| At the edge of life and death is a spreading dark wave.Scientists spotted it first in rabbits. In a series of papers published throughout the 1940s, Harvard biologist Aristides Leo described finding a sudden silencing of electrical activity in the exposed brains of his unconscious experimental animals after subjecting them to injuries applying electrical shocks, poking them with glass rods or cutting off the blood in their arteries. | | Two newly discovered species of giant virus both have the largest assembly of protein-coding genes ever found in the virus realm.And the viruses themselves aren't exactly tiny. A paper in the journal Nature Communications describes them as optically visible a highly unusual characteristic.The two new species, note a team of scientists led by Bernard La Scola from Aix-Marseille University, have a protein shell, known as a capsid, around 450 nanometres long and a cylindrical tail roughly the same length. The tail is the largest ever discovered. | | A team of astronomers from the Space Telescope Institute and John Hopkins University led by Nobel laureate Adam Reiss has confirmed data that the universe is expanding significantly faster than previously thought.As detailed in a forthcoming paper for The Astrophysical Journal, Reiss and his colleagues used four years' worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine that the universe is expanding about 9 percent faster than other leading measurements predicteda wild mismatch in a field as precise as cosmology. | | Rockets have been the way to get satellites into orbit since the dawn of the space age. But Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen hopes to shake that up with help from the world's biggest airplane.Stratolaunch is a 500,000-pound beast with twin fuselages and a wingspan of 385 feet. Allen's Seattle-based company is developing it as a platform for lifting rockets into the stratosphere before launching them into space. | | When Frank Drake was a boy, growing up in 1930s Chicago, his parents, observant Baptists, enrolled him in Sunday School. By the time he was 8 years old, he suspected his religion, and others around the world, were, to some extent, environmentally determinedlocal chance events helped shape them. He began to think the same might be true of civilization, for humans and, perhaps, aliens as wellbut he thought it better to keep these thoughts to himself. | | In the microscopic world of the quantum particle, there are certain rules that are wholly unfamiliar to us on a macroscopic scale. If you measure a particle's position and ask "where are you," the more accurately you learn the answer, you'll fundamentally know its motion, or its momentum, less well. | | Researchers from Iowa State University are claiming that US versions of popular Russian-funded news media are littered with articles and links casting genetically modified organisms in a negative light. It's an effort, say the researchers, to discredit American agricultural practices and to portray Russian crops as an ecologically cleaner alternative to GMOs. | | Scientists and science fiction writers alike have long wondered about what forms alien life might take on other worlds. Now researchers have strengthened the case that, at least on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, some alien life might closely resemble a specific type of microbe found deep in our own planet's seas. | | After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway's memory for a hundred years.These commandos did know, however, that an earlier attempt at the same mission by British soldiers had been a complete failure. | Yuen Yiu, Physics Central Can temperature drop below absolute zero? What happens then? Does it pop out at the other end of the thermometer like Pac-Man and become infinitely hot? Well, kind of, and the seemingly wacky concept is actually surprisingly common in physics.A recent paper published in Physical Review Letters describes a system where negative temperature is used to explain a weird but real phenomenon in our physical world. | | In 1887, physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley performed one of physics' most famous experiments (at Case Western Reserve University, coincidentally, across the street from where this article was written). Unlike other important experiments, they didn't find what they were looking for, but unexpectedly their null result prepared the way for the theory of relativity. | | Three thousand years ago, dense old-growth rainforests covered most of central Africa. But around 2,600 years ago, an event that ecologists call the Late Holocene Rainforest Crisis occurred, and the forests suddenly gave way to savannas dotted with islands of trees. Six hundred years later, the forests grew back almost as swiftly as they had vanished.But for the last 20 years, paleoecologists have debated what caused the Rainforest Crisis. Most thought that the region's climate changed, bringing either less annual rain or a longer dry season with a short but intense monsoon. | | Last week laser scanning revealed the true scale of the ancient city of Angamuco in western Mexico. The city, built around AD900, is thought to have had 100,000 residents and included pyramids, road systems, vegetable gardens and ball courts. It was a major centre for the Purpecha people, rivals to the Aztecs. | | During the Arctic winter, when the sun hides from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around a bone-chilling minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). But this year, the Arctic is experiencing a highly unusual heat wave. | | Speaking to an audience of active-duty airmen, US Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein predicted it'll only be a matter of years before American forces find themselves fighting from space. To prepare for this grim possibility, he said the Air Force needs new tools and a new approach to training leaders. Oh, and lots of money. | | The shift to a cooked-food diet was a decisive point in human history. The main topic of debate is when, exactly, this change occurred.All known human societies eat cooked foods, and biologists generally agree cooking could have had major effects on how the human body evolved. For example, cooked foods tend to be softer than raw ones, so humans can eat them with smaller teeth and weaker jaws. | | |
