Jones, of Rice University, studies the behavior of low-viscosity lava, the runny kind that’s found at most volcanoes. About two years ago, he began a series of lab experiments and field observations that provided the raw inputs for a new fluid dynamic model of lava break-up. The work is described in a paper in Nature Communications. Low-viscosity lava is the red-hot, flowing type one might see at Hawaii’s famed Kilauea volcano, and Jones said it usually behaves in one of two ways....

A new study explains how DNA that sits between genes – called ‘junk’ DNA or non-coding regulatory DNA – accommodates a basic plan conserved over tens to hundreds of millions of years while at the same time allowing wing patterns to evolve extremely quickly. “Deep cis-regulatory homology of the butterfly wing pattern ground plan” was published as the cover story in the October 21 issue of the journal Science. The research supports the idea that an ancient color pattern ground plan is already encoded in the butterfly genome and that non-coding regulatory DNA works like switches to turn up some patterns and turn down others....

Researchers have engineered gold-based molecules that target cancer cells and leave healthy cells unharmed, in a critical step towards precision cancer drugs with fewer toxic side effects. Pre-clinical studies have shown the molecules were up to 24 times more effective at killing cancer cells than the widely used anti-cancer drug cisplatin and were also better at inhibiting tumor growth. The molecules were also more targeted and selective, making them promising candidates for development into a new class of gold-based drugs that can wipe out cancer without destroying healthy cells....

A humpback whale swims in a circular pattern while blowing bubbles to create a “net” to encircle its prey. It’s a regular occurrence in the cold blue-green waters of Southeast Alaska, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers and their collaborators have captured it on video from an amazing whale’s-point-of-view along with an aerial video. “The footage is rather groundbreaking,” said Lars Bejder, director of the UH Mānoa Marine Mammal Research Program (MMRP)....

The seabed of the North Sea is covered in thousands of ship and aircraft wrecks, warfare agents, and millions of tons of conventional munition such as shells and bombs. Wrecks contain hazardous substances (such as petroleum and explosives) that may harm the marine environment. Yet, there is a lack of information about the location of the wrecks, and the effect they might have on the environment. “The general public is often quite interested in shipwrecks because of their historical value, but the potential environmental impact of these wrecks is often overlooked,” said PhD candidate Josefien Van Landuyt, of Ghent University....

Start thinking about numbers and they can become large very quickly. The diameter of the universe is about 8.8×1023 km and the largest number with a name—googolplex, 1010100—outranks it enormously. Although that colossal concept was dreamt up by brilliant mathematicians, we’re still pretty limited when it comes to assessing quantities at a glance. ‘Humans have a threshold limit for instantly processing one to four elements accurately,’ says Adrian Dyer from RMIT University, Australia; and it seems that we are not alone....

The purpose of going to school is to learn, but students may find certain topics difficult to understand if they don’t have the necessary background knowledge. This is one of the conclusions of a research article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Background knowledge plays a key role in students’ reading comprehension — our findings show that if students don’t have sufficient related knowledge, they’ll probably have difficulties understanding the text,” says lead researcher Tenaha O’Reilly of Educational Testing Service (ETS)’s Center for Research on Human Capital in Education....

But the wait was uniquely nerve-wracking for a group of scientists at Predictive Science Inc., a private research company in San Diego: They had just published a prediction of what the corona would look like on August 21, the day of the total solar eclipse. How would their prediction — the result of a complex numerical model and tens of hours of computing — compare to the real thing? “Waiting for totality, you know exactly what you’ve predicted and what you’re expecting,” Predictive Science researcher Zoran Mikić said....

The shimmering colors visible in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image show off the remarkable complexity of the Twin Jet Nebula, or PN M2-9. The new image highlights the nebula’s shells and its knots of expanding gas in striking detail. Two iridescent lobes of material stretch outwards from a central star system. Within these lobes two huge jets of gas are streaming from the star system at speeds in excess of one million kilometers per hour....

Weirdly enough, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. Early observers, when looking through small telescopes, could only see undefined, smoky forms that looked like gaseous planets — hence the name. The term has stuck even though modern telescopes like Hubble have made it clear that these objects are not planets at all, but the outer layers of dying stars being thrown off into space. Stars shine as a result of nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, converting hydrogen to helium....

