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Scientists at the University of Texas Medical Center accidentally reprogrammed one type of mature neuron into another type of mature neuron, without having to revert the cells to a stem-cell state. Here, green indicates the cells that transformed. (Credit: Lei-Lei Wang/UT Southwestern) Sometimes, the best discoveries are the ones you make by accident. Molecular biologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center can attest to that: The team announced in a new paper in the jo ...read more

An animation of images captured by the GOES-16 weather satellite shows Hurricane Michael making landfall along the Florida Panhandle on Oct. 10, 2018. (Source: Rick Kohrs, University of Wisconsin /SSEC) The utter devastation wrought by Hurricane Michael’s storm surge and 155-mph winds simply boggles the mind. “It appears that the impact of the hurricane was more like a bomb than a hurricane,” National Public Radio’s Tom Gjelton reported today. “Buildings liter ...read more

Astronomers were surprised at how wimpy the explosion was from this dying star. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt) A Strange, Dying Star Astronomers watched the strange death of a massive star that had a surprisingly “wimpy” and fast explosion in a galaxy 920 million light-years away. According to the researchers, this unusual explosion suggests that the dying star had a secret companion that was stripping away the star’s mass, leading to the surprisingly fast supernova. The ...read more

An “anomaly” occurred as the Soyuz spacecraft carrying two astronauts launched toward the International Space Station from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday. The crew had to abort. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls) Launch Failure Two astronauts made an emergency landing this morning in Kazakhstan after a Russian Soyuz rocket failed while launching them to the International Space Station. According to NASA officials, the rocket failed in its asce ...read more

A healthy adult “bimaternal” mouse. (Credit: Leyun Wang) Chinese researchers have created healthy mice from two biological moms for the first time. The pups grew to adulthood and even went on to have normal offspring of their own, scientists announced today in the journal Cell Stem Cell. The researchers also produced mice with two dads, but the pups only survived a few days. Although the reality of biological parenthood for same sex couples in humans is still a ways away, the break ...read more

Paleontologists have discovered clues to the evolution of the biggest animals to ever walk on land by studying one of the tiniest members of the group ever found. (Credit: Andrey Atuchin) (Inside Science) — Sauropods were the largest animals that ever lived on land. These plant-eating dinosaurs could reach 120 feet in length, and yet their heads were small enough that you could hold its skull in your arms. Despite a robust overall fossil record, until now scientists had only about 12 sau ...read more

Clues to the earliest days of mammal evolution may lie in the genome of the Somalian blind cavefish, Phreatichthys andruzzii. (Credit: Luca Scapoli/University of Ferrara) If you’re trying to understand the earliest days of mammal evolution, including how our ancestors lived, the genome of a blind cavefish might not strike you as the most obvious place to hunt for clues. A study out today, however, suggests that’s exactly where you can glimpse our distant — and very dark & ...read more

A new study casts doubt on the long lingering idea that black holes might explain dark matter. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) The hunt for a dark matter explanation seems endless, but now we can mostly rule out one often mentioned potential culprit: black holes. “The idea of primordial black holes as dark matter is quite old, with some papers already in the ’70s when Stephen Hawking and others proposed it,” said lead study author Miguel Zumalacárreg ...read more

(Credit: gerasimov_foto_174/Shutterstock) Climate change may be on everyone’s lips since the recent UN report, but don’t let that fool you. The shifts in climate we’re beginning to see are nothing new, as far as Earth — or our ancestors — are concerned. But while all the talk nowadays focuses on how to change the course of the climate’s evolution, a study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests shifts in ancient we ...read more