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The chief model for modern yellowjacket mimics are social wasps united into the Vespidae family. In our time these wasps are as really common as everyone knows who has ever seen them stuck in his or her jam. However, judging by the fossil record, vespid wasps were rare and represented by exclusively solitary taxa in the Early Cretaceous. So probably Buccinatormyia gangnami mimicked something else, or, alternatively, vespid wasps radiated early than currently thought....

Dr. Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University led the study, which analyzed the bones of 35 animals excavated from Navan Fort, the legendary capital of Ulster. Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, Memorial University Newfoundland and the British Geological Survey were also involved in the research. The site had long been considered a center for ritual gatherings, as excavations found a huge 40m diameter building and a barbary ape cranium, likely from at least as far as Iberia....

Scientists don’t know why biodiversity tends to concentrate around tropical regions, but they have put forward several hypotheses. One states that higher latitudes cannot support high biodiversity because of a lack of sunlight and heat. Another proposes that increased solar radiation in tropical latitudes could result in higher mutation rates there. Yet a third points out that the colder ecosystems of the earth are younger than their equatorial equivalents. During a period of rapid global cooling called the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, which occurred 34 million years ago, the planet’s tropical habitats shrank dramatically toward the equator, while ice sheets grew at the poles....

Formic acid is one of the simplest organic acids. It is produced in a special gland in the abdomen of numerous species of ant. “There was a long-standing assumption that the acid only served to ward off predators, for example insects and birds,” says Dr. Simon Tragust from the Institute of Biology at MLU, who co-led the new study alongside Professor Heike Feldhaar from Bayreuth. A couple of years ago he was able to show that ants also use the acid in brood care, for example, to disinfect their brood and prevent the spread of harmful fungi....

The Graphene Flagship analyses the current graphene landscape and market forecast for graphene over the following decade. Graphene is light, flexible, conductive, and one of the strongest materials in the world. And it is right on track to deliver on its promises — the Graphene Flagship is confident many applications will be unveiled in the next decade. In a special Nature Nanotechnology issue, celebrating 15 years since the Nobel Prize-winning “ground-breaking experiments on graphene,” the Graphene Flagship analyzed the current graphene landscape and market forecast for graphene over the following decade....

Over the last half-century, many molecules have been discovered in space. Using radio telescopes, astronomers have with the help of these molecules been able to investigate just what happens in the dark and dense clouds where new stars and planets are born. Scientists can measure temperature, pressure, and gas motions when they study the signature of molecules in the signals they detect. But especially where the most massive stars are born, there’s another major player that’s more difficult to measure: magnetic fields....

Last December, scientists discovered an “active” asteroid within the asteroid belt, sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, designated by astronomers as 6478 Gault, appeared to be leaving two trails of dust in its wake — active behavior that is associated with comets but rarely seen in asteroids. While astronomers are still puzzling over the cause of Gault’s comet-like activity, an MIT-led team now reports that it has caught the asteroid in the act of changing color, in the near-infrared spectrum, from red to blue....

In a dark, starless patch of intergalactic space, astronomers have discovered a never-before-seen cluster of hydrogen clouds strewn between two nearby galaxies, Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33). The researchers speculate that these rarefied blobs of gas — each about as massive as a dwarf galaxy — condensed out of a vast and as-yet undetected reservoir of hot, ionized gas, which could have accompanied an otherwise invisible band of dark matter....

NASA’s Dawn mission has found recently exposed deposits that give us new information on the materials in the crust and how they are changing, according to two papers published March 14 in Science Advances that document the new findings. Observations obtained by the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) on the Dawn spacecraft previously found water ice in a dozen sites on Ceres. The new study revealed the abundance of ice on the northern wall of Juling Crater, a crater 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter....

In this new Hubble Space Telescope image, an uncanny pair of glowing eyes glares menacingly in our direction. The piercing “eyes” are the most prominent feature of what resembles the face of an otherworldly creature. But this is no ghostly apparition. Hubble is looking at a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies. Each “eye” is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars....

