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The spectacular fossil, affectionately nicknamed the ‘Wonderchicken,’ includes a nearly complete skull, hidden inside nondescript pieces of rock, and dates from less than one million years before the asteroid impact which eliminated all large dinosaurs. Writing in the journal Nature, the team, led by the University of Cambridge, believes the new fossil helps clarify why birds survived the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period, while the giant dinosaurs did not....

In order to create a technology that can produce more than 100 microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body, Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team at the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) worked with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich. There are many approaches to building microrobots with the goal of minimally invasive targeted precision treatment....

MIT researchers have an answer: a battery-free underwater communication system that uses near-zero power to transmit sensor data. The system could be used to monitor sea temperatures to study climate change and track marine life over long periods — and even sample waters on distant planets. They are presenting the system at the SIGCOMM conference this week, in a paper that has won the conference’s “best paper” award. The system makes use of two key phenomena....

A new image combining previously released data from three telescopes shows a region that includes the Orion Nebula, named after the mighty hunter from Greek mythology who was felled by a scorpion’s sting. But the story of how this dusty region came to be is just as dramatic. The Orion Nebula is located in the constellation Orion, which takes the appearance of a hunter raising a club and shield at an unseen target....

Colors of the Innermost Planet This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER’s primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury’s surface.

Multiple programs running on the same computer may not be able to directly access each other’s hidden information, but because they share the same memory hardware, their secrets could be stolen by a malicious program through a “memory timing side-channel attack.” This malicious program notices delays when it tries to access a computer’s memory, because the hardware is shared among all programs using the machine. It can then interpret those delays to obtain another program’s secrets, like a password or cryptographic key....

According to the study which analyzed over 200 surveys, 79% of parents reported that their children aged 12 or younger use cosmetic products and body products specifically marketed towards kids, such as glitter, face paint, and lip gloss. Prior research has shown that these products often have toxic chemicals, like lead, asbestos, PFAS, phthalates, and formaldehyde in them. Toxic chemicals found in children’s makeup and body products (CMBP), like heavy metals, are especially harmful to infants and children....

Researchers analyzing meteorite fragments that fell on a frozen lake in Canada have developed an explanation for the origin of life’s handedness – why living things only use molecules with specific orientations. The work also gave the strongest evidence to date that liquid water inside an asteroid leads to a strong preference of left-handed over right-handed forms of some common protein amino acids in meteorites. The result makes the search for extraterrestrial life more challenging....

In a scientific first, chemical analysis of ancient Eskimo hair found in Western Alaska could reveal how people in the region lived through times of climate change over the last 1000 years. It’s hoped the findings by University of Aberdeen archaeologists could provide lessons on how modern societies could cope with climate change now and in the future. A team of experts from the institution – including doctors Rick Knecht, Charlotta Hillerdal, and Kate Britton – returned this week from a three-week dig near the modern Yup’ik Eskimo village of Quinhagak – the first large-scale archaeological investigation into the prehistory of this region, which is three times the size of Scotland....

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified an antibody that is highly protective at low doses against a wide range of viral variants. Moreover, the antibody attaches to a part of the virus that differs little across the variants, meaning that it is unlikely for resistance to arise at this spot. The findings, available online in the journal Immunity, could be a step toward developing new antibody-based therapies that are less likely to lose their potency as the virus mutates....

Previous studies of a genetic on/off switch may have been confounded by contamination, but Mount Sinai scientists have created a new tool for accurately determining whether it plays a role in human disease. A tiny team of cutting-edge medical experts has been examining a biochemical, DNA tagging mechanism that turns genes on and off for decades. Some have recently discovered evidence of it in plants, flies, human brain tumors, and even bacteria, which has long been researched in bacteria....

In 2017, Stanford University researchers presented a new device that mimics the brain’s efficient and low-energy neural learning process. It was an artificial version of a synapse — the gap across which neurotransmitters travel to communicate between neurons — made from organic materials. In 2019, the researchers assembled nine of their artificial synapses together in an array, showing that they could be simultaneously programmed to mimic the parallel operation of the brain....

One-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions stem from the global food system, which encompasses the manufacturing of fertilizer, to food storage and packaging. These figures are from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which is a partnership of 15 research centers from around the world. Two reports were published by the CGIAR, and they state that reducing agriculture’s footprint is central to limiting climate change. To ensure food security, farmers should switch to cultivating more climate-hardy crops....

Unclear if World Anti-Doping Agency ‘approved’ versions have same effect, finds evidence review. A type of asthma drug, known as ß2-agonists, can boost sprint and strength performance in athletes who don’t have the respiratory condition, finds a review and pooled data analysis of the available evidence, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The performance-enhancing qualities of ß2-agonists seem to be greater when taken by mouth rather than when inhaled, the findings indicate....

NASA astrobiologists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a comprehensive new model that shows how planetary chemistry could make that happen. The model, published in a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience, was based on a likely scenario on Earth three billion years ago and was actually built around its possible geological and biological chemistry. The sun produced a quarter less light and heat then, but Earth remained temperate, and methane may have saved our planet from an eon-long deep freeze, scientists hypothesize....

Astronomers at ESO have captured the best image so far of the curious clouds around the star cluster NGC 3572. This new image shows how these clouds of gas and dust have been sculpted into whimsical bubbles, arcs and the odd features known as elephant trunks by the stellar winds flowing from this gathering of hot young stars. The brightest of these cluster stars are much heavier than the Sun and will end their short lives as supernova explosions....

Ever since these objects were discovered at distances corresponding to a time only 750 million years after the Big Bang,[1] astronomers have struggled to understand the emergence of supermassive black holes in the early Universe. Rapidly growing black holes in dusty, early star-forming galaxies are predicted by theories and computer simulations but until now they had not been observed. Now, however, astronomers have reported the discovery of an object — which they named GNz7q — that is believed to be the first such rapidly growing black hole to be found in the early Universe....

Twenty-one light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia, a planet by the name of HD219134 b orbits its star with a year that is just three days long. With a mass almost five times that of Earth, it is what is known as a super-Earth. Unlike our planet, however, it most likely does not have a massive core of iron, but is rich in calcium and aluminum instead. “Perhaps it shimmers red to blue like rubies and sapphires, because these gemstones are aluminum oxides, which are common on the exoplanet,” says Caroline Dorn, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Computational Science of the University of Zurich....

Supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of solar-masses of material are found at the nuclei of most galaxies, including our Milky Way. A torus of dust and gas orbits around the black hole (at least according to most theories) and radiates in ultraviolet light when material falling toward the black hole heats the disk to millions of degrees. The accretion process can also power the ejection of jets of rapidly moving charged particles....

Using observations of galactic cosmic rays — a type of highly energetic particle — from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft scientists calculated the total pressure from particles in the outer region of the solar system, known as the heliosheath. At nearly 9 billion miles (14 billion kilometers) away, this region is hard to study. But the unique positioning of the Voyager spacecraft and the opportune timing of a solar event made measurements of the heliosheath possible....