Blog

Mouse fathers under psychological stress were more likely to have offspring with high blood sugar compared to their unstressed counterparts. In a study appearing February 18 in Cell Metabolism, researchers link this difference to an epigenetic change in the stressed dad’s sperm—a change that they could prevent by blocking the father’s stress hormones

According to research by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, extraction with deep eutectic solvents (DESs) offer an efficient, sustainable and easy method for dissolving proteins from agrobiomass by-products. DESs are mixtures of solids that form a liquid solution at low temperatures when mixed in suitable ratios.

(Phys.org)—Giant exoplanets, like the so-called ‘hot Jupiters’ that are similar in characteristics to the solar system’s biggest planet and orbit very close to their host stars, are excellent targets for astronomers in their search for extrasolar worlds. The size and proximity of these planets is easy to detect as they create a large decrease in brightness when passing in front of their parent stars.

A new study argues that a purported link between populations of coastal sharks, cownose rays and commercial bivalves along the U.S. East Coast is based on spurious data and reasoning, and calls for fisheries managers and others to reconsider the related campaign in the Chesapeake Bay region to “Save the Bay, Eat a Ray.”

(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers studying fossils unearthed in Ethiopia’s Chorora Formation in the Afar rift has dated some gorilla teeth fossils to approximately 8 million years ago, which the team suggests, shows that the human gorilla split had to have occurred at least 10 million years ago. The team has published a report of its findings and theories in the journal Nature.

Here’s some incentive to cover your mouth the next time you sneeze: New high-speed videos captured by MIT researchers show that as a person sneezes, they launch a sheet of fluid that balloons, then breaks apart in long filaments that destabilize, and finally disperses as a spray of droplets, similar to paint that is flung through the air.

The tropical low pressure area previously known as System 97P has developed into a tropical storm named 11P in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. NASA’s Aqua satellite passed overhead and gathered cloud top temperatures that showed powerful storms within, while NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the storm east of Vanuatu.

Atomic clock experts from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) are the first research group in the world to have built an optical single-ion clock which attains an accuracy which had only been predicted theoretically so far. As early as 1981, Hans Dehmelt, who was to be awarded a Nobel prize later, had already developed the basic notions of how to use an ion kept in a high-frequency trap to build a clock which could attain the—then unbelievably low—relative measure-ment uncertainty in the range of 10-18.

Polymers that visibly change shape when exposed to temperature changes are nothing new. But a research team led by Chemical Engineering Professor Mitch Anthamatten at the University of Rochester created a material that undergoes a shape change that can be triggered by body heat alone, opening the door for new medical and other applications.

A new weakly electric mormyrid fish genus of two new species has been described from only three specimens collected over a period of 13 years in the rivers of the Central African country of Gabon. The genus has been named Cryptomyrus, meaning ‘hidden fish’ in Greek, and is the first new genus to be described within the family Mormyridae since 1977.