source: Phys.org Future historians might look back on this time and call it the “exoplanet age.” We’ve found over 5,000 exoplanets, and we’ll keep finding more. Next, we’ll move beyond just finding them, and we’ll turn our efforts to finding biosignatures, the special chemical fingerprints that living processes imprint on exoplanet atmospheres. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org A new publication aims to challenge the accepted narrative that modern global history began when the “old world” encountered the “new”; when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org In the coming years, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will send two robotic missions to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. These are none other than NASA’s Europa Clipper and the ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which will launch in 2024, and 2023 (respectively). Once they arrive by the 2030s, they will study Europa’s surface with a series of flybys to determine if its interior ocean could support life.

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source: Phys.org Reliable colorimetric analysis technologies have been widely praised for their highly sensitive and selective responses towards various contaminants in environmental monitoring. In principle, the chromogenic agent selectively reacts with the target in water samples, and the colored product reflects the specific absorbance spectrum. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org With only a small percentage of plastics recycled, determining the best way to recycle and reuse these materials may enable higher adoption of plastics recycling and reduce plastic waste pollution. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) examined the benefits and trade-offs of current and emerging technologies for recycling certain types of plastics to determine the most appropriate options. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Bees may be at risk from exposure to glyphosate—an active ingredient in some of the EU’s most commonly used weedkillers—via contaminated wildflower nectar, according to new research from Trinity and DCU scientists. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in part for what can be a quite difficult problem: precisely altering one aspect of biomolecules without affecting the rest of the cell. Now, in a study recently published in Organic Letters, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and coworkers have concisely synthesized a class of molecules that will greatly facilitate such work. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org An internal circadian clock controls the distinctive concentric rings of flowering in sunflowers, maximizing visits from pollinators, shows a new study from plant biologists at the University of California, Davis. The work is published Jan. 13 in eLife. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Spring is the sweet spot for breeding songbirds in California’s Central Valley—not too hot, not too wet. But climate change models indicate the region will experience more rainfall during the breeding season, and days of extreme heat are expected to increase. Both changes threaten the reproductive success of songbirds, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org New findings from the University of Houston may reverse some of the prevailing wisdom about the scourge of screen time and digital devices in the hands of young children. The research is the first to focus on a child under three and reveals that while digital technology may bore, distract and confuse them, those are the same emotions that promote creativity and learning. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Tick, tick, tick. An update is coming to the “Doomsday Clock,” representing the judgment of leading science and security experts about the perils to human existence. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org The share of e-commerce retail sales in the United States has grown steadily over the last decade. This trend has been driven by retailers with traditional brick-and-mortar stores adopting online channels to connect to customers. In a new study, researchers explored the world of omnichannel retailing—the merging of in-store and online channels in which customers can select from a combination of online and physical channels to place and receive orders.

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source: Phys.org In the blazing upper atmosphere of the Sun, a team of scientists have found new clues that could help predict when and where the Sun’s next flare might explode. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Firefighting may look vastly different in the future thanks to intelligent fire suits and masks developed by multiple research institutions in China. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org If you think of flying dinosaurs, you probably picture an animal with long, leathery wings, sharp claws and a big beak. The animal you are imagining is not a dinosaur, it’s from a group of flying reptiles called the pterosaurs. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org The otherwise unremarkable double asteroid of Didymos and Dimorphos made headlines as the target of NASA’s successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission. With new details about the system emerging, astronomers have put together a hypothesis of how this strange double asteroid came to be. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org The finless porpoise, a relative of dolphins and whales, is native to the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as the freshwater habitats of the Yangtze River basin in China. The Yangtze river’s finless porpoise is one of the very few porpoises that live in fresh water. Its small size and cute ‘smile’ make it much loved in the country and beyond. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org As buzz grows ever louder over the future of quantum, researchers everywhere are working overtime to discover how best to unlock the promise of super-positioned, entangled, tunneling or otherwise ready-for-primetime quantum particles, the ability of which to occur in two states at once could vastly expand power and efficiency in many applications. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org The world’s population may have shot up beyond eight billion for the first time recently, but some countries including the most populous, China, are seeing their populations shrink. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Exposure to high doses of micro-sized polyethylene has adverse effects on cells, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland finds. The researchers investigated the toxicity of micro-sized polyethylene in two different human colorectal cancer cell lines. Being one of our most common plastics, polyethylene is used for a variety of purposes, for example as packaging material. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org A new study led by Western biological anthropology professor Jay Stock, suggests that milk consumption in some regions between 7,000 and 2,000 years ago led to an increase in human body mass and stature. This ran counter to trends in body size experienced elsewhere in the world. This size increase is found in regions where there was evolution for higher frequencies of genes that allow humans to produce enzymes to digest milk into adulthood—called lactase persistence.

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source: Phys.org Many genetic diseases are caused by diverse mutations spread across an entire gene, and designing genome editing approaches for each patient’s mutation would be impractical and costly. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org Sometimes there is a confluence of events in municipal politics that takes a serious problem, a collection of outsized personalities and potty humour and sloshes them around to create headline gold. Such was the Big Flush, an arguably overreported but undeniably rich media bonanza in 2015. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org In a desperate effort to save a seabird species in Hawaii from rising ocean waters, scientists are moving chicks to a new island hundreds of miles away. Read Full Article Here

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source: Phys.org There are many ways to initiate chemical reactions in liquids, but placing free electrons directly into water, ammonia and other liquid solutions is especially attractive for green chemistry because solvated electrons are inherently clean, leaving behind no side products after they react. Read Full Article Here

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