Plants are like humans, they generate electric signals, like the ECG (electrocardiogram) from our hearts,” said Luo, who works at NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

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A COVID-19 vaccine that could provide protection against existing and future strains of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and other coronaviruses, and costs about $1 a dose has shown promising results in early animal testing.

Vaccines created by UVA Health’s Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, and Virginia Tech’s Xiang-Jin Meng, MD, PhD, prevented pigs from being becoming ill with a pig model coronavirus, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV). The vaccine was developed using an innovative approach that Zeichner says might one day open the door to a universal vaccine for coronaviruses, including coronaviruses that previously threatened pandemics or perhaps even coronaviruses that cause some cases of the common cold.

Their coronavirus vaccine offers several advantages that could overcome major obstacles to global vaccination efforts. It would be easy to store and transport, even in remote areas of the world, and could be produced in mass quantities using existing vaccine-manufacturing factories.

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