It may come down to a coin toss as to whether the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy within 10 billion years. While scientists have previously reported that a convergence was certain, an analysis of the latest data suggests the odds are only about 50 percent, researchers report June 2 in Nature Astronomy. The…
The brain is like an ecosystem—thousands of different types of cells connect to form one big, interdependent web. And just as biologists document species of plants and animals, neuroscientists have spent decades identifying different “species” of neurons and other brain cells that support them. They’ve found more than 3,000 cell types spread throughout the brain,…
Lunar craters could be a rich source of platinum NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Craters on the moon could hold over a trillion dollars’ worth of platinum and other precious metals deposited there by asteroids. That means lunar prospecting may be more economically viable than travelling to asteroids individually to mine them – but the legality…
Personal care products influence the chemistry of the air swirling around us. Lotion and perfume disrupt chemical reactions that occur between ozone and skin oils, researchers report May 21 in Science Advances. More work is needed to understand how these reactions might benefit or affect human health, they say. In 2022, atmospheric chemist Nora Zannoni…
Black Death Plague That Killed Millions Became Less Fatal because of This Genetic Tweak Reducing the copies of one gene in the bubonic plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, made it less deadly but potentially more transmissible By Rachel Fieldhouse & Nature magazine Scanning electron micrograph of Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague, on proventricular spines of a Xenopsylla…
We all age at different rates Richard Levine/Alamy Your sex, ethnicity and level of education may influence how long you live, but also the pace at which your body ages. There has been growing recognition over recent years that ageing doesn’t progress at the same rate in different people, and factors such as stress, poor…
As children grow into adulthood and then continue ageing, what happens to their imagination? Do all of us gradually lose our innate capacity to conjure up novelty to the drudgery of life, or does experience teach us to fine-tune it? Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University, has argued that imagination gets better with…
Weather forecasts based on AI are faster and sometimes more accurate than traditional ones, but they may miss rare and unprecedented weather events – which are becoming more common as the climate changes
RNA is thought to have played a key role in life getting started Shutterstock/nobeastsofierce The goal of understanding how inert molecules gave rise to life is one step closer, according to researchers who have created a system of RNA molecules that can partly replicate itself. They say it should one day be possible to achieve…
All of these strange-looking dice can produce a desired probability distribution Keenan Crane Gamers everywhere, rejoice: researchers have discovered that it is possible to transform any shape – from dragons to kittens – into a fair die, making it suitable for playing games that rely on random outcomes. “We started from the idea of: ‘If…
