ScienceDaily: Top News

A study proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle. The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of tectonic plates is related to convection currents in the Earth's mantle.

A study has discovered that sufficient water flows during summer can be critical to a Chinook salmon population in the interior of British Columbia.

Atom-level simulations reveal the reason iron rusts in supposedly 'inert' supercritical carbon dioxide fluid. Trace amounts of water can cause a reaction at the interface between iron and the fluid, prompting the formation of corrosive chemicals.

Mange has decimated the population of wild vicunas and guanacos in an Argentinian national park that was created to conserve them, according to a new study. The findings suggest domestic llamas introduced to the site may have been the source of the outbreak. Cascading consequences for local predator and scavenger species are expected.

Our brain maps out our body to facilitate accurate motor control. For a century, the body map has been thought to have applied to all types of motor actions. Now, a research group has revealed that the body relies on multiple maps based on the choice of motor system.

Bumblebees are important pollinators because they pollinate many different plant species and are extremely resilient. They can still manage to fly at temperatures that are too cold for other pollinators. Like many other insects, they are in sharp decline. This makes it even more important to find out what bumblebees need to reproduce successfully. A team has shown that a diverse landscape and a diverse pollen diet, which the bumblebees collect as a protein source to nourish their offspring, play a significant role in this. A more diverse diet could even mitigate negative effects of infestation with parasitic wax moth larvae.

Industry and private consumers alike depend on oil and gas pipelines that stretch thousands of kilometers underwater. It is not uncommon for these pipelines to become clogged with deposits. Until now, there have been few means of identifying the formation of plugs in-situ and non-destructively. Measurements now show that neutrons may provide the solution of choice.

Scientists have made a discovery about the properties of water that could provide an exciting addendum to a phenomenon established over two centuries ago. The discovery also holds interesting possibilities for cooling devices and processes in industrial applications using only the basic properties of water.

Machine-learned, light-field camera reads facial expressions from high-contrast illumination invariant 3D facial images.

New research has confirmed the frequency of asteroid collisions that formed impact craters on Mars has been consistent over the past 600 million years.

Scientists have developed new biological parts that are able to shape the flow of cellular processes along DNA.

Inside neurons, motor proteins haul precious cargo, moving essential goods along thread-like roadways called microtubule tracks.

Bioengineers have created a new type of petri dish in the form of microscopic, permeable particles that can dramatically speed up research and development (R&D) timelines of biological products, such as fatty acids for biofuels. Dubbed PicoShells, the picoliter (trillionth of a liter), porous, hydrogel particles can enable more than one million individual cells to be compartmentalized, cultured in production-relevant environments, and selected based on growth and biomass accumulation traits using standard cell-processing equipment.

Researchers propose a novel method of significantly enhancing the catalytic efficiency of materials already in broad commercial usage, a process they have termed 'induced activation.'

Scientists have identified natural nano-bubbles containing the ACE2 protein (evACE2) in the blood of COVID-19 patients and discovered these nano-sized particles can block infection from broad strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The protein acts as a decoy in the body and can serve as a therapeutic to be developed for prevention and treatment for current and future strains of SARS-CoV-2 and future coronaviruses. It could be delivered as a nasal spray.