Microscopic analysis of residues on surgical scissors and tweezers from a 1348–1411 CE tomb in Jiangyin, China, finds the first evidence for the controlled application of a highly toxic chemical as anesthetic, highlighting the sophisticated medicine of the Ming dynasty.
The thinking around exoplanet habitability is mostly concerned with a planet's distance from its star. Too close, and any surface water is boiled away into space. Too far, and surface water is frozen. Both are severe limits on the prospects for life. Habitability depends on an exoplanet being in the Goldilocks Zone, a distance range around a star where liquid water can persist.
What if some of the most important clues about marine biodiversity were already collected but never fully shared? That's the question that motivated a study, published in Biodiversity Data Journal. It brought together over 40 years of unpublished data on marine amphipods—ecologically crucial crustaceans—from across Italian waters.
Flashes of femtosecond laser light, lasting just a few trillionths of a second, have made it possible to observe new magnetic structures for the first time. By using light as a remote control, researchers were able to switch magnetism into previously unseen three-dimensional states at the nanoscale.
Transposons, DNA sequences that can self-replicate and move (jump) throughout the genome, are widespread and can affect cell survival if left unchecked. Cells control these "jumping genes" by silencing them, but little was known about how cells recognize and defend themselves from invading transposons.
Increasingly, the world's oceans are telling us our climate system may be changing faster and more dramatically than expected.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) separation is central to technologies ranging from natural gas purification to hydrogen production and carbon management. One widely used approach relies on thin filtering materials called membranes. However, these membranes face a major challenge: materials that allow CO2 to pass through quickly are often less effective at separating it from other gases, while highly selective materials usually slow the flow of CO2. This balancing act is known as the permeability-selectivity trade-off.
A new Physical Review Letters study places constraints on the ER = EPR conjecture, showing that under the authors' assumptions, the conjecture would imply possible alterations to the hyperfine structure and effective charge of the hydrogen atom—effects that have never been observed.
Across Europe, many landscapes show strong potential to move forward climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and biodiversity benefits, with low socioeconomic risk, according to an analysis using a new climate-smart rewilding framework published in One Earth.
Changes in land-use across Southeast Asia over the past 15 years are worsening air quality and contributing to thousands of excess deaths each year, according to a study led by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore).
