Aliens Could Live Like This! Life Found in Oily Goo
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 522 words
| Patria Henriques
Extremely tiny newfound habitats hidden within oil could expand the potential for life in the universe, researchers say.
Scientists have discovered microbes living in microscopic droplets of water inside a giant asphalt lake on Earth, suggesting that alien life could perhaps exist within ponds of sludge on distant landscapes such as Saturn's largest moon Titan.
Researchers investigated the largest naturally occurring asphalt lake on Earth, Pitch Lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
[Read More]First Image of a Bleeding Heart
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 2 minutes
| 367 words
| Patria Henriques
Doctors have captured the first images of bleeding inside the heart muscle following a heart attack.
A new study, detailed in the Jan. 19 issue of the journal Radiology, suggests the amount of bleeding of the heart muscle can indicate how damaged a person's heart is after a heart attack.
"We still have a lot of unanswered questions about whether the bleeding itself may cause further damage to the heart muscle and this is an area that needs further research,"
[Read More]How Scientists Created the Purest Drop of Water on Earth
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 470 words
| Patria Henriques
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then this is one divine droplet.
Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology announced yesterday (Aug. 23) that they have created the cleanest drop of water in the world.
This ultrapure water could help explain how self-cleaning surfaces, such as those coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), become covered with a mysterious layer of molecules when they come into contact with air and water.
"We had four labs [around the world] studying this and four different explanations for it,"
[Read More]In Photos: The Stunning Gila Wilderness Area
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 5 minutes
| 1010 words
| Fernande Dalal
Protected beautyThe Gila (pronounced "He-la") Wilderness of southwest New Mexico became the world's first designated wilderness area when it was created on June 3, 1924. Along with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness and the Blue Range Wilderness, the three make up the Gila National Forest. These lands are a vast, undeveloped natural region of grasslands, juniper woodlands, ponderosa pine forests and, at the summits of the mountains' highest peaks, spruce-fir forests.
[Read More]Man slams truck into Easter Island statue, causing 'incalculable damage'
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 503 words
| Fernande Dalal
A resident of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island, a Polynesian territory of Chile) was arrested last week for damaging one of the island's sacred moai statues with his pickup truck, Chilean news site Cooperativa reported.
Local police said the truck likely rolled down a hill and struck the statue's ceremonial platform, or "ahu," after being left unattended. The man left the truck with only a rock wedged under its front tire to compensate for a broken parking brake.
[Read More]Mantis shrimp punch down, pick on smaller rivals to steal their homes
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 638 words
| Fernande Dalal
A perfect home is hard to find, and some mantis shrimp called "smashers" for their clublike arm work hard to locate one that's just right. If the home already has an owner, the invader will fight fiercely to evict it.
To find out how aggressively this tiny crustacean will fight to throw out a previous owner of a coral burrow, researchers created "arenas" in laboratory aquariums and staged battles between mantis shrimp, over ownership of a desirable mock burrow.
[Read More]Neutrons' 'evil twins' may be crushing stars into black holes
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 6 minutes
| 1089 words
| Arica Deslauriers
The universe may be filled with "mirror" particles — and these otherwise-undetectable particles could be shrinking the densest stars in the universe, turning them into black holes, a new study suggests.
These hypothetical evil twins of ordinary particles would experience a flipped version of the laws of physics, as if the rules that govern known particles were reflected in a looking glass. According to a new study, published in December 2020 in the preprint database arXiv but not yet peer-reviewed, if these particles exist, they would be shrinking the densest stars in the universe into black holes.
[Read More]Species Extinction Rates Grossly Overestimated
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 513 words
| Patria Henriques
A group of researchers agrees that Earth is facing a mass extinction event, but they are daring to overturn dogma on how fast species are disappearing. The researchers say they have discovered why current estimates are overblown, and they recommend a different way to calculate the rates.
"We need to go back to revisit ... how those numbers are derived," Fangliang He, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, said in a press briefing with fellow study researcher Stephen Hubbell of the University of California at Los Angeles.
[Read More]Study Reveals Who Gets Spanked
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 3 minutes
| 575 words
| Mittie Cheatwood
Children in homes full of books and educational games are less likely to get spanked, new research shows.
Recent studies have found that corporal punishment can cause significant antisocial behavioral, such as lying, cheating, and hitting, in children as they grow older. So Andrew Grogan-Kaylor of the University of Michigan and his colleague Melanie D. Otis of the University of Kentucky wanted to find out what factors, independent of others, predict whether or not a parent is likely to “spare the rod.
[Read More]These Volunteers Drank E. Coli-Laced Water and Got Diarrhea, for Science
Posted on March 16, 2023
| 4 minutes
| 769 words
| Fernande Dalal
Sometimes, scientists conduct experiments in lab dishes. Other times, they observe people who are already sick. And then there are times when they ask people to drink E. coli-laced water to give them traveler's diarrhea.
In a new study, that was the stomach-churning task given to volunteers, who bravely downed a cup of E. coli, for science.
Their fortitude paid off. Scientists were able to study an important question: whether a person's blood type affects the severity of an "
[Read More]