On average, the glaciers travel at around one kilometer (0.6 miles) a year. But a new study has found a seasonal variation in the speed of the ice flow, which speeded up by up to 22% in summer when temperatures are warmer. This gives an insight into the way climate change could affect the behavior of glaciers and the role they could play in raising sea levels. Up until now, the study of the rugged Antarctic peninsula has been limited because of the difficulties scientists face getting onto the glaciers to conduct fieldwork....

The distinction between wild and domesticated rice lies in their seed dispersal pattern; wild rice sheds its ripe seeds naturally, causing them to shatter on the ground when mature, whereas cultivated rice retains its seeds on the plant upon maturity. To harvest rice, some sort of tools would have been needed. In harvesting rice with tools, early rice cultivators were selecting the seeds that stay on the plants, so gradually the proportion of seeds that remain increased, resulting in domestication....

Since its launch on February 11, 2010, SDO has collected millions of scientific images of our nearest star, giving scientists new insights into its workings. SDO’s measurements of the Sun — from the interior to the atmosphere, magnetic field, and energy output — have greatly contributed to our understanding of our closest star. SDO’s images have also become iconic — if you’ve ever seen a close-up of activity on the Sun, it was likely from an SDO image....

In August 2019, one century after the biplane flight, Dr. Kieran Baxter and Dr. Alice Watterson from the 3DVisLab at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee, flew over the Mont Blanc massif to repeat three of Mittelholzer’s photographs of the glaciers. By using a process called monoplotting to triangulate the original camera position in airspace, the pair used the peaks and spires of the alpine landscape as anchor points to find the geolocation of where the historical shots were taken....

The first known and named pterosaur was Pterodactylus, which was discovered in the Solnhofen Limestone of Bavaria, Germany. Pterodactylus was named and first described by the Italian naturalist Cosimo Alessandro Collini in 1784. Originally, this fossil was thought to be an aquatic animal, but it was later determined to be a flying reptile belonging to a new and previously unknown group by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. The oldest specimen of this iconic pterosaur was recently found near Painten, a small town in the southern part of the Franconian Alb in central Bavaria....

This short video shows the bulk of the Arctic sea ice freeze cycle from October through this year’s apparent winter maximum on February 25. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Beck The sea ice cap of the Arctic appeared to reach its annual maximum winter extent on February 25, according to data from the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At 5....

Since satellites began measuring it consistently in 1978, summer ice extent in and around the Arctic Ocean has declined significantly. The past 16 years (2007 to 2022) have been the lowest 16 minimum extents, with 2022 tying 2017 and 2018 for the 10th-lowest in 44 years of observations. The satellite record is maintained by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), which hosts one of NASA’s Distributed Active Archive Centers....

The research, published recently in Nature Physics, was jointly led by Professor Michael Tobar, from UWA’s School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing and Chief Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and Dr. Jacob Pate from the University of Merced. Professor Tobar said that the result allowed a new way to manipulate and control macroscopic objects in a non-contacting way, allowing enhanced sensitivity without adding loss....

The battery was developed by Gustav Nyström and colleagues, and it consists of at least one cell that is one centimeter squared and is made up of three inks that have been printed on a rectangular piece of paper. The paper strip is covered with sodium chloride salt, and one of its shorter ends has been dipped in wax. One of the flat sides of the paper is printed with ink containing graphite flakes, which serves as the positive end of the battery (cathode)....

Traditional genomic, proteomic, and other screening methods currently used to characterize drug mechanisms are time-consuming and require special equipment, but now researchers led by chemist Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst offer a multi-channel sensor method using gold nanoparticles that can accurately profile various anti-cancer drugs and their mechanisms in minutes. As Rotello and his doctoral graduate student Le Ngoc, one of the lead authors, explain, to discover a new drug for any disease, researchers must screen billions of compounds, which can take months....

The discovery was made by the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, which operates at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory; two Hawaiʻi telescopes – W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island and University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakala, Maui – helped characterize the dead star, along with the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar, the European Gaia space observatory, and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory....

An organic material that can repeatedly change shape without breaking would have many useful applications, such as artificial muscles, pumps, or switches. Physicists at Radboud University accidentally discovered a material with that property. Their findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications today, October 8, 2019. “I tend to call it the ‘molecular pinball machine,’” says Theo Rasing, professor of Spectroscopy of Solids and Interfaces at Radboud University. Together with colleagues from Nijmegen and China, he demonstrates the shape-changing abilities of the material by having it fling a glass bead at high speed....

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapeutic technique that is already authorized in Germany to treat neurological movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, as well as neuropsychiatric conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder. In DBS, thin electrodes are implanted in the patient’s brain and deliver constant, mild electrical pulses to a specific area. The electrodes remain in the brain permanently and are connected via wires that run under the skin to a pacemaker-like device implanted in the chest area....

An international team led by Dr. Renske Smit from the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to open a new window onto the distant Universe, and have for the first time been able to identify normal star-forming galaxies at a very early stage in cosmic history with this telescope. The results are reported in the journal Nature, and will be presented at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society....

Overview With the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observation, astronomers led by Shigehisa Takakuwa, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA), Taiwan, found spiral arms of molecular gas and dust around the “baby twin” stars, binary protostars. Gas motions to supply materials to the twin were also identified. These observational results unveil, for the first time, the mechanism of the birth and growth of binary stars, which are ubiquitous throughout the universe....

An extinct species now named Electrorana limoae, it’s one of four fossils that provide the earliest direct evidence of frogs living in wet, tropical forests and are the oldest-known examples of frogs preserved in amber. “It’s almost unheard of to get a fossil frog from this time period that is small, has preservation of small bones, and is mostly three-dimensional. This is pretty special,” said David Blackburn, study co-author and the associate curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History....

Geneva 3 April 2013. The international team running the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) today announced the first results in its search for dark matter. The results, presented by AMS spokesperson Professor Samuel Ting in a seminar at CERN, are to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. They report the observation of an excess of positrons in the cosmic ray flux. The AMS results are based on some 25 billion recorded events, including 400,000 positrons with energies between 0....

By genetically analyzing prostate cancer tumors from Australian, Brazilian, and South African donors, the team developed a new prostate cancer taxonomy (classification scheme) and cancer drivers that not only distinguish patients based on their genetic ancestry but also predict which cancers are likely to become life-threatening, a task that is currently difficult. “Our understanding of prostate cancer has been severely limited by a research focus on Western populations,” said senior author Professor Vanessa Hayes, genomicist and Petre Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health in Australia....

Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons....

The new model was developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Recently published in the journal Science Advances, the study was conducted in the laboratory of Andy Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering. Ice shelves are outcroppings of the Antarctic ice sheet, found where the ice juts out from land and floats on top of the ocean. The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels)....