If you have an appetite for cosmic destruction, there’s an app for that. NOVA Black Holes, a free iPad game developed by the PBS series NOVA, lets you hurl a star at other celestial objects while navigating an increasingly complex minefield of stars, planets and black holes. Each level presents a new target and a […]
Call it exoplanet fatigue. The historic detection of an exoplanet just 4.2 light-years from Earth, featured on our cover, was big news. It attracted a lot of media buzz. But outside the office, I heard little about it. No questions from other parents at the playground, including those who had been eager to chat about […]
Carefully counting steps, stairs and sprints might backfire for some people. At the end of a two-year weight-loss trial, people who used activity monitors had lost less weight than people without the device. The results, described in the Sept. 20 JAMA, are the exact opposite of what researchers expected to find. Going into the study, […]
A Swedish scientist is gene editing healthy human embryos, and he is probably not alone, researchers say. Chinese researchers have twice reported editing genes in human embryos that are unable to develop into a baby (SN Online: 4/6/16; SN Online: 4/23/15). But developmental biologist Fredrik Lanner of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm is the first […]
Rosetta is no more. The comet orbiter touched down on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko at 7:19 a.m. Eastern and immediately shut down, bringing to an end a nearly 26-month mission in orbit around the comet. “I hereby declare mission operations ended,” said Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin. The landing site has been dubbed Sais, […]
Bagels and pretzels have a lot in common with the physics of certain materials: The snacks illustrated the mathematics behind theoretical descriptions of exotic states of matter, work which won the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics on October 4. David Thouless of the University of Washington in Seattle, J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University and […]
Like Marvel’s surly superhero Luke Cage, naked mole-rats are seemingly indestructible, hairless creatures that are impervious to certain kinds of pain. This last power has puzzled researchers, because like other mammals, mole-rats have functional versions of a protein called TRPV1, which responds to painfully hot stimuli. It turns out that a different protein, TrkA, is […]
For the first time, researchers have grown eggs entirely in a lab dish. Skin-producing cells called fibroblasts from the tip of an adult mouse’s tail have been reprogrammed to make eggs, Japanese researchers report online October 17 in Nature. Those eggs were fertilized and grew into six healthy mice. The accomplishment could make it possible […]
Textbook drawings of the cell’s largest organelle might need to be updated based on new images. Super-resolution shots of the endoplasmic reticulum reveal tightly packed tubes where previous pictures showed plain flat sheets, scientists report in the Oct. 28 Science. The finding helps explain how the endoplasmic reticulum, or ER, reshapes itself in response to […]
Ecologist Linda Geiser works her way through thick undergrowth on the steep hills of the Bull Run Watershed just outside of Portland, Ore. Every step in her heavy boots is deliberate. It would be easy to break an ankle here, or worse. A dense sea of ferns and berry bushes hides deep pits and sharp […]