For decades, astronomers have thought that planets form out of the rotating disks of debris that encircle most newly formed stars. Within these so-called protoplanetary disks — which can be up to 1,000 astronomical units wide (1 AU is the average Earth-Sun distance of 93 million miles) — particles of gas and dust clump together over time, slowly but surely forming larger bodies that may eventually reach planetary status. However, despite years of searching, ...read more
At some point in the last 4 million or so years, our hominin ancestors climbed down from the trees and got grounded. The transition between arboreal and terrestrial was, like just about everything in evolution, gradual. For decades researchers have debated, often heatedly, which hominin species was the first to be fully bipedal, walking and running rather than climbing.
Today, great answers come in small packages: A rare, mostly-complete juvenile hominin foot reveals new and unprecedented ...read more
The Northern White Rhino is basically extinct — just two living females remain — yet scientists announced Wednesday that they’ve found a way to bring the species back from the brink.
In a paper published July 4 in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers say they’ve created a first-ever hybrid rhino embryo outside the womb.
The scientists extracted a kind of egg cells called oocytes fro ...read more
In recent years, scientists have developed drugs can help shrink cancerous tumors. Several of these target P13K, an enzyme involved in cellular growth that is known to contribute to causing cancers.
But the anti-cancer drugs that target P13K don’t work as well as scientists had hoped. The problem is that the drugs also cause a spike in insulin, which helps tumors grow. The spike could compromise the effectiveness of the cancer therapies.
One solution is to supplement a pati ...read more
Albert Einstein’s been having quite a few weeks! First his “imaginary elevator� thought experiment was confirmed with unprecedented precision, then his theory of relativity was shown to create gravitational lenses as expected even in other galaxies. And today, we learn that a central tenet of relativity still holds even at gravitational extremes. It’s no annus mirabilis, but it ain’t bad.
Todayâ ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine