Posts

The scientists published their findings in the journal BMC Plant Biology. The Austrian research team collected 14 varieties of black dahlias, from Black Barbara, Arabian Night, Karma Choc, and Tisa, as well as five varieties with more subdued colors to analyze their petals. The scientists analyzed the activity of the enzymes that make pigments, investigated gene expression and measured the pigmentation. They conclude that the black color in these black dahlia varieties comes from high levels of anthocyanins....

This new HiRISE image shows a group of dunes on the surface of Mars. The mound in the center of this image appears to have blocked the path of the dunes as they marched south (north is to the left in this image) across the scene. Many of these transverse dunes have slipfaces that face south, although in some cases, it’s hard to tell for certain. Smaller dunes run perpendicular to some of the larger-scale dunes, probably indicating a shift in wind directions in this area....

After learning about this story, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where Moriguchi claimed to have done the work, denied that it had ever happened. There were no clinical trials relating to Moriguchi’s work approved by an institutional review board, either at Harvard or MGH, states David Cameron, spokesman for the Harvard Medical School in Boston. Another public affairs official at MGH states that the work wasn’t done there either....

But inference is not a skill possessed by the lucky few. On the contrary — we all use inference regularly, we just don’t realize it because it comes so naturally to us. It has been crucial for our survival as a species ever since the early days, when we used it to figure out when and where to search for food. For instance, we used indirect evidence, such as faint rustling sounds in the vegetation, or the presence of half-eaten leaves, to infer that a rabbit must be near....

At Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, Akram Bakkour, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research scientist in the Shohamy lab, investigates the ways in which our brain incorporates our memories and past experiences into the everyday decision-making process. He and his Zuckerman Institute collaborators, including Principal Investigators Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D., and Michael Shadlen, MD, Ph.D., recently found that the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, plays a central role in this deliberation process. These findings were published in the journal eLife....

New theoretical modeling by Carnegie’s Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by The Astrophysical Journal. New stars are surrounded by rotating gas disks during the early stages of their lives. Gas giant planets are thought to form in the presence of these disks. Observations of young stars that still have these gas disks demonstrate that sun-like stars undergo periodic outbursts, lasting about 100 years, which transfer mass from the disk onto the young star, increasing its luminosity....

“Looking around, the animals and plants that surround us are remarkably complex, but putting a number to that phenomenon is very tricky. With this study, we wanted to take a complex system—the mammal vertebral column—and measure how its complexity changed through time. We show that increases in complexity were discrete steps like rungs on a ladder instead of a smooth increase like a ramp. Adaptations for high activity levels in mammals seem to trigger these jumps in complexity, and they continue to influence its evolution today,” says Katrina Jones, the paper’s first author and a paleontologist from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology....

The study, published in Science, compared 187 samples of waterhemp from contemporary farms and adjacent wetlands to over 100 historical samples dating back to 1820 that were stored in museums across North America. By analyzing the genetic makeup of the plant over the last two centuries, the researchers were able to observe evolution in action in different environments, much like how studying ancient human and neanderthal remains can reveal key insights into human history....

Online discourse by users of social media can provide important clues about the political dispositions of communities. New research suggests it can even be used by governments as a source of military intelligence to estimate prospective casualties and costs incurred from occupying foreign territories. In a new University of California San Diego study, researchers examine data from Twitter during the 2014 conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian television narrative, which is that a fascist coup had taken place, did not “catch on” in Ukrainian Russian-speaking communities....

New research from Yale University shows how the immune system combats superinfections, revealing a biological basis for new vaccines against sexually transmitted diseases and possibly HIV. The immune system is great at making sure infections such as the herpes virus do not repeatedly infect a person, a condition known as a superinfection. Yet how the immune system combats superinfection is not well understood. In the August 28 issue of the journal Science Express, Yale University researchers help explain the mystery....