Asteroid impact: the only natural disaster we might prevent Natural hazards come in a range of forms and occur with varying frequency. Some are relatively frequent events with localized impacts such as flooding and wildfires. Others occur just once in a blue moon but can impact the entire planet, such as global pandemics and asteroid impacts. The threat from asteroids however is unique: an asteroid impact is the most predictable natural disaster we face, and given enough warning we have the technology, in principle, to entirely prevent it....

As policymakers assemble in Glasgow for the UN Climate Change Conference, there is growing recognition that human impacts on the environment are going global and growing urgent. However, gaining a quantitative perspective on these impacts has remained elusive. Scientists from the ICTA-UAB in Spain, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Germany, Queensland University of Technology in Australia, Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and McGill University in Canada have used advances in ocean observation and large meta-analyses to show that human impacts have already had major consequences for the larger oceanic species, and have dramatically changed one of life’s largest scale patterns – a pattern encompassing the entire ocean’s biodiversity, from bacteria to whales....

The universe consists of matter. Matter is everything we see around us. That’s strange – but why? In theory, there should also be large amounts of antimatter. Antimatter and matter are actually the same, only reversed in a way, with opposite charges. But there’s hardly any antimatter in the part of the universe we know, including the stars and other galaxies. “We’re here because there’s more matter than antimatter in the universe,” says Professor Jens Oluf Andersen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Physics....

The International Space Station Program brings together international flight crews, multiple launch vehicles, globally distributed launch, operations, training, engineering, and development facilities, communications networks, and the international scientific research community. Launched in 1998 and involving the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, and the participating countries of the European Space Agency — the International Space Station is one of the most complex international collaborations ever attempted. Q. Who operates the International Space Station?...

Berkeley Lab-led team creates a new, lighter form of the element mendelevium in experiments at the 88-Inch Cyclotron. A team of scientists working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered a new form of the human-made element mendelevium. The newly created isotope, mendelevium-244, is the 17th and lightest form of mendelevium, which is element 101 on the periodic table. Mendelevium was first created by Berkeley Lab scientists in 1955 (see a related video), and is among a list of 16 elements that Berkeley Lab scientists discovered or helped to discover....

The paper shows “the virus is mutating due to a combination of neutral drift — which just means random genetic changes that don’t help or hurt the virus — and pressure from our immune systems,” said Ilya Finkelstein, associate professor of molecular biosciences at The University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study. The study was carried out by scientists at Houston Methodist Hospital, UT Austin and elsewhere....

Fewer than half of autistic children in four New Jersey counties got treatment before the age of 36 months, despite a federal mandate necessitating access to early intervention programs (EIP) for children with disabilities, according to a Rutgers University study. Children’s brains are more plastic during this timeframe, increasing the chance of treatment effectiveness. Therefore, early interventions are important in order to give children the best chance of developing to their full potential....

Physicists from the Max Born Institute in Berlin and the University of Rostock have now revealed a so-far overlooked nonlinear optical mechanism that emerges from the light-induced tunneling of electrons inside dielectrics. For intensities near the material damage threshold, the nonlinear current arising during tunneling becomes the dominant source of bright bursts of light, which are low-order harmonics of the incident radiation. These findings, which have just been published in Nature Physics, significantly expand both the fundamental understanding of optical non-linearity in dielectric materials and its potential for applications in information processing and light-based material processing....

A new study from Brown University examines the effect of light exposure at night on the biology of teen sleep, revealing that light from phones or tablets suppressed their production of the sleep-timing hormone melatonin significantly. Brown University — A new study has an important implication for tweens and young teens as they head back to school: Taking a gadget to bed could really hurt their sleep. Enough light exposure at night can keep anyone from falling asleep as quickly as they otherwise would have....

Many of the protected areas in tropical nations are struggling to sustain their biodiversity, according to a study by more than 200 scientists from around the world. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that deforestation is advancing rapidly in these nations and most reserves are losing some or all of their surrounding forest. Among the scientists participating in the study were lead author Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who is also a senior research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Tropical Research; and Thomas Smith, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and director of UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research....