News Archive for February 2023

Life reconstruction of Paralitherizinosaurus japonicus. Image credit: Masato Hattori.

Study: Giant Therizinosaurs Used Their Meter-Long, Sickle-Like Claws for Display

Feb 28, 2023 by News Staff

The dinosaur clade Maniraptora includes the ancestors of birds, and most maniraptoran dinosaurs used their hands for grasping and in flight, but early...

The climbing capabilities of living creatures such as geckos, tree frogs, and inchworms provide a promising platform for exploiting biomimetic soft climbing robots. Image credit: Sun et al., doi: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.101241.

GeiwBot: Gecko- and Inchworm-Inspired Robot Can Climb Walls and Ceilings

Feb 28, 2023 by News Staff

GeiwBot can climb on walls and ceilings of different textures including glass, polyimide, and aluminum; its climbing behavior is based on dynamic attachment...

SPT0418-47 is gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy, appearing in the sky as a near-perfect ring of light -- a so-called Einstein ring. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Rizzo et al.

Dusty, Chemically Mature Galaxy Spotted in Early Universe

Feb 28, 2023 by News Staff

The newly-discovered galaxy, SPT0418-SE, and its much larger companion, SPT0418-47, reside in a massive dark-matter halo with yet-to-be-discovered neighbors,...

An illustration of Earth as it existed during part of its formation billions of years ago, when an ocean of magma covered its surface and stretched thousands of km deep into the core; a typical cell from a simulation conducted by Bajgain et al. with the relative positions of atoms are shown in the left. Image credit: Suraj Bajgain / Lake Superior State University.

New Research Provides Insights into Dynamics of Primordial Earth’s Magma Ocean

Feb 28, 2023 by News Staff

Previous research estimated that it took hundreds of million years for early Earth’s magma ocean to solidify, but new research narrows these large uncertainties...

This Hubble image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5033. The image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). It is based on data obtained through two filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.

ALMA Detects Supermassive Black Hole in Early Star-Forming Galaxy

Feb 28, 2023 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have detected a rapidly growing supermassive black hole in COS-87259, a galaxy that forms stars...

An artistic reconstruction of Macronectes tinae in its paleoenvironment; a darker plumage was chosen for the reconstruction because a darker coloration in giant petrels seems to be related to warmer regions, as Taranaki had warmer temperatures during the Pliocene period. Image credit: Simone Giovanardi / Te Papa.

Giant Petrels Lived in New Zealand 3 Million Years Ago

Feb 27, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Macronectes tinae lived approximately 3 million years ago (Pliocene period), and belongs to the extant genus Macronectes. An artistic reconstruction of...

The oxidation of ferrocenyl-substituted boranes and boronic esters allows for the straightforward synthesis of strong boron-centered Lewis superacids. Image credit: Köring et al., doi: 10.1002/anie.202216959.

Chemists Develop New Technique to Synthesize Lewis Superacids

Feb 27, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Lewis superacids are very special catalysts that can be used to break strong chemical bonds in non-biodegradable fluorinated hydrocarbons and climate-damaging...

Torvosaurus gurneyi. Image credit: © Sergey Krasovskiy.

New Research Shines Light on Evolution of Body Size in Theropod Dinosaurs

Feb 27, 2023 by News Staff

Over evolutionary history, many different species of animals have evolved very large body sizes. The general consensus has been that an animal grows to...

Morphology evolution of X7’s thermal dust emission between 2002 and 2021: the images are oriented with equatorial north at the top and with Sagittarius A* positioned in the upper left corner of each panel. Image credit: Ciurlo et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/acb344.

Astronomers Observe Elongated Object near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

Feb 27, 2023 by News Staff

An elongated dust and gas feature named X7 has a mass of about 50 Earth masses and is on an orbital path around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black...

This Hubble image shows JO201 (also known as Ka 364, LEDA 2456 and LEDA 93189), a jellyfish galaxy located in the constellation of Cetus. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Gullieuszik.

