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The latest drone and satellite technology is helping an international team of researchers to better understand how the vast, treeless regions called the tundra is becoming greener. As Arctic summer temperatures warm, plants are responding. Snow is melting earlier and plants are coming into leaf sooner in spring. Tundra vegetation is spreading into new areas and where plants were already growing, they are now growing taller. Understanding how data captured from the air compare with observations made on the ground will help to build the clearest picture yet of how the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and North America are changing as the temperature rises....

In our globalized world, which has already become victim to climate change and biodiversity loss, non-native species present a further threat to our ecosystems. Thus, the rising accounts of newly recorded alien species are of serious concern to both scientists and (inter)national institutions. However, surveying non-native species remains limited to a small fraction of species: those known to be particularly invasive and harmful. One of the multitude of non-native species that are currently lacking efficient and coordinated surveying efforts is the Asian bamboo longhorn beetle (Chlorophorus annularis)....

Star formation is one of the principal markers of galaxy growth. Observations of galaxies have tried to measure star formation by correlating the formation rate with the intrinsic luminosity (star formation heats the dust whose infrared emission can dominate the luminosity). However, the emission from the region around a supermassive black hole that is actively accreting, an active galactic nucleus (AGN), can easily be confused with the emission from star formation....

Whether it be vaccines, climate change, or GM foods, societally important science can evoke strong and opposing attitudes. Understanding how to communicate science requires an understanding of why people may hold such extremely different attitudes to the same underlying science. The new study performed a survey of over 2,000 UK adults, asking them both about their attitudes to science and their belief in their own understanding. A few prior analyses found that individuals that are negative towards science tend to have relatively low textbook knowledge but strong self-belief in their understanding....

The NIRCam is Webb’s primary imager that covers the infrared wavelength range from 0.6 to 5 microns. NIRCam detects light from the earliest stars and galaxies in the process of formation, the population of stars in nearby galaxies, as well as young stars in the Milky Way and Kuiper Belt objects. The Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science, or PEARLS, project is the subject of a recent study published in Astronomical Journal by a team of researchers, including Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration Regents Professor Rogier Windhorst, Research Scientist Rolf Jansen, Associate Research Scientist Seth Cohen, Research Assistant Jake Summers, and Graduate Associate Rosalia O’Brien, along with the contribution of many other researchers....

Paleontologists and palaeoanthropologists published their findings in the journal Nature, and it focuses on Homo rudolfensis, a hominin with a relatively flat face that was first identified in 1972. Other big-skulled fossils have been attributed to this species, but none of these have included both a face and a lower jaw. This caused problems in palaeoanthropology, as faces and jaws function like fingerprints when identifying a specimen from a particular species....

“It’s a cornucopia of results,” says Shri Kulkarni, the principal investigator of ZTF and the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at Caltech. Recently, several new papers about early results and technical specifications for ZTF were accepted for publication in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. “We are up and running and delivering data to the astronomical community. Astronomers are energized.” ZTF uses the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar to survey the northern skies for anything that explodes, moves, or changes in brightness....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The wires were made with a thin tube of an elastic polymer that was filled with a liquid metal alloy of gallium and indium, which conducts electricity efficiently. Previous efforts to create stretchable wires focused on embedding materials or other electrical conductors in elastic polymers, creating a trade-off, states Michael Dickey, a chemical engineer at NC State, and co-author of the paper....

Keeping blood insulin levels within strict, healthy parameters is a daily goal for people with diabetes. But now, researchers from Japan have found that regulating blood insulin levels may even help lower the risk of getting COVID-19. In a study published this month in Diabetes, researchers from Osaka University have revealed that a protein called GRP78 helps the virus that causes COVID-19 bind to and enter cells. GRP78 is a protein that is found in adipose tissue (i....

The moon experiences a heavier bombardment by small meteoroids than models had predicted, according to new observations from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. The result implies that lunar surface features thought to be young because they have relatively few impact craters may be even younger than previous estimates. The finding also implies that equipment placed on the moon for long durations — such as a lunar base — may have to be made sturdier....

A heart surgeon doesn’t need to grasp quantum mechanics to perform successful operations. Even chemists don’t always need to know these fundamental principles to study chemical reactions. But for Kang-Kuen Ni, the Morris Kahn associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics, quantum spelunking is, like space exploration, a quest to discover a vast and mysterious new realm. Today, much of quantum mechanics is explained by Schrödinger’s equation, a kind of master theory that governs the properties of everything on Earth....

Penguins are a diverse order of species that span the Southern hemisphere, ranging from the Galápagos Islands on the equator, to the oceanic temperate forests of New Zealand, to the rocky coastlines of the sub-Antarctic islands, finally reaching the sea-ice around Antarctica. This iconic bird group has transitioned from flying seabirds to powerful, flightless marine divers. With their specialized skin and feathers and an enhanced thermoregulation system, they are able to inhabit environments from the extremely cold Antarctic sea ice to the tropical Galápagos Islands....

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has detected deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars. Though formed in the searing heat of a violent impact, such deposits might provide a delicate window into the possibility of past life on the Red Planet. During the past few years, research has shown evidence about past life has been preserved in impact glass here on Earth. A 2014 study led by scientist Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, found organic molecules and plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago in Argentina....

Among those to take a closer look at the object was a team of astronomers from the Universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg and Potsdam. They discovered that it may not necessarily be a black hole at all, but possibly a massive neutron star or even an ‘ordinary’ star. Their results have now been published as a highlight-paper in the renowned journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The putative black hole was detected indirectly from the motion of a bright companion star, orbiting an invisible compact object over a period of about 80 days....

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have announced the most precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart. The Hubble constant is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world in the 1920s by confirming our universe has been expanding since it exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered the expansion is accelerating, or speeding up over time....

When a DNA molecule breaks in two, the fate of the cell is threatened. From the perspective of a bacterium, fixing the break quickly is a matter of life and death. But to mend the DNA without introducing mistakes in the sequence is challenging; the repair machinery needs to find a template. The process of healing broken DNA using a template from a sister chromosome is known as homologous recombination and is well described in the literature....

“We are making a polymer completely change its architecture through a chemical response,” said FSU Assistant Professor of Chemistry Justin Kennemur. “In nature this happens too. Think of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The cellular machinery changes the design of natural biopolymers and hence their properties. That’s what we’re doing with synthetic polymers.” The research is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Polymers are materials made of large molecular chains composed of chemically similar repeating units....

The field of predictive analytics holds increasing promise for helping clinicians diagnose and treat patients. Machine-learning models can be trained to find patterns in patient data to aid in sepsis care, design safer chemotherapy regimens, and predict a patient’s risk of having breast cancer or dying in the ICU, to name just a few examples. Typically, training datasets consist of many sick and healthy subjects, but with relatively little data for each subject....

MIT engineers have taken a critical first step toward making that vision a reality. By embedding specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, they induced the plants to give off dim light for nearly four hours. They believe that, with further optimization, such plants will one day be bright enough to illuminate a workspace. “The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don’t have to plug in....

“The role of mossy cells in epilepsy has been debated for decades. This study reveals how critical these cells are in the disease, and the findings suggest that preventing loss of mossy cells or finding ways to activate them may be potential therapeutic targets,” said Vicky Whittemore, Ph.D., program director at NINDS. Mossy cells, named for the dense moss-like protrusions that cover their surface, are located in the hippocampus, a brain area that is known to play key roles in memory....