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Scientists have unraveled the biological mechanisms behind what they describe as the extraordinary “superpower” ability of jellyfish to regenerate body parts.

Jellyfish are primitive animals which evolved in the oceans around 600 million years ago. Part of the reason for their evolutionary success is that some species are able to grow back tissue that has been lost—a trait that is rare in the animal kingdom.

To learn more about this poorly understood ability, a team of researchers from Tohoku University in Japan investigated the biology of a jellyfish species known as Cladonema pacificum—which has tentacles that spread out like tree branches—for a study published in the journal PeerJ.

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If you’re going to do right by DC Comics’ “Crisis on Infinite Earths” saga, you need the Monitor, yes. But you also need a Harbinger at his side. And now, it has been confirmed that Lyla Michaels, a character who has been played on Arrow over the years by Audrey Marie Anderson, will fill that role in the Arrowverse’s next, five-part crossover.

We say “confirmed” because while it did seem that Oliver Queen, in fulfilling his deal with the Monitor, might serve as an ersatz Harbinger, the fact is that in the comic books Lyla Michaels became Harbinger, and the Arrow character has used that codename since Season 1.

You can get a look at Anderson’s full costume here; Arrowverse EP Marc Guggenheim said they explored the idea of a comics-accurate helmet but it “didn’t look right.”

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You may think that lithium-ion batteries are the best man can create, but researchers believe otherwise. There are other combinations of elements that are very promising. What about a cell with potential for seven times more energy density than Li-Ion could ever achieve? State of the art for current batteries would be 256 Wh/kg. Lithium-Carbon Dioxide batteries – or Li-CO2, for short – can theoretically reach 1,876 Wh/kg. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago created the first usable Li-CO2 battery. It was tested to up to 500 cycles, and it worked, which is great news.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago created the first usable Li-CO2 battery. It has 7 times the energy density of a Li-Ion battery.

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New interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.

Interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog ‘Aging Matters’.

Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die?

Josh is the co-author of ‘Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old — And What It Means for Staying Young’ : “A revolutionary examination of why we age, what it means for our health, and how we just might be able to fight it.

Continue reading “Josh Mitteldorf — Cracking the Aging Code” | >

Energy is a quantity that must always be positive—at least that’s what our intuition tells us. If every single particle is removed from a certain volume until there is nothing left that could possibly carry energy, then a limit has been reached. Or has it? Is it still possible to extract energy even from empty space?

Quantum physics has shown time and again that it contradicts our intuition, which is also true in this case. Under certain conditions, negative energies are allowed, at least in a certain range of space and time. An international research team at the TU Vienna, the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and the IIT Kanpur (India) have now investigated the extent to which negative is possible. It turns out that no matter which quantum theories are considered, no matter what symmetries are assumed to hold in the universe, there are always certain limits to “borrowing” energy. Locally, the energy can be less than zero, but like money borrowed from a bank, this energy must be “paid back” in the end.

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From raindrops rolling off the waxy surface of a waterlily leaf to the efficiency of desalination membranes, interactions between water molecules and water-repellent “hydrophobic” surfaces are all around us. The interplay becomes even more intriguing when a thin water layer becomes sandwiched between two hydrophobic surfaces, KAUST researchers have shown.

In the early 1980s, researchers first noted an unexpected effect when two hydrophobic surfaces were slowly brought together in . “At some point, the two surfaces would suddenly jump into contact—like two magnets being brought together,” says Himanshu Mishra from KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center. Mishra’s lab investigates water at all length scales, from reducing in agriculture, to the properties of individual water molecules.

Researchers were unable to explain the phenomenon at the , so in 2016, Mishra organized a KAUST conference on the subject. “We brought together leaders in the field—experimentalists and theorists—leading to intense debates on the understanding of hydrophobic surface forces,” he says.

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According to a decade-long study by an international team of researchers, human CO2 emissions total 100 times more than the planet-warming effects of all volcanoes combined.

The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year — a tiny fraction of the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.

That means they’re not nearly as big of a contributor to global emissions as some prevailing theories hold.

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