ScienceDaily: Top Science News

Studying neurons in C. elegans, researchers made a surprising discovery: these roundworms, like most animals, process information using a digital, electric code.

A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, spiral toward a collision.

Previous research showed it was possible to reduce the burden of damaged cells, termed senescent cells, and extend lifespan and improve health, even when treatment was initiated late in life. They now have shown that treatment of aged mice with the natural product Fisetin, found in many fruits and vegetables, also has significant positive effects on health and lifespan.

Scientists have developed a novel approach that boosts the chances of finding extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy. The method uses probability theory to calculate the possibility of detecting an extraterrestrial signal (if there is one) at a given distance from Earth.

By translating a key human physical skill, whole-body balance, into an equation, engineers used the numerical formula to program their robot Mercury.

A team of astronomers using the latest set of data from ESA's Gaia mission to look for high-velocity stars being kicked out of the Milky Way were surprised to find stars instead sprinting inwards -- perhaps from another galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X.

Secondary forests only last an average of 20 years. The finding presents a major problem for large-scale restoration policy, which often focuses on commitments to restore a certain number of hectares by a given year. But the benefits of restoration depend on those forests persisting. It takes much longer than 20 years for a secondary forest to absorb large amounts of carbon, or to provide habitat for many forest species, research shows.

If dark matter consists of a plethora of primordial black holes, then their gravitational lensing -- magnifying and brightening distant objects -- should be detectable. Physicists analyzed 740 known supernovas to find the handful that should have been magnified and brightened by black holes, and found none. This puts a strong upper limit, 40, on the percent of dark matter that can consist of black holes, and suggests that none of it is.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded to Arthur Ashkin "for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems" and jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland "for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses."

An intricate network of crevices adorns the skin surface of the African bush elephant. By retaining water, these micrometer-wide channels greatly help elephants in regulating their body temperature. Today, researchers report that African elephant skin channels are true fractures of the animal brittle and desquamation-deficient skin outermost layer. The scientists show that the elephant hyperkeratinised skin grows on a lattice of millimetric elevations, causing its fracture due to local bending mechanical stress.

Violent video game play by adolescents is associated with increases in physical aggression over time, according to a new meta-analysis.