Although both Herbig–Haro objects are visible in this image, the young star system responsible for their creation is lurking out of sight. It is swaddled in the thick clouds of dust at the center of this image. However, an outflow of gas from one of these stars can be seen streaming out from the central dark cloud as a bright jet. Meanwhile, the bright star between that jet and the HH 1 cloud was once thought to be the source of these jets, but it is now known to be an unrelated double star that formed nearby....

Astronomers have puzzled over why some puny, extremely faint dwarf galaxies spotted in our Milky Way galaxy’s backyard contain so few stars. These ghost-like galaxies are thought to be some of the tiniest, oldest, and most pristine galaxies in the universe. They have been discovered over the past decade by astronomers using automated computer techniques to search through the images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But astronomers needed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to help solve the mystery of these star-starved galaxies....

These exploding stars glow so incredibly brightly when they first form that they can be spotted from afar using telescopes such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The subject of this image, a spiral galaxy named NGC 4051 — about 45 million light-years from Earth — has hosted multiple supernovae in past years. The first was spotted in 1983 (SN 1983I), the second in 2003 (SN 2003ie), and the most recent in 2010 (SN 2010br)....

In November 2008, 14-year-old Caroline Moore from New York discovered a supernova in UGC 12682. This made her the youngest person at the time to have discovered a supernova. Follow-up observations by professional astronomers of the so-called SN 2008ha showed that it was peculiarly interesting in many different ways: its host galaxy UGC 12862 rarely produces supernovae. It is one of the faintest supernovae ever observed and after the explosion it expanded very slowly, suggesting that the explosion did not release copious amounts of energy as usually expected....

Hubble imaging and spectroscopy of the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 clearly show a gas outflow stretching from the black hole to a bright star birth region like an umbilical cord, triggering the already dense cloud into forming clusters of stars. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris In the most recent study from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, black holes play a less villainous role than they often do as destructive monsters that imprison light....

Shown here, NGC 7773 is a beautiful example of a barred spiral galaxy. A luminous bar-shaped structure cuts prominently through the galaxy’s bright core, extending to the inner boundary of NGC 7773’s sweeping, pinwheel-like spiral arms. Astronomers think that these bar structures emerge later in the lifetime of a galaxy, as star-forming material makes its way towards the galactic center — younger spirals do not feature barred structures as often as older spirals do, suggesting that bars are a sign of galactic maturity....

However, because the inner Milky Way is such a crowded environment, it has always been a challenge to disentangle stellar motions to probe the bulge in detail. Now, a new analysis of about 10,000 normal Sun-like stars in the bulge reveals that our galaxy’s hub is a dynamic environment of stars of various ages zipping around at different speeds, like travelers bustling about a busy airport. This conclusion is based on nine years worth of archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope....

The international team, led by Patrick Kelly (University of Minnesota, USA), Jose Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), and Steven Rodney (University of South Carolina, USA), discovered the distant star in the galaxy cluster MACS J1149-2223 in April 2016. The observations with Hubble were actually performed in order to detect and follow the latest appearance of the gravitationally lensed supernova explosion nicknamed “Refsdal”, when an unexpected point source brightened in the same galaxy that hosted the supernova....

This Hubble image of the week shows the Vermin Galaxy as it began its transit behind star HD 107146. The galaxy will not be fully obscured until around 2020. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for its jaw-dropping snapshots of the cosmos. At first glance this Picture of the Week appears to be quite the opposite, showing just a blur of jagged spikes, speckled noise, and weird, clashing colors — but once you know what you are looking at, images like this one are no less breathtaking....

In terms of intergalactic real estate, our solar system has a plum location as part of a big, spiral galaxy, the Milky Way. Numerous, less glamorous dwarf galaxies keep the Milky Way company. Many galaxies, however, are comparatively isolated, without close neighbors. One such example is the small galaxy known as DDO 190, snapped here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (“DDO” stands for the David Dunlap Observatory, now managed by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, where the catalog was created)....