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Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, during the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old, our understanding of the planet's environment during that time is limited. However, samples from the moon and its cratered surface hint at the period's rate of cosmic impacts.

Similar to the way DNA damage can contribute to human diseases such as cancer, it can also disrupt growth, development and survival in plants. Every day, plants endure environmental stresses such as sunlight, radiation, drought and soil stress—all of which can damage their DNA. However, they cannot move away from danger. How do plants handle all that damage?

SpaceX is preparing for a stock market debut that could transform the company, the wider market and Elon Musk's fortune.

Almost a quarter of all freshwater species are threatened with extinction. The removal of human-made barriers from rivers, such as dams and weirs, is a popular way to restore water flow and sediment transport to its natural state and allow fish and other aquatic wildlife to move more freely.

Thanks to effective therapies, more and more people are now able to live with or after cancer in the long term. Consequently, the number of patients affected by the long-term effects of their treatment is also increasing. Secondary leukemias are particularly serious. These can develop when cellular stress caused by chemotherapy or radiotherapy triggers DNA breaks in specific regions of the genome. If these breaks are incorrectly repaired by the body's own repair mechanisms, detrimental rearrangements can occur that promote the development of leukemia.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have developed a practical, comprehensive noise-modeling framework for a popular class of superconducting quantum processors. Their work, published in the journal PRX Quantum, offers a sevenfold improvement in predictive accuracy over existing approaches.

For over a century, doctors have used electrocardiograms (EKGs) to render the invisible electrical activity of the human heart visible, using the pulse to diagnose disease before it becomes fatal. Now, scientists have invented a way to do the exact same thing for the places where most of humanity lives: cities.

A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem challenges a long-held assumption in climate science by showing that aerosols—tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere—can either warm or cool the climate, depending on the time scale considered.

Plants are undeniably one of nature's most promising sources of new medicines, with monoterpenoid indole alkaloids (MIAs) being a great example. Some intricate compounds are built from multiple-linked chemical units that form highly complex three-dimensional structures. Because of their size and shape, scientists believe such oligomeric MIAs may be able to interfere with specific protein–protein interactions inside cells—a biological target that conventional small-molecule drugs often struggle to reach.

The space industry is surging. In coming years, nearly 10,000 spacecraft are slated to launch into low-Earth orbit for a variety of purposes, such as global surveillance, space tourism, and satellite "megaconstellations" providing internet service.

Rice is a staple food for nearly half the global population and an important dietary source of magnesium, a mineral essential for human health, plant growth and energy metabolism. Although magnesium is known to influence grain quality and taste, the biological mechanism controlling how the mineral reaches rice grains has remained largely unknown.

A collaboration of scientists from NASA and Brazilian research institutions has produced a detailed picture of groundwater change across Brazil. The images reveal significant declines in some of the aquifers that are critical to one of the world's largest agricultural producers.

Are two sets of data genuinely different, or is it because of randomness? This question, known as the two-sample testing problem, becomes notoriously difficult in modern datasets, because they are often high-dimensional, complex, and differences between them can take countless subtle forms.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and GlitterinTech, a startup founded by the same research group, have unveiled a fundamentally new type of optical spectrometer that delivers laboratory-grade precision in a device small enough to be embedded in portable and wearable technologies. By rethinking how spectra are measured and processed, the team has demonstrated a spectrometer costing only around $10, operating at a centimeter scale, and capable of applications ranging from industrial quality control to real-time health care monitoring.

An international team led by the Max Born Institute has developed a new type of momentum microscopy to image magnons—the quanta of collectively excited spins—directly in two-dimensional reciprocal space using soft X-rays. Owing to its remarkable sensitivity, simplicity, and access to nanometer-scale wavelengths, this novel technique establishes a powerful and versatile platform for exploring nonlinear magnon interactions, which are promising for future computing schemes.

A publication has revealed the first photographic evidence and confirmed sighting of the Cozumel dwarf fox in more than 20 years. Published in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation by researchers Travis D. Bayer, Maggie A. McGreal and A. Rafael Chacón D., the short communication details the rescue of an adult male Cozumel dwarf fox on the morning of Sept. 14, 2023.

Researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Centre for Advanced Semiconductors and Integrated Circuits (CASIC) have achieved a major breakthrough in cryogenic electronics. The team has developed a programmable neuromorphic hardware platform that operates near absolute zero, providing a potential solution for scaling up quantum computers and enabling deep-space exploration. The discovery was published in Nature Communications in an article titled "Cryogenic neuromorphic circuits using gate-controlled negative differential resistance in silicon carbide."

Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) have demonstrated that larvae of the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella, are suitable as an alternative infection model for investigating the pathogenicity of bacteria on a larger scale. This could significantly reduce testing on mammals in the future. The results of the study were published in The Lancet Microbe.

The Russian military is using the 'ancient' "Dazzle" camouflage techniques to make its trucks and armored vehicles harder to hit by Ukraine's deadly AI-controlled drones.The post Russia Uses WWI-Era Zebra Camouflage to Protect Its Vehicles from AI-Powered Kamikaze Drones first appeared on Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities.

What do iron, lead and nickel have in common? These heavy metals are an indispensable part of many industries. However, they also share a dark reality: They are serious environmental and public health threats. Every day, they find their way into the atmosphere and water bodies through industrial activities, mining and urban waste. Heavy metals are highly toxic, do not break down naturally and tend to build up in the tissues of living organisms over time.

A new study finds that ancient hominins nearly 800,000 years ago deliberately selected specific basalt sources for different stages of tool production rather than simply using whatever stone was available nearby. By tracing the geochemical "fingerprints" of stone tools to both exposed and now-buried basalt flows, the researchers demonstrated that these hominins possessed detailed environmental knowledge, advanced planning abilities, and long-term technological traditions that were maintained and repeated across generations.

Astronauts on long space missions may one day use plants to produce fresh stocks of medicines on demand, thanks to new research by engineers at the University of California San Diego. The team developed a simple method to grow and repeatedly harvest pharmaceuticals from plants under space-like conditions, without destroying the plants or generating large amounts of waste.

The fixed idea that DNA is only a molecule that stores genetic information is being challenged. KAIST researchers have developed a technology that controls the chemical environment around catalysts at the nanometer scale by designing DNA sequences—the arrangement of A, T, G and C that make up genetic information. The team has presented a new catalyst platform that can improve hydrogen production efficiency and increase the yield of desired chemical products by designing DNA much like writing a computer program.

A three-year study has cracked open the hidden biology behind coral reproduction, revealing hormone cycles that echo those of humans and other animals, and a new way to detect reef distress before it's too late.