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 […]
This year’s Nobel Prizes honored scientific achievements that dedicated Science News readers (with good memories) would have found familiar. A dive into our archives revealed some interesting results. The physiology or medicine prize recognized autophagy, the cellular process by which living cells dispose of — or recycle — their biochemical garbage. Molecular biology writer Tina […]
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 […]
SALT LAKE CITY — Dinosaur smarts may be a mystery, but their brains, at least, are now more concrete. A chunk of petrified brain tissue discovered in a tidal pool in southern England is the first reported from a dinosaur, researchers claim. The roughly 133-million-year-old fossil preserves the brain’s wrinkled topology, said paleontologist David Norman, […]
Around 90 percent of ivory seized by law enforcement comes from African elephants that died less than three years before seizure, a study of ivory samples finds. The results confirm what many conservationists have suspected: Long-term stockpiles don’t contribute much ivory to illegal trade, and poached ivory quickly ends up in illegal markets. Thure Cerling […]
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 […]
Complex swirls and vortices can appear in the souplike phase of matter that existed just moments after the Big Bang. Computer simulations show that this substance, called the quark-gluon plasma, can contain “the hottest smoke ring in nature,” says Xin-Nian Wang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, coauthor of a paper published in the Nov. 4 […]