Hubble Finds Star-Forming Clumps in Six Jellyfish Galaxies

Feb 27, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed clumps of star formation in the tails and disks of six ram-pressure stripped (jellyfish)...

Life reconstruction of the non-marine component of the Waterloo Farm ecosystem: Hyneria udlezinye is shown together with the tetrapods Umzantsia amazana and Tutusius umlambo, the placoderms Groenlandaspis riniensis and Bothriolepis africana, the coelacanth Serenichthys kowiensis, the lungfish Isityumzi mlomomde, and a cyrtoctenid eurypterid. Image credit: Maggie Newman / R.W. Gess.

360-Million-Year-Old Fossils of Giant Predatory Fish Found in South Africa

Feb 24, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

The newly-identified species of tristichopterid fish grew up to 3 m (10 feet) long and belongs to the extinct genus Hyneria. Life reconstruction of the...

An artist’s concept of active volcanoes on Venus, depicting a subduction zone where the foreground crust plunges into the planet’s interior at the topographic trench. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Peter Rubin.

Venus’ Outer Shell is Shaping Planet’s Surface, Study Suggests

Feb 24, 2023 by News Staff

Earth has a hot core that heats the surrounding mantle, which carries that heat up to the planet’s lithosphere. The heat is then lost to space, cooling...

Differences between 3D, 2D, and 1D corrosion: (a) schematic drawing of a typical bulk bicontinuous dealloying corrosion morphology; (b) schematic drawing of a typical pitting corrosion morphology with the volume set as transparent; the grain boundaries (GBs) were not displayed because both intergranular and intragranular pitting can occur; (c) schematic drawing of a typical intergranular corrosion morphology with the volume set as opaque; the sides of the cube display the cross-sectional views; (d) schematic drawing of 1D wormhole corrosion in a polycrystalline material; the upper half is a cross-sectional view showing discontinuous dots (i.e., voids filled by molten salt) along the GBs; the bottom half is a volumetric cutaway along the GBs where the 1D percolating network of tunnels on the grain surfaces is clearly shown in red; the dark blue color in (a) to (c) indicates free space such as cracks, voids, crevices etc., while the red color in (d) indicates wormholes filled with molten salt; (e) a representative false-colored SEM image showing the cross-section of Ni-20Cr after corrosion; (f) FIB-SEM 3D reconstruction of the volume shown in (e). Image credit: Yang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-36588-9.

New Form of Corrosion Discovered: One Dimensional Wormhole Corrosion

Feb 24, 2023 by News Staff

Corrosion is a ubiquitous failure mode of materials. Often, the progression of localized corrosion is accompanied by the evolution of porosity in materials...

Drosophila melanogaster and other non-migrating animals can sense external magnetic fields. Image credit: University of Manchester.

Animals’ Ability to Sense Magnetic Field May Be More Widespread than Previously Thought

Feb 23, 2023 by News Staff

New research led by University of Leicester and University of Manchester scientists shows that a molecule present in all living cells called flavin adenine...

Left: a fully assembled quantum system at Google Quantum AI; prominently displayed is the dilution refrigerator in which the computations occur, the quantum processor and quantum-limited amplifiers installed at the bottom stage of the refrigerator, various cables connecting bottom to top, and control electronics of quantum computer in the back. Right: two generations of Sycamore processors fabricated by Google Quantum AI; each processor features two chips that are bonded together: a chip containing the quantum bits (qubits), and a chip containing the wiring between the qubits and the outside world; the latest generation of the Sycamore processor on the right is notably larger than previous generations, but also has several modifications to the qubits resulting in improved performance. Image credit: Google Quantum AI.

Google Quantum AI Team Improves Error Correction in Quantum Computing

Feb 23, 2023 by News Staff

A new work from Google Quantum AI represents a step towards the development of scalable quantum error correction to enable quantum computers to reach sufficiently...

$Mathematicians often describe arguments as beautiful or dull, and famous scientists have claimed that mathematical beauty is a guide toward the truth. Do laypeople, like mathematicians and scientists, experience mathematics aesthetically? Three studies by Johnson & Steinerberger suggest that they do. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.$