Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?
A giant string of invisible dark matter has been discovered across the universe between a pair of galaxy clusters. The filament forms a bridge between two huge clusters called Abell 222 and Abell 223, which lie 2.7 billion light-years away. The universe is thought to be filled with such strings of dark matter, a mysterious…
The human population is growing at such a staggering rate that we are organizing ourselves more like ant supercolonies, with new research finding that we have more in common now with some ants than we do with our closest living animal kingdom relatives. The new study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, points out that…
“Why hyperdecant?” Myhrvold asked the audience in a plenary lecture here on Saturday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes ScienceNOW). “To improve the flavor of a young red wine, it’s faster than letting wine breathe unaided,” because the mechanical agitating provides more surface area to aerate the wine more rapidly. “But the real…
A new study suggests that protein knots, a structure whose formation remains a mystery, may have specific functional advantages that depend on the nature of the protein’s architecture. Relatively little is known about protein folding, the process by which a polypeptide chain with a specific sequence of amino acid chains forms the three-dimensional structures —…
In a lab at Harvard Medical School, a man is using his mind to wag a rat’s tail. To send his command, he merely glances at a strobe light flickering on a computer screen, and a set of electrodes stuck to his scalp detects the activity triggered in his brain. A computer processes and relays…
A quail egg is like a protein-filled, free lunch, waiting on the ground to be spotted—and devoured—by a predator. But the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) seems to have mastered an impressive level of camouflage-manipulating behavior to keep her eggs off the menu. Female Japanese quails tend to lay distinctive eggs that are specific to each…