Ancient mud cracks on Mars point to conditions favorable for life
Did life once exist on Mars? Today, the planet is frigid, dry, and inhospitable. But billions of years ago, water flowed through rivers and filled lakes. Now, the discovery of distinctive mud cracks on the planet’s surface suggest ancient Mars cycled through sustained wet and dry seasons for millions of years. Not only would the climate have been habitable, scientists say, but the cycling might have also given the basic chemistry of life a boost.
The discovery, reported today in
Nature
, is
compelling evidence for an Earth-like climate on early Mars
and presents “thought-provoking” theories ...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 9, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Crocodiles are alarmingly attuned to the cries of human infants
Whether they're in mortal peril or just suffering from indigestion, infants across the animal kingdom cry out to tell their parents they need help. Unfortunately for them, the parents aren't the only ones attuned to the cries of their vulnerable young. Nile crocodiles are uniquely sensitive to the wails of distressed primate babies, according to a new study—and the more anxious the cry, the more interested the crocs become.
Indeed, according to the research, published today in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,
the reptiles are even better at identifying the emotional cues hid...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 8, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
On the Afghanistan-Iran border, climate change fuels a fight over water
Earlier this year, Mohammed Noman could hear the faint but persistent sound of gunshots from his farm in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran. The gunfire was a reminder that, since the Taliban won control of the nation in 2021, conflict has continued. This time, however, “The fight is over the precious water,” Noman says.
Fueled in part by a prolonged drought, tensions over water between Iran and Afghanistan have escalated this year, with Iran accusing Taliban leaders of violating a long-standing agreement to share water from the Helmand River that flows from Afghanistan into Iran. In late May, clashes ...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 4, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Doctors have long considered the thymus expendable. But could removing it be fatal?
The thymus, a butterfly-shaped organ that sits between our collarbones, has never seemed like a particularly useful appendage—at least in adults. During early childhood, it provides a place for T cells (the T stands for thymus) to mature into immune cells that attack invaders. But during adolescence the organ begins to shrink and mostly stops producing these cells. By adulthood, it’s assumed to be so useless that cardiac surgeons will occasionally remove it just to get easier access to the heart.
But researchers have recently started to question that assumption, and a study published today in
The New England...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 2, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
HIV researcher will head NIH ’s infectious disease institute
The infectious disease institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will soon have its first new chief in nearly 4 decades. Jeanne Marrazzo, an expert on sexually transmitted infections, will become director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the fall. She will succeed Anthony Fauci, who
stepped down
in December 2022 after 38 years at NIAID’s helm.
Marrazzo, 61, currently directs the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). A physician and epidemiologist, she has expertise in HIV prevention, vaginal infection...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 2, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
University of Alabama HIV researcher will head NIH ’s infectious disease institute
The infectious disease institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will soon have its first new chief in nearly 4 decades. Jeanne Marrazzo, an expert on sexually transmitted infections, will become director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the fall. She will succeed Anthony Fauci, who
stepped down
in December 2022 after 38 years at NIAID’s helm.
Marrazzo, 61, currently directs the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). A physician and epidemiologist, she has expertise in HIV prevention, vaginal infection...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 2, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth
The Atlantic Ocean is
running a fever
. Waters off Florida have become a hot tub, bleaching the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Off the coast of Ireland, extreme heat was implicated in the mass death of seabirds. For years, the north Atlantic was warming more slowly than other parts of the world. But now it has caught up, and then some. Last month, the sea surface there surged to a record 25°C—nearly 1°C warmer than the previous high, set in 2020—and temperatures haven’t even peaked yet. “This year it’s been crazy,” says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 2, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
With new flurry of clinical trials, NIH finally seeks treatments for Long Covid
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) yesterday announced
new clinical trials to test a diverse array of treatment strategies
—from an intravenous immune drug to light therapy and a dietary supplement—in people with Long Covid, the disabling syndrome that can follow infection with the pandemic coronavirus. The focus is on mitigating some of the most common and debilitating symptoms including brain fog and sleep troubles.
Most of the trials will include 100 to 300 people with Long Covid and will start to enroll this year, officials said. One, a multiweek study of the antiviral Paxlovid, has started to ...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 1, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘Everyone is aghast.’ India’s move to weaken forest protections outrages conservationists
Conservation scientists fear more than one-quarter of forests in India could lose legal protection under controversial legislation that the nation’s Parliament could approve as early as this week.
The legislation amends India’s flagship 1980 Forest Conservation Act. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi says it will help India meet its commitments to combat climate change by planting trees, and “eliminate ambiguities” in rules that govern how officials legally define forests and regulate their use.
But researchers and others worry the measure—which has triggered nationwide protests—will irr...
Source: ScienceNOW - August 1, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Electrified cement could turn houses and roads into nearly limitless batteries
Tesla’s Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home
was
the battery?
Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 31, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘Shocking levels of stress.’ A marine heat wave is devastating Florida’s corals
Ocean water temperatures off southern Florida have spiked to record levels, with sea surface temperatures hovering at more than 2°C above typical seasonal peaks for the past few weeks. The heat wave threatens coral reef ecosystems already buffeted by years of ocean warming, disease, and pollution. Coral bleaching, in which heat-stressed coral polyps eject the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues and help nourish the coral, is already widespread this year off Florida’s coast. Corals are also shedding tissue and swiftly dying without going through bleaching.
Ian Enochs, a coral reef ecologist with the National...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 31, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
AI helps crack salt water ’s curious electrical properties
Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water’s electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields—including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out exactly why this happens, using state-of-the-art computer simulations bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI).
“This is a fundamental property of water and one can...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 28, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Grown from scratch, simulated magnetic fields could explain cosmic mystery
Far beyond the magnet on your refrigerator door, out past the magnetic fields of Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way, are invisible field lines that permeate the barren voids between galaxies. But the genesis of these expansive fields has remained a mystery.
Some have proposed that they arose as a result of the big bang, but a
new study
adds support to an alternative hypothesis: These fields can be born relatively easily, anywhere and anytime in the universe. The study relies on computer simulations that illustrate how gravity can stir up charged particles in ways that generate tiny magnetic seeds, which beco...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 28, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
A spectacular superconductor claim is making news. Here ’s why experts are doubtful
This week, social media has been aflutter over a claim for a new superconductor that works not only well above room temperatures, but also at ambient pressure. If true, the discovery would be one of the biggest ever in condensed matter physics and could usher in all sorts of technological marvels, such as levitating vehicles and perfectly efficient electrical grids. However,
the two related papers
, posted to the arXiv preprint server by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of South Korea’s Quantum Energy Research Centre and colleagues on 22 July, are short on detail and have left many physicists skeptical. The researche...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 27, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Farmers are being paid millions to trap carbon in their soils. Will it actually help the planet?
Lance Unger has been doing things a little differently lately on his farm near the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana. After last fall’s harvest, rather than leaving his fields fallow, he sowed some of them with cover crops of oats and sorghum that grew until the winter cold killed them off. And before planting corn and soybeans this spring, Unger drove a machine to shove aside yellowing stalks—last season’s “trash,” as he calls it—rather than tilling the soil and plowing the stalks under.
For these efforts, a Boston-based company called Indigo paid Unger $26,232 in late 2021 and an even larger chunk la...
Source: ScienceNOW - July 27, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
