In the new paper, published today in Nature Communications, evidence is provided to match the two events – the mass extinction, called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and the initial diversification of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had originated much earlier, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, some 245 million years ago, but they remained very rare until the shock events in the Carnian 13 million years later. The new study shows just when dinosaurs took over by using detailed evidence from rock sequences in the Dolomites, in north Italy – here the dinosaurs are detected from their footprints....

Over 60 million people have been infected and around 1.5 million have died from COVID-19. The virus is disrupting economies and food supply chains all over the world. Understanding why some animals get infected and others do not could be the key to unlocking new treatments and therapies. In a study published in Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, researchers analyzed available protein sequences of the virus and host cell receptors across different spices to find out why....

The Big Bang is still shrouded in mystery in many respects. Cosmologists use various ways to try and get information about the first moments of our universe. One possibility is cosmic magnetic fields, which were created by the birth of the universe and should have survived to this day. In addition to a number of highly speculative mechanisms, which have been proposed for this so-called magnetogenesis, there is a simple plasma-physical effect: the Harrison effect....

What has been found? That the known masses and sizes of many exoplanets of two to four times the size of Earth can be explained by large amounts of water.Why is it important? Water has been implied previously on individual exoplanets, but this work concludes that water-rich planets are common. This bodes well for planet formation of Earth-like planets with water and the search for life beyond our Solar System....

Researchers have long known that exposure to the neurotoxin methylmercury (MeHg) comes almost exclusively from eating seafood. But the geographic origins of that exposure haven’t been well understood. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have traced the worldwide origins of methylmercury in the U.S. diet and examined changes in those sources in recent decades, as ecosystems and palates evolved. Understanding the sources of methylmercury exposure in the diet is important in developing strategies to reduce mercury emissions....

Physicists on the hunt for a rarely seen magnetic spin texture have discovered another object that bears its hallmarks, hidden in the structure of ultra-thin magnetic films, that they have called an incommensurate spin crystal. University of Warwick physicists set out to find Skyrmions, only to find near-identical object with distinctive qualities that they have named an incommensurate spin crystalScientists looked for the signs of the magnetic spin texture in ultra-thin materials only a few atoms thickPhysicists have great interest in the potential of Skyrmions frequently detected by their ambiguous, bulk electrical measurements....

Researchers at ETH Zurich’s Marsquake Service have been studying data from the NASA InSight mission’s seismometer on one of our neighboring planets. For over three years, the only seismic waves identified on Mars were those that traveled through the planet’s depths from each quake’s focus or hypocenter. However, the scientists had always hoped for an event that would also cause waves to move throughout the planet’s surface. On December 24, 2021, a meteorite impact on Mars produced the kind of surface waves they had been longing for, finally rewarding their wait....

A new comprehensive study of organ impairment in long COVID patients over 12 months shows organ damage persisted in 59% of patients a year after initial symptoms, even in those not severely affected when first diagnosed with the virus. The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, focused on patients reporting extreme breathlessness, cognitive dysfunction, and poor health-related quality of life; 536 long COVID patients were included in the study....

A new study from University of Chicago and University of California, Santa Barbara researchers finds that external attackers can use inexpensive technology to turn these ambient signals into motion detectors, monitoring activity inside a building without being detected themselves. With only a small, commercially available Wi-Fi receiver, an attacker from outside the target site can measure the strength of signals emitted from connected devices and monitor a site remotely for motion, sensing whether a room is occupied....

A step beyond transparent display, soap bubble displays are actually something possible. Ultrasonic vibrations shot through the soap bubble display alter the images’ texture. More than just a two-dimensional display, these kinds of displays could even create a 3D image if stacked properly. The bubble mixture is somewhat more complex than what is used to entertain children, but soap remains the main ingredient. The surface of a soap bubble is a micro membrane, which allows light to pass through it and displays its color on its structure....

Researchers have designed an off-grid, low-cost modular energy source that can efficiently produce power at night. The system uses commercially available technology and could eventually help meet the need for nighttime lighting in urban areas or provide lighting in developing countries. Although solar power brings many benefits, its use depends heavily on the distribution of sunlight, which can be limited in many locations and is completely unavailable at night. Systems that store energy produced during the day are typically expensive, thus driving up the cost of using solar power....

“We used sound signals captured by underground fiber-optic sensors to understand how COVID measures impacted human activities,” said Junzhu Shen, a graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. “These sensors provide very accurate, high-resolution data that can help us understand what’s happening in our communities.” The scientists analyzed sound data recorded from March through June 2020 in and around the Penn State University Park campus and State College, Pennsylvania. They observed a quiet period that coincided with the lockdown followed by a recovery of activity as the area moved from red to less-restrictive yellow and green phases....

SpaceX’s ground-breaking rocket, the Grasshopper, is still in development, but it’s designed to be reusable, meaning that it takes off and lands vertically. The rocket made its first trip in September 2012, after it traveled 2 meters up before landing safely. In November, it went up 32 meters and landed safely. This time, it traveled up 40 meters before landing safely yet again. The Grasshopper RLV consists of a Falcon 9 Stage 1 tank, a Merlin-1D engine, four steel landing legs, and a steel support structure....

The best tool to study massive stars are ‘detailed stellar evolution codes’­: computer programs which can calculate both the interior structure and the evolution of these stars. Unfortunately, detailed codes are computationally expensive and time-consuming—it can take several hours to compute the evolution of just a single star. For this reason, it’s impractical to use these codes for modeling stars in complex systems, such as globular star clusters, which can contain millions of interacting stars....

Nan Liu, research assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is first author of a new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters that analyzes a diverse set of presolar grains with the goal of realizing their true stellar origins. Liu and her team used a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer called NanoSIMS to measure isotopes of a suite of elements including the N and Mg-Al isotopes in presolar silicon carbide (SiC) grains....

This image is a composite of six VLBA images made at observing frequencies ranging from 2.2 GigaHertz (GHz) to 22.2 GHz. The broad lobes on either side of the bright core are the result of jet activity that began roughly 80 years ago. The gap between these lobes and the central region indicates, the scientists said, that the jet activity stopped sometime after that, then resumed about 10 years ago....

New statistical model suggests an infected student returning home for Christmas would, on average, have infected just less than one other household member. A student infected with COVID-19 returning home from university for Christmas would, on average, have infected just less than one other household member with the virus, according to a new model devised by mathematicians at Cardiff University and published in Health Systems. Professor Paul Harper and colleagues defined an equation to predict the number of secondary household infections using variables for prevalence of the virus, the probability of secondary transmission, the number of household occupants and the total number of students returning home....

In a study published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists in the U.S. and Japan report that in the laboratory, cats can readily become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and may be able to pass the virus to other cats. Professor of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine Yoshihiro Kawaoka led the study, in which researchers administered to three cats SARS-CoV-2 isolated from a human patient....

Researchers from the Biocenter of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany have made new discoveries about the control of insulin secretion in their recent study published in Current Biology. The team, led by Dr. Jan Ache, used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. Interestingly, this fly also releases insulin after eating, but unlike humans, the hormone is not produced by pancreas cells, but rather by nerve cells in the brain....

Have you ever wondered why lightning zigzags? Scientists have argued over the reasons why lightning zigzags and how it is related to the thundercloud above for the last 50 years. There hasn’t been a definitive explanation until now, with a University of South Australia (UniSA) plasma physicist publishing a landmark paper that solves both mysteries. Dr. John Lowke, former CSIRO scientist and now a UniSA Adjunct Research Professor, says the physics of lightning has stumped the best scientific minds for decades....