Other Sciences News

Gamma-Ray Emission from Tropical Thunderstorms Takes More Forms Than Previously Thought

NASA’s high-flying ER-2 airplane carries instrumentation in this artist’s impression of the Airborne Lightning Observatory for Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper Simulator and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (ALOFT) mission to record gamma rays (colored purple for illustration) from thunderclouds. Image credit: NASA / ALOFT team.
Oct 3, 2024 by News Staff

There’s more to thunderclouds than rain and lightning. Along with visible light emissions, thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays that last for millionths of a second. The clouds can also glow steadily with gamma rays for seconds to minutes at a time. Using a battery of detectors aboard NASA’s ER-2 research aircraft, scientists have found a new kind of gamma-ray emission that’s shorter in duration than the steady glows and longer...

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The center of this infographic shows the sharpest-ever image of the cloud of charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, while the insets show measurements of high-energy ions and electrons detected along the JUICE’s flyby route. Image credit: ESA / NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Josh Diaz.

JUICE Captures Sharpest Ever Image of Earth’s Radiation Belt

Oct 2, 2024 by News Staff

In August 2024, ESA’s JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer (JUICE) made history with a daring Moon-Earth flyby and double gravity assist maneuver. As the spacecraft...

Han et al. found that erosion from a river network about 75 km from Mount Everest is carving away a substantial gorge; the loss of this landmass is causing the mountain to spring upwards by as much as 2 mm a year and has already increased its height by between 15 and 50 m over the past 89,000 years. Image credit: Truthseeker08.

Nearby River is Pushing Up Peak of Mount Everest, Study Suggests

Oct 1, 2024 by News Staff

Mount Everest, also known as Chomolungma in Tibetan or Sagarmāthā in Nepali, is about 15 to 50 m taller than it would otherwise be because of uplift...

A map of the East Pacific Rise region where the discovery of an ancient seafloor was made. Image credit: Jingchuan Wang.

Geoscientists Discover Mysterious Subduction Zone beneath Pacific Ocean

Oct 1, 2024 by News Staff

During the Mesozoic era, between 250 and 120 million years ago, an ancient seafloor sank deep into Earth in the East Pacific Rise, a tectonic plate boundary...

These 3,500-year-old kefir cheese samples are among the few dairy remains preserved more than 3,000 years and were produced by the Bronze Age Xiaohe population -- a population that possesses mixed lifestyles and techniques (e.g., farming, dairy production, hunting, etc.). Also, although early Xiaohe individuals show little genetic interaction with other populations, mitochondrial DNA data suggest maternal connections with East and West Eurasians. By recovering DNA information from ancient fermented dairy remains, Liu et al. investigated the lifestyle linked to the usage of fermented dairy by the Xiaohe population and explore the co-evolution between the fermented bacteria and their hosts. Image credit: Liu et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.08.008.

World’s Oldest Cheese Sheds Light on Origins of Kefir

Sep 25, 2024 by News Staff

Despite the long history of consumption of fermented dairy, little is known about how the fermented microbes were utilized and evolved over human history....

Kutter et al. discovered that individual nerve cells in the medial temporal lobe recognize zero as a numerical value and not as a separate category ‘nothing.’

New Research Sheds Light on How Human Brain Processes Number Zero

Sep 25, 2024 by News Staff

The number zero holds a special status among numbers, indispensable for developing a comprehensive number theory. Despite its importance in mathematics,...

The 5D memory crystal. Image credit: University of Southampton.

Researchers Store Entire Human Genome on ‘Everlasting’ 5D Memory Crystal

Sep 20, 2024 by News Staff

Unlike other data storage formats that degrade over time, 5D memory crystals can store up to 360 terabytes of information without loss for billions of...

Map of Cyprus showing the approximate position of fossil sites where dwarf elephants and hippos have been retrieved. Image credit: Corey J.A. Bradshaw / Flinders University.

Paleolithic Humans Caused Extinction of Dwarf Hippos and Elephants on Cyprus

Sep 19, 2024 by News Staff

Around 3,000-7,000 hunter-gatherers on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus hunted endemic dwarf hippopotamus (Phanourios minor) and dwarf elephants (Palaeoloxodon...

Lu et al. found that regular coffee or caffeine intake, especially at moderate levels, was associated with a lower risk of new-onset cardiometabolic multimorbidity. Image credit: Sci.News.

Moderate Coffee Consumption Reduces Risk of Multiple Cardiometabolic Diseases

Sep 19, 2024 by Natali Anderson

In a new study on the UK Biobank cohort, habitual coffee or caffeine consumption, especially at a moderate level, was associated with a lower risk of new-onset...