More than 4,000 exoplanets are known to date, most of them orbiting single stars like our Sun. Now astrophysicist Dr. Markus Mugrauer of Friedrich Schiller University Jena has discovered and characterized many new multiple-star systems that contain exoplanets. The findings confirm assumptions that the existence of several stars influences the process by which planets are formed and developed. The study by Mugrauer, of the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory of the University of Jena, has now been published in the renowned specialist journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

But with a practically unlimited number of possible combinations, one challenge for metallurgists is figuring out where to focus their research efforts in a vast, unexplored world of metallic mixtures. A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a new process that could help guide such efforts. Their approach involves building an atomic resolution chemical map to help gain new insights into individual high-entropy alloys and help characterize their properties....

Leaves in the Adirondacks were at peak or near-peak color for the season on October 8, 2022, when the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 acquired these satellite images. The image above shows autumn color around Elizabethtown, New York. The town, which is located approximately 40 miles (60 kilometers) southwest of Burlington, Vermont, has long been called the “eastern gateway of the Adirondacks.” Much of the striking yellow foliage in this image is west of the town, within the Hurricane Mountain Wilderness, a 13,784-acre part of the Adirondack Forest Preserve....

Historically, researchers have used population-level methods to study bacterial physiology. These methods characterize the behavior of an idealized “average” cell and form the basis of current models for bacterial growth. Models based on an average cell are useful, but they may not accurately describe how individual cells really work. New possibilities opened up with the advent of single-cell live imaging technologies. Now it is possible to peer into the lives of individual cells....

As the biggest vaccination effort in U.S. history gets underway, several states may not have a sufficient number of facilities in some areas to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to all residents who want it, according to a new analysis from the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and the nonprofit West Health Policy Center. In what is believed to be the first county-level analysis of the nation’s potential COVID-19 vaccine facilities, which include community pharmacies, federally qualified health centers, hospital outpatient departments and rural health clinics, the researchers found that more than a third (35%) of U....

The findings, published in Cell Host & Microbe, may represent a breakthrough strategy for treating West Nile Virus after virus invasion of the brain and the central nervous system, noted senior author Priti Kumar, M.D., associate professor of infectious disease at Yale School of Medicine. There are no approved vaccines or effective therapies for West Nile Virus disease, a mosquito-borne condition. While many infected individuals have no symptoms, others — particularly the very young and older adults — can develop severe neurological problems and even die from the disease....

While associations between microbes and their hosts, from the beneficial — think probiotics in yogurt — to the harmful — such as with viruses spread by touch — have long been known, little is known about how microbes evolve and how their evolution affects the health of their hosts. Now, researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that as microbes evolve and adapt to their unique hosts, they become less beneficial to hosts of other genotypes....

An international team of scientists analyzed centuries-old DNA from victims and survivors of the Black Death pandemic and identified key genetic differences that determined who lived and who died. They also uncovered how those aspects of our immune systems have continued to evolve since that time. Scientists analyzed and identified genes that protected some against the devastating bubonic plague pandemic that swept through Europe, Asia, and Africa nearly 700 years ago....

Hydrogen is an incredibly powerful fuel, and the ingredients are everywhere—in plain old water. Researchers would love to be able to use it widely as a clean and sustainable energy source. One catch, however, is that a considerable amount of energy is required to split water and make hydrogen. Thus scientists have been working on fabricating materials for photoelectrodes that can use solar energy to split water, creating a “solar fuel” that can be stored for later use....

When two neutron stars spiral inward and merge, the resultant explosion generates a large number of the heavy elements that comprise our Universe. The first confirmed instance of this process occurred in 2017, and was named GW 170817. Despite this, scientists have yet to identify the exact elements generated by neutron star mergers, with the exception of strontium, which has been identified in optical spectra. Nanae Domoto, a graduate student at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Science and a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), led a research team that carefully analyzed the properties of all heavy elements to decode the spectra from neutron star mergers....