Science & Research
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Soil Fungi Borrowed a Bacterial Gene Millions of Years Ago to Freeze Water, Opening a Path to Safer Cloud Seeding
A Science Advances study identifies cell-free ice-nucleating proteins in Mortierellaceae soil fungi, acquired from bacteria via horizontal gene transfer, offering a non-toxic alternative to silver iodide for cloud seeding.
Southernmost Purgatorius Fossils Unearthed in Colorado, Extending the Range of Earth's Earliest Known Primate Relative by 800 Kilometers
Paleontologists have recovered tiny fossilized teeth of Purgatorius from Colorado's Denver Basin, marking the southernmost occurrence ever documented and suggesting that archaic primates dispersed rapidly across western North America within hundreds of thousands of years of the dinosaur extinction.
Biodiversity Faces Compounding Threats as Extreme Heat, Land-Use Change, and Carbon Removal Tradeoffs Converge
An Oxford-led study warns nearly 8,000 vertebrate species face unsuitable conditions by 2100 from combined heat and land-use stress, while a separate Nature Climate Change paper finds that protecting biodiversity hotspots would halve the land available for forestation-based carbon removal.
Antarctica Has Lost Nearly 5,000 Square Miles of Grounded Ice in 30 Years as Retreat Concentrates in Vulnerable Western Glaciers
A 30-year satellite study shows Antarctica lost 12,820 square kilometers of grounded ice, concentrated in West Antarctica's most vulnerable glaciers.
Stanford Geophysicists Produce First Global Map of Continental Mantle Earthquakes, Cataloging 459 Deep Tremors Since 1990
A Stanford-led study published in Science presents the first systematic global catalog of earthquakes originating in the continental mantle, identifying 459 events since 1990 and revealing unexpected clustering beneath the Himalayas and the Bering Strait.
Three Studies Converge on the Scale of the Global Insect Crisis as Scientists Warn Monitoring Cannot Keep Pace
Three major studies reveal invasive species cut insect numbers by 31 percent globally, climate change alone drove a 72 percent decline in a pristine Colorado meadow, and monitoring frameworks cannot yet track whether rescue plans work.
Archaeologists Uncover a Previously Unknown Roman Fortlet Beneath Suburban Gardens in Scotland, Expanding the Antonine Wall's Defensive Map
GUARD Archaeology has published findings from a 2017 excavation in Bearsden that revealed a fortified Roman outpost hidden under residential back gardens, offering the clearest evidence yet of a denser surveillance network along the Antonine Wall than historians had assumed.
Webb Reveals a Sulfur-Shrouded Super-Earth With a Permanent Magma Ocean, Defining a New Class of Exoplanet
JWST observations of super-Earth L 98-59 d reveal a sulfur-dominated atmosphere sustained by a perpetual magma ocean, a combination that fits no existing planetary category and may define a new class of exoplanet.
Cambridge Lab Mistake Yields Light-Powered Reaction That Reverses 150 Years of Organic Chemistry
A failed control experiment led Cambridge chemists to discover a metal-free, LED-driven method for modifying drug molecules at positions previously considered unreachable, reversing the selectivity rules established by Friedel and Crafts in 1877.
Los Alamos THOR Framework Uses Tensor Networks to Solve a Century-Old Physics Problem 400 Times Faster Than Supercomputer Simulations
Los Alamos and University of New Mexico researchers built THOR, an open-source tensor network framework that computes configurational integrals for crystalline solids 400 times faster than molecular dynamics simulations.
MIT's Terahertz Microscope Reveals Hidden Quantum Motion of Electrons Inside a Superconductor for the First Time
MIT physicists built the first terahertz near-field microscope and used it to directly image quantum oscillations of superconducting electrons in BSCCO, a result published in Nature.
Webb Reveals the Inner Workings of the 'Exposed Cranium' Nebula, a Dying Star's Brain-Shaped Shroud
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed images yet of nebula PMR 1, nicknamed the Exposed Cranium, revealing a two-light-year-wide structure shaped by jets from a massive dying star roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Vela.