Ancient DNA research, also known as aDNA, has made significant strides in recent years and has shed light on a variety of biological, societal, and historical issues. The study of aDNA has aided in the understanding of disease evolution, historical migration patterns, the impacts of European colonialism, and much more. However, the new information acquired through aDNA research has not come without expenses and controversy, notably with the ethical usage of human genetic material from the past....

Some 9,000 years ago, corn as it is known today did not exist. Ancient peoples in southwestern Mexico encountered a wild grass called teosinte that offered ears smaller than a pinky finger with just a handful of stony kernels. But by stroke of genius or necessity, these Indigenous cultivators saw potential in the grain, adding it to their diets and putting it on a path to become a domesticated crop that now feeds billions....

The research team, led by Chris Yakymchuk, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Waterloo, set out to study the geology of rubies to better understand the conditions necessary for ruby formation. During this research in Greenland, which contains the oldest known deposits of rubies in the world, the team found a ruby sample that contained graphite, a mineral made of pure carbon. Analysis of this carbon indicates that it is a remnant of early life....

In a serendipitous discovery, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to turn bone marrow stem cells directly into brain cells. Current techniques for turning patients’ marrow cells into cells of some other desired type are relatively cumbersome, risky, and effectively confined to the lab dish. The new finding points to the possibility of simpler and safer techniques. Cell therapies derived from patients’ own cells are widely expected to be useful in treating spinal cord injuries, strokes and other conditions throughout the body, with little or no risk of immune rejection....

Over the past several years, Ariel Amir, Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has been studying how cells regulate size. In previous research, he and his collaborators found that E. coli (bacteria) and budding yeast (eukaryote) use the same cellular mechanisms to ensure uniform cell sizes within a population. Now, with a team of collaborators including Ethan Garner, the John L....

Following a season of unstable conditions this summer, the Arctic ice cap will have a record-breaking melt. This has been reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The numbers have been coming in and scientists have been looking at them with a sense of amazement. If the melt were to stop today, it would be the third-lowest ice level on record, thanks to satellite imagery. There are still two more weeks of melt to go, so it’s very likely that there will be a new record low....

Of specific interest are the physical processes responsible for producing heavy elements — like gold, platinum, and uranium — that are thought to happen during neutron star mergers and explosive stellar events. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory led an international nuclear physics experiment conducted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that utilizes novel techniques developed at Argonne to investigate the nature and origin of heavy elements in the universe....

Promising new chapter in fusion research “This research opens a promising new chapter in the effort to bring unlimited energy to Earth,” Steve Cowley, director of PPPL, said of the findings, which are reported in the current issue of Nature magazine. “Artificial intelligence is exploding across the sciences and now it’s beginning to contribute to the worldwide quest for fusion power.” Fusion, which drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates energy....

An assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, Wolkovich is a co-author of a new study that suggests that, although vineyards may be able to counteract some of the effects of climate change by planting lesser-known grape varieties, scientists and vintners need to better understand the wide diversity of grapes and their adaptations to different climates. The study is described in a January 2 paper in Nature Climate Change. “It’s going to be very hard, given the amount of warming we’ve already committed to … for many regions to continue growing the exact varieties they’ve grown in the past,” Wolkovich said....

In a recent study, French scientists led by Prof. Franck Courchamp at the Université Paris-Saclay and the CNRS, tried to evaluate the first estimated control costs for this invasion. Supported by the INVACOST project, their findings are published in the open-access journal NeoBiota. Since its invasion to France in 2004 when it was accidentally introduced from China, the Asian hornet has been spreading rapidly, colonizing most of France at an approximate rate of 60-80 km per year, and also invading other European countries: Spain in 2010, Portugal and Belgium in 2011, Italy in 2012, Germany in 2014 and the UK in 2016....

In 2018, the researchers published their original study about galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 — DF2 for short — the first known galaxy to contain little or no dark matter. The finding was highly significant because it showed that dark matter is not always associated with traditional matter on a galactic scale. It also ruled out several theories that said dark matter is not a substance but a manifestation of the laws of gravity on a cosmic scale....

Over fifty years ago, a supernova was discovered in M83, a spiral galaxy about 15 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to make the first detection of X-rays emitted by the debris from this explosion. Named SN 1957D because it was the fourth supernova to be discovered in the year of 1957, it is one of only a few located outside of the Milky Way galaxy that is detectable, in both radio and optical wavelengths, decades after its explosion was observed....

A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system. “The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls,” said team lead Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California....

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA’s Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth. “The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. “We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer....

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that “learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star. Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin, and Shallue, a Google machine learning researcher, teamed up to train a computer to learn how to identify signs of an exoplanet in the light readings from distant stars recorded by Kepler....

For decades, astronomers have known about irregular outbursts from the double star system V745 Sco, which is located about 25,000 light years from Earth. Astronomers were caught by surprise when previous outbursts from this system were seen in 1937 and 1989. When the system erupted on February 6, 2014, however, scientists were ready to observe the event with a suite of telescopes including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. V745 Sco is a binary star system that consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf locked together by gravity....

A spectrograph can be used to analyze any object that absorbs or emits light to determine characteristics such as temperature, density, chemical composition, and velocity. Once light enters a spectrograph it is split by a dispersive optical element into its different components (or wavelengths) in order to be studied. This element acts much like rain droplets that disperse the light to form a rainbow. This dispersed light is then focused onto a detector and it is seen as a spectrum....

Almost three-in-five Australians (58.5 percent) say they will definitely get a COVID vaccine once it is available, new analysis from The Australian National University (ANU) shows. But six percent of the population say they definitely won’t, with another seven percent of Australians saying they will probably not get the vaccine. The analysis, led by the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods, examined COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance and builds on a survey of 3,000 adult Australians....

University of Exeter scientists examined the “learning flights” which most bees perform after leaving flowers. Honeybees are known to perform such flights — and the study shows bumblebees do the same, repeatedly looking back to memorize a flower’s location. “It might not be widely known that pollinating insects learn and develop individual flower preferences, but in fact bumblebees are selective,” said Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, Associate Professor at Exeter’s Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour....

In the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, many of the genes required to form new memories are shut down by a genetic blockade, contributing to the cognitive decline seen in those patients. MIT researchers have now shown that they can reverse that memory loss in mice by interfering with the enzyme that forms the blockade. The enzyme, known as HDAC2, turns genes off by condensing them so tightly that they can’t be expressed....