Such tiny robots could "heal" themselves when damaged, avoiding the need for hard maintenance and fix, and when they've completed their job they can simply break down organically. Later tests showed that groups of xenobots would move around in circles, pushing pellets into a central location - spontaneously and collectively. The heart cells have enough energy to keep swimming for 7-10 days. [Full Article...]
Taking advantage of Drosophila flies' normal instinct to climb up and out of a test tube , their collaborators Robert Wessells, Ph.D. and Alyson Sujkowski of Wayne State University in Detroit developed a type of fly treadmill. In contrast, the flies that lacked Sestrin showed no improvement at all, suggesting that the molecule must in some way generate changes in endurance levels following exer... [Full Article...]
A team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany for the first time used a single star affected by the collision as a clue for dating. Through a combination of accurate galactic mapping data, spectroscopy , stellar kinematics and asteroseismology, observations of this singular star have now revealed our galaxy's violent past. [Full Article...]
Heck notes that there are lifetimes' worth of questions left to answer about presolar grains and the early Solar System. About 30 years ago it was found that the rocks housed "presolar grains" - tiny grains of silicon carbide older than the Sun. [Full Article...]
A team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland analysed 40 pre-solar grains contained in a portion of the Murchison meteorite , that fell in Australia in 1969. "The silicon can be split into helium and neon", Heck says. Scientists have developed a method to determine stardust's age. The stardust represented time capsules dating to before the solar system. [Full Article...]
Since 2017, rainfall has been less frequent in New South Wales and Queensland. On Friday night, three fires joined to form a megafire in the Snowy Mountains that straddle the border between the states of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW), Efe news reported. [Full Article...]
An exoplanet , according to Merriam-Webster , is a "planet orbiting a star that is not [Earth's] sun". "We don't have a large sample size of binary system planets". A few other similar planets have been discovered before, notably by the Kepler Space Telescope, but this is the first discovered by TESS, which was launched in 2018. [Full Article...]
According to the Old Farmer's Almanac , legend has it that wolves hungry from winter starvation howled more at the first full moon of the year than any other. The first full moon of 2020 will arrive in style on Friday evening. The moon was noticed throughout the nation, from rural areas to London. Earlier on Friday, Andrew Peters captured breathtaking scenes of the total moon setting over a hi... [Full Article...]