Plants that secrete colored nectars are part of an exclusive club. To date, only 70 plants in the world are on that list. The colors lure in pollinators, but more recently they sparked the interest of researchers and industry partners in search of natural colorant options. Over the past several years, a team of researchers, including a handful from the University of Minnesota, sorted out how plants produced distinctive red nectar and its makeup in a newly published study in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences....

A comprehensive genomic analysis suggests that colon and rectal tumors constitute a single type of cancer and reveals previously unsuspected therapeutic targets for the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. “Nobody has ever done analysis of this large a set of tumors,” said Raju Kucherlapati, Paul C. Cabot Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and corresponding author of the study, published July 19 in the journal Nature....

Even individually, the ALMA antennas are impressive in size. The Chajnantor plateau itself is also located at an altitude of 5,000 meters (16,000 feet), with its Operations Support Facility (OSF) at a (still considerable) altitude of 2,900 meters (9,500 feet). As the antennas are not built up on the plateau, this required an entirely new approach to transporting each of the constituent antennas from the OSF up to Chajnantor. Enter Otto and Lore!...

A team of researchers from Caltech and the China Earthquake Administration has discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas. The geologists say that the ancient canyon—thousands of feet deep in places—effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalayas became so steep, so fast. “I was extremely surprised when my colleagues, Jing Liu-Zeng and Dirk Scherler, showed me the evidence for this canyon in southern Tibet,” says Jean-Philippe Avouac, the Earle C....

From that standpoint, Grammy Award nominees may be especially brainy. “It turns out that practicing a musical instrument might be the most difficult and challenging thing a human brain can do,” says Larry Sherman, Ph.D., a professor in the Division of Neuroscience at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at OHSU. “You’re integrating sensory and fine motor skills, gross motor skills. You’re holding your instrument, moving your fingers. You’re doing all these things, and it’s rewiring your brain to the point where you can actually become a Grammy-nominated musician....

Physicists have been looking for laws that explain both the microscopic world of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of the universe and the Big Bang at its beginning, expecting that such fundamental laws should have symmetry in all circumstances. However, last year, two physicists found a theoretical proof that, at the most fundamental level, nature does not respect symmetry. How did they do it? Gravity and hologram. There are four fundamental forces in the physical world: electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and gravity....

The University of Queensland-led study has compiled a data set, listing the threats to Australian species from habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation. Michelle Ward, a PhD candidate at UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences said while it painted a grim picture for many plants and animals, it was not all bad news. “This information can improve the conservation of some of Australia’s most endangered plants and animals by providing conservation managers with more precise data to better direct their efforts,” Ms....

Hubble welcomes the Year of the Rat with a view of its own favorite rodents, NGC 4676A and B, and highlights the planetary origins of the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year timetable.

In 2008, a space-borne detector measured an unexpectedly high number of positrons—the anti-matter cousins of electrons—in orbit. Ever since, scientists have debated the cause of the anomaly, split over two competing theories of its origin. Some suggested a simple explanation: The extra particles might be coming from nearby collapsed stars called pulsars, which spin around several times a second and throw off electrons, positrons, and other matter with violent force....

Flight 17 is approximately half of Flight 9 in reverse, which was one of the most challenging flights for Ingenuity to date. The crossing of the “Séítah” region of Mars’ Jezero Crater will take at least two flights, with a stop halfway across. This stop is necessary for two reasons. Ingenuity’s reduced flight time, because of higher rotor RPMs, means that Ingenuity would need to fly faster to cover the same distance....

The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly impacted our sleep and dream activity. In a recent study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, people had a higher number of awakenings, a harder time falling asleep, higher dream recall, and more lucid dreams during lockdown than after lockdown. People also reported more dreams related to “being in crowded places” during post-lockdown than lockdown. For the study, 90 adults in Italy recorded their dream experiences and completed a sleep-dream diary each morning....

Researchers are using the ultra-bright X-rays of the Advanced Photon Source, an accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory, to help turn naturally generated llama antibodies into potentially effective therapies against COVID-19. “We have received more than 50 llama antibodies with several proteins of SARS-CoV-2,” said University of Chicago professor and senior Argonne scientist Andrzej Joachimiak, director of the Structural Biology Center at the Advanced Photon Source and co-director of the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases....

The model is detailed in a new paper by Suzanne Lenhart, Chancellor’s Professor, and James R. Cox Professor of Mathematics, published in Mathematics. “Invasives pose a serious threat to native habitats and species, especially in aquatic environments,” said Lenhart. “Using optimal control techniques in a model with realistic hydrology features, we illustrated how to adjust the flow rate in a river to keep an invasive species from moving upstream.” Mathematical models like the PDE model in this study, which represents an invasive population in a river, can give insight into new management strategies....

The authors of the new study published in Scientific Reports today (March 19, 2020), investigated how many species are needed for tropical ecosystem functioning and associated ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, to project future changes in the climate that affect ecosystem carbon storage and thus might trigger further climatic change through increased greenhouse gas emissions. It is important that we are able to construct realistic scenarios of how tropical ecosystems function to help improve current conservation and management strategies, so they can continue to provide their valuable services into the future....

Many of these craniofacial disorders arise from mutations of “housekeeping” genes, so called because they are required for basic functions such as building proteins or copying DNA. All cells in the body require these housekeeping genes, so scientists have long wondered why these mutations would produce defects specifically in facial tissues. Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have now discovered how one such mutation leads to the facial malformations seen in Treacher-Collins Syndrome, a disorder that affects between 1 in 25,000 and 1 in 50,000 babies and produces underdeveloped facial bones, especially in the jaw and cheek....

Jumping spiders can distinguish living from non-living objects in their peripheral vision using the same cues used by humans and other vertebrate animals, according to a study published on July 15, 2021, in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Massimo De Agrò of Harvard University in the United States. The ability to detect other living creatures in your surroundings is a key skill for any animal — it is crucial for finding mates, avoiding predators, and catching prey....

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have led to a record crash in emissions. But it will be emission levels during the recovery—in the months and years after the pandemic recedes—that matter most for how global warming plays out, according to a new Nature commentary from researchers at the University of California San Diego. While the skies have been noticeably cleaner, countries like the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and others have recently relaxed laws controlling pollution and vehicle energy efficiency standards....

The research, published in Planetary and Space Science, uses computer models to simulate the movement of debris from Stickney crater, a huge gash on one end of Phobos’ oblong body. The models show that boulders rolling across the surface in the aftermath of the Stickney impact could have created the puzzling patterns of grooves seen on Phobos today. “These grooves are a distinctive feature of Phobos, and how they formed has been debated by planetary scientists for 40 years,” said Ken Ramsley, a planetary science researcher at Brown University who led the work....

The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars....

Galaxy formation and evolution are still far from being fully understood. Luckily, the conditions found within certain galaxies — like starburst galaxies — can tell us a lot about how they have evolved over time. Starburst galaxies contain regions where stars are forming at such a breakneck rate that the galaxy is eating up its gas supply faster than it can be replenished! NGC 4536 is just such a galaxy, captured here in beautiful detail by the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) as the image of the week....