Sea turtles are famous for being prodigious wanderers. Guided by Earth's magnetic field, ocean currents and the sun, they tend to crisscross the seas in search of food, returning to the region of their birth every few years to breed. So when scientists discovered a population of sea turtles that appear to be very much homebodies, they were taken aback.
Imagine a plume of brown sediment washed off the land into Queensland rivers and carried out to sea. Here, it can settle on seagrass and inshore corals, potentially smothering them. River water often also carries nitrogen from fertilizer residue, which can fuel algal growth and damage coral health.
A research team has uncovered fundamental molecular mechanisms governing the formation of tendons and ligaments, which are essential for musculoskeletal integration. Understanding these mechanisms could pave the way for the regeneration of tendons, ligaments and their attachment sites, known as entheses, which have limited capacity for functional repair after injury because of their poor vascularization.
Doubts about the standard model of cosmology are deepening after a new study identified fundamental problems in a recent analysis that defended the conventional view that the universe is currently undergoing accelerated expansion driven by dark energy.
For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the remarkable coordinated movements of flocking birds, swarming insects and schooling fish. Researchers have studied these natural phenomena to understand the rules of interactions between individuals that can produce complex group-level behavior. A collaboration of physicists and neurobiologists at the University of California San Diego has been studying schools of micro glassfish (Danionella cerebrum) to understand how the interactive mental processes of individual fish produce group-level decisions.
Scientists have been hard at work for more than 20 years to instruct biological systems, such as E. coli cells, to produce proteins they don't naturally produce. Success could mean faster, cheaper, more innovative solutions for medicine, agriculture, materials science, environmental remediation and other industries.
In micro- and nanotechnology, highly precise components with tall, narrow structures (high aspect ratios) made from semiconductor materials like silicon are important. A promising fabrication method is gas-phase metal-assisted chemical etching (MacEtch). In this plasma-free process, a thin metal layer defines the pattern on the silicon substrate. The etching step takes place in a chemical environment, where the reaction occurs only at the interface between the metal and silicon. The metal catalyst gradually sinks into the silicon, directing the etching deeper.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed and demonstrated a step-by-step framework called Socratic Challenger that uses artificial intelligence to help undergraduate students cultivate critical thinking skills. Specifically, the framework uses AI as a collaborator to develop research questions that can be pursued in laboratory or classroom settings.
Bees are the most important pollinators of flowering plants, and approximately 10% of flowering plants are functionally specialized for buzz pollination. Buzz pollination is a mechanism in which pollen can be extracted from flowers only through the application of mechanical vibrations. Many important crops, such as tomatoes, eggplants and blueberries, are buzz-pollinated because they conceal their pollen in so-called poricidal anthers—floral structures with only a minute opening through which pollen can be released only when mechanical vibrations are applied.
Electrically charged raindrops, a naturally occurring phenomenon, can break down surfaces treated with protective coatings, according to new research published in Nature. This previously overlooked corrosion mechanism highlights the need for a new method of preserving metal objects like cars, ships, buildings and cultural heritage sites.
