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A January 30, 2019, image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter orbiting the Moon shows Chang’e 4 lander; arrows indicate position of the lander on the floor of Von Karman crater; the sharp crater behind and to the left of the landing site is 12,800 feet (3,900 m) across and 1,970 feet (600 m) deep. Image credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University.

NASA Orbiter Spies China’s Chang’e-4 Lander

Feb 7, 2019 by News Staff

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently caught a view of China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-4 lander on the lunar surface. A...

Howard et al show that honeybees can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction. In a free-flying environment, individual bees used this information to solve unfamiliar problems involving adding or subtracting one element from a group of elements. Image credit: Ralph.

Study: Honeybees Can Do Basic Arithmetic

Feb 7, 2019 by News Staff

A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that honeybees (Apis mellifera), with a miniature brain, can be taught to recognize colors...

The HII region LHA 120-N 180B resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At only around 160,000 light-years away from the Earth, it is practically on our doorstep. Image credit: ESO / A. McLeod et al.

Astronomers Catch Jet from Fledgling Star in Large Magellanic Cloud

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

Deep within LHA 120-N 180B, an HII region located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very...

An artist’s impression of the protoplanetary disk around the young star V883 Orionis. Image credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

ALMA Detects Complex Organic Molecules around V883 Orionis

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

V883 Orionis is a young star located approximately 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion. This star is experiencing a so-called FU Orionis...

Namibia’s drumlins were formed by fast-moving ice floes instead of slow melting ice. Image credit: West Virginia University.

Geologists Find Evidence of Paleozoic Ice Age in Southern Africa

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

While exploring Namibia, the desert country in southern Africa, a team of geologists from West Virginia University stumbled upon a peculiar land formation...

The receptors required for the gustatory responses to sour compounds have been elusive. Rimal et al discover a Drosophila taste receptor, IR7a, which is required for rejecting a sour chemical. Surprisingly, IR7a is narrowly tuned to acetic acid, suggesting that carboxylic acids are detected by a repertoire of receptors. Image credit: Rimal et al, doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.01.042.

Scientists Identify Sour Taste Receptor in Fruit Flies

Feb 6, 2019 by News Staff

Sour taste allows for the detection of hydrogen ions and organic acids. It is one of the five basic tastes and, along with other chemical and textural...

In conventional electronic devices, electricity requires the movement of electrons (blue spheres) and their positive counterparts, called holes (red spheres), which behave much like the gas molecules in our atmosphere. Although they move rapidly and collide infrequently in the gas phase, electrons and holes can condense into liquid droplets akin to liquid water in devices composed of ultrathin materials. Image credit: QMO Lab, University of California, Riverside.

‘Electron Liquid’ Created at Room Temperature

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists at the University of California, Riverside, has produced the first ‘electron-hole liquid’ at room temperature. In conventional...

This image was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it performed its most recent close flyby of Jupiter on December 21, 2018. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstaedt / Sean Doran.

NASA Video Shows Massive Storm in Jupiter’s Southern Hemisphere

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

A giant Jovian storm called Oval BA is captured in an amazing new video from NASA’s Juno mission. Oval BA and the famed Great Red Spot. Image credit:...

From a great distance, our Milky Way Galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbits once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together. But this pull of gravity is much weaker in the Galaxy’s far outer disk. There, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, instead they give the disk an S-like, or warped, appearance. Image credit: Xiaodian Chen.

New 3D Map of Milky Way Reveals True Shape of Its Stellar Disk

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has used 1,339 classical Cepheid stars — pulsating variable stars each up to 100,000 brighter than our Sun —...

Forster et al created the most comprehensive collection of human intestinal bacteria to date.

Researchers Discover 105 New Species of Human Gastrointestinal Bacteria

Feb 5, 2019 by News Staff

A team of microbiologists has isolated 105 completely new species of bacteria from healthy people’s intestines. Forster et al created the most comprehensive...

Ten mammalian and five bird species were documented scavenging fish carcasses in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone including Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra). Image credit: Schlichting et al, doi: 10.1016/j.fooweb.2018.e00107.

Wildlife is Abundant in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Confirms New Study

Feb 4, 2019 by News Staff

A new study published in the journal Food Webs provides additional evidence that wildlife is abundant in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a large area of...

Airplanes wring extra snow and rain out of clouds. Image credit: Michael Bryant-Mode.

Study: Airplanes Flying Over Rain, Snow Can Intensify Precipitation by 10-Fold

Feb 4, 2019 by News Staff

By analyzing several years of weather radar observations in Finland, a research team led by University of Helsinki scientists has discovered that planes...

This Hubble image shows Messier 85. The image includes infrared, visible and ultraviolet observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Four filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. O’Connell.

Hubble Space Telescope Spies Messier 85

Feb 4, 2019 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing new photo of a lenticular — or elliptical — galaxy called Messier 85. This Hubble...

Statins produce significant reductions in major vascular events, but there is less direct evidence of benefit among patients older than 75 years who do not already have evidence of occlusive vascular disease. Image credit: Heung Soon.

Statins Reduce Major Vascular Events, New Meta-Analysis Study Confirms

Feb 4, 2019 by News Staff

Statin therapy produces significant reductions in major vascular events irrespective of age, including in people older than 75 years, according to a new...

The globular cluster Camargo 1107. Image credit: D. Camargo & D. Minniti, doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slz010.

Astronomers Discover Three New Globular Clusters in Milky Way

Feb 4, 2019 by Sergio Prostak

A duo of astronomers has spotted three new globular clusters in the Milky Way’s bulge, a 10,000-light-year-wide central structure made primarily of old...

In this illustration, MAXI J1820+070 pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk; above the disk is a region of subatomic particles called the corona. Image credit: Aurore Simonnet / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NICER Observes ‘X-Ray Echoes’ of Nearby Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Astrophysicists using NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) have detected X-rays from a stellar-mass black hole called MAXI J1820+070...

Han et al compare stable isotope ratios from the bones and teeth of extant and extinct pandas and show that their trophic niches are distinctly different, although both species had a C3-dominated diet over time and space. The results indicate that ancient pandas possibly had more complex diets and habitats than do their modern counterparts. This image shows a male giant panda named Xiao Liwu at San Diego Zoo. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Ancient Giant Pandas Had More Complex Diet than Do Their Modern Counterparts: Study

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Today, giant pandas are represented by one iconic species, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, and they live only in the understory of particular mountains in southwestern...

A selfie taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 2291 (January 15, 2019) at the ‘Rock Hall’ drill site, located on Vera Rubin Ridge. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

Curiosity Makes First Surface Gravity Measurements on Mars

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Gravimetry — the measurement of tiny changes in gravitational fields — can be used to probe the internal structure of Earth and other planets....

Along the banks of a river, three archosaur inhabitants of the dense Voltzia conifer forest cross paths: Antarctanax shackletoni sneaks up on an early titanopetran insect, Prolacerta broomi lazes on a log, and an enigmatic large archosaur pursues two unsuspecting dicynodonts, Lystrosaurus maccaigi. Image credit: Adrienne StrouAntarctanax shackletoni. Image credit: Adrienne Stroup, Field Museum.p, Field Museum.

Iguana-Sized Reptile Roamed Antarctica 250 Million Years Ago

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Some 250 million years ago (early Triassic epoch), an early relative of dinosaurs and crocodiles lived in what is now a frozen continent, Antarctica, according...