Lifeboat Foundation

In a study appearing in Nature, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reconstructed the evolutionary history and global spread of malaria over the past 5,500 years, identifying trade, warfare, and colonialism as major catalysts for its dispersal.

Scientists refer to this phenomenon as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE for short. But the initial accumulation of O₂ on Earth was not nearly as straightforward as that moniker suggests, according to new research led by a University of Utah geochemist.

This “event” lasted at least 200 million years. And tracking the accumulation of O₂ in the oceans has been very difficult until now, said Chadlin Ostrander, an assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

“Emerging data suggest that the initial rise of O₂ in Earth’s atmosphere was dynamic, unfolding in fits-and-starts until perhaps 2.2. billion years ago,” said Ostrander, lead author on the study published June 12 in the journal Nature. “Our data validate this hypothesis, even going one step further by extending these dynamics to the ocean.”

Waves pick up information from their environment through which they propagate. A theory of information carried by waves has now been developed at TU Wien—with astonishing results that can be utilized for technical applications.

A new study published in Nature Physics introduces a theory of electron-phonon coupling that is affected by the quantum geometry of the electronic wavefunctions.

The movement of electrons in a lattice and their interactions with the lattice vibrations (or phonons) play a pivotal role in phenomena like superconductivity (resistance-free conductivity).

Electron-phonon coupling (EPC) is the interaction between free electrons and phonons, which are quasiparticles representing the vibrations of a crystal lattice. EPC leads to the formation of Cooper pairs (pairs of electrons), responsible for superconductivity in certain materials.

University of Southern California scientists have proven that the Earth’s inner core is backtracking—slowing down—in relation to the planet’s surface, as shown in new research published in Nature.

Researchers have used inkjet printing to create a compact multispectral version of a light field camera. The camera, which fits in the palm of the hand, could be useful for many applications including autonomous driving, classification of recycled materials and remote sensing.

Earthquakes may betray their impending presence much earlier than previously thought through a variety of anomalies present in the ground, atmosphere and ionosphere that can be detected using satellites, a recent study in the Journal of Applied Geodesy suggests.

Most of the universe is invisible to the human eye. The building blocks of stars are only revealed in wavelengths that are outside of the visible spectrum. Astronomers recently used two very different, and very powerful, telescopes to discover twin disks—and twin parallel jets—erupting from young stars in a multiple star system.

This discovery was unexpected, and unprecedented, given the age, size, and chemical makeup of the stars, disks, and jets. Their location in a known, well-studied part of the universe adds to the thrill.

Observations from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) were combined for this research.

Researchers at QuTech have found a way to make Majorana particles in a two-dimensional plane. This was achieved by creating devices that exploit the combined material properties of superconductors and semiconductors. The inherent flexibility of this new 2D platform should allow one to perform experiments with Majoranas that were previously inaccessible. The results are published in Nature.