Georgia Tech researchers say they’ve resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The resurrected bacterium has been growing for more than 1,000 generations, providing scientists a chance to observe evolution in action, the university announced. “This is as close as we can get to rewinding and…
A detailed genetic analysis has settled the question of how and when the first Americans arrived in the continent. Scientists have found that Native American populations from Canada to the southern tip of Chile arrived in at least three waves. Most are descended entirely from a single group of migrants that crossed over through Beringia,…
The discovery of another moon around Pluto is exciting news for planetary science, but it’s also likely causing some anxiety for the team in charge of New Horizons, a spacecraft set to be the first probe ever to visit the dwarf planet. Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope announced the detection of P5, a tiny…
The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining as well – 62% of Americans believe corruption…
The equivalent of an MRI of the sun was created by scientists, who studied high-resolution images of the sun’s surface taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory showing motions on the sun’s surface caused by convection. The findings challenge our existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of three odd galaxies that may help scientists solve a 13 billion-year cosmic mystery. The galaxies are so old and faint that astronomers nicknamed them “ghost galaxies” in a description. The objects are among the smallest and faintest galaxies near our own Milky Way galaxy, researchers said. “These…
Prominent scientists are in a bitter struggle over the origins of kindness. But the root of this conflict may be the most ironic part of all.
Scientists say they’ve identified ‘internal compass needles’ in the noses of rainbow trout, helping explain the way many creatures can navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. Neuroscientists recently discovered ‘GPS maps’ in pigeons’ brains, explaining how information on magnetism is encoded in the brain – but until now, nobody’s ever been able to pinpoint the…
Mummies found off the coast of Scotland are Frankenstein-like composites of several corpses, researchers say. This mixing of remains was perhaps designed to combine different ancestries into a single lineage, archaeologists speculated. The bodies were first unearthed in 2001 during excavations beneath the foundations of an approximately 3,000-year-old house on South Uist, an island in…
It is natural for those not deeply involved in the half-century quest for the Higgs Boson – one of the most important missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is nature – to ask why they should care about this seemingly esoteric discovery. There are three reasons. First, it caps one of the most remarkable…