Interpretation of the tusked animal of the Horned Serpent panel and its dicynodont-like traits. Image credit: J. Benoit, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309908.

Strange Tusked Animal in South African Rock Art is Permian Dicynodont, Scientist Claims

Sep 19, 2024 by News Staff

The Horned Serpent panel at La Belle France in the Free State province of South Africa was painted by the San people at least two hundred years ago. It...

A geological field section reveals a desiccated (extreme dryness) land surface that was common all over the world 252 million years ago. Image credit: University of Bristol / China University of Geosciences.

Mega El Niño Events Caused End-Permian Mass Extinction, Researchers Suggest

Sep 16, 2024 by News Staff

The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred about 252 million years ago, was the most severe extinction event in the past 540 million years, eliminating...

Rapanui people. Image credit: © Santiago Caruso.

Genomes of Ancient Easter Islanders Reveal Resilience and Pre-European Contacts with Americas

Sep 11, 2024 by News Staff

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. It has captured the imagination of many owing to its...

El Sidron Neanderthals taste wild mushrooms, pine nuts and forest moss. Image credit: Abel Grau, CSIC Communication.

Neanderthal Populations Were Genetically and Socially Isolated for Tens of Thousands of Years: Study

Sep 11, 2024 by News Staff

In 2015, archaeologists discovered the fossilized remains of a Neanderthal individual at Grotte Mandrin, a rockshelter located in Mediterranean France...

In the gas phase, if once formed, sulfurous acid shows a certain kinetic stability with an estimated lifetime of at least one second for atmospheric water vapor conditions. Image credit: Berndt et al., doi: 10.1002/anie.202405572.

Chemists Demonstrate Existence of Sulfurous Acid in Gas Phase under Atmospheric Conditions

Sep 11, 2024 by Sergio Prostak

Chemists at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research have provided experimental evidence that sulfurous acid (H2SO3), once formed in the gas phase,...

Oceanic anoxic events are geologically abrupt phases of extreme oxygen depletion in the oceans that disrupted marine ecosystems and brought about evolutionary turnover. Typically lasting approximately 1.5 million years, these events occurred frequently during the Mesozoic era, from about 183 to 85 million years ago. One hypothesis suggests that anoxic events resulted from enhanced chemical weathering of Earth’s surface in a greenhouse world shaped by high volcanic carbon outgassing. Gernon et al. tested this hypothesis using a combination of plate reconstructions, tectonic-geochemical analysis and global biogeochemical modeling. Image credit: University of Southampton.

Study: Tag-Team between Oceans and Continents Triggered Mesozoic Extinctions of Marine Life

Sep 4, 2024 by News Staff

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists offer a new explanation for a string of severe environmental crises, called oceanic anoxic...

Levin et al suggest that we could have more in common with our extraterrestrial neighbors than initially thought. Image credit: Fernando Ribas.

Alien Visitation Claims Are Widespread Societal Problem, Researcher Says

Sep 3, 2024 by The Conversation

Around a fifth of U.K. citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO. The figures...

Energy dispersive spectroscopic map of the sample studied by Voisey et al. Image credit: Chris Voisey.

Earthquake-Induced Piezoelectricity Plays Key Role in Formation of Large Gold Nuggets: Study

Sep 2, 2024 by News Staff

Gold nuggets occur predominantly in quartz veins, and the current paradigm posits that gold precipitates from hot water and carbon dioxide-rich fluids...

This schematic shows the process by which the smart mask can detect chemicals in the breath, such as nitrite, which is an indicator of airway inflammation. Image credit: Wei Gao & Wenzheng Heng, Caltech.

EBCare: New Smart Mask Can Be Used to Assess Metabolic and Respiratory Conditions

Aug 30, 2024 by News Staff

Recent respiratory outbreaks have garnered substantial attention, yet most respiratory monitoring remains confined to physical signals. Exhaled breath...

Collinson et al. report the existence of a +0.55 ± 0.09 V electric potential drop between 250 km and 768 km from a planetary electrostatic field generated exclusively by the outward pressure of ionospheric electrons; they experimentally demonstrate that the ambipolar field of Earth controls the structure of the polar ionosphere, boosting the scale height by 271%. Image credit: NASA.

NASA’s Endurance Mission Measures Earth’s Ambipolar Electric Field for First Time

Aug 28, 2024 by News Staff

First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the polar wind, a steady outflow of charged particles into space...

The Battle of Orsha by Hans Krell.

Landscape of Fear: Fear of Violent Conflicts Influenced Development of Non-State Societies in Ancient Europe

Aug 28, 2024 by News Staff

The impact of inter-group conflict on population dynamics has long been debated, especially for prehistoric and non-state societies. In their work, scientists...

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