Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor to break down hard-to-recycle forms of plastic waste – such as drinks bottles, nylon textiles and polyurethane foams – using acid recovered from old car batteries. The process then converts the waste into clean hydrogen fuel and … | Continue reading
For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble—called an astrosphere—completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star’s surface are blowin … | Continue reading
The butternut tree, (Juglans cinerea) a close relative of black walnut prized for its pale wood and wildlife value, is on the brink of disappearing from North American forests. But a new study from Virginia Tech offers hope that the species could regain its foothold with help fro … | Continue reading
A research team at Johns Hopkins Medicine is developing a nose-delivered inoculation against tuberculosis, the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease. The approach fuses two tuberculosis genes with the goal of directing the immune system to fight drug-tolerant bac … | Continue reading
A nano-scale pinch of gold dust may be enough to transform a previously-ineffective battery technology into a new industry standard. As the demand for more reliable power systems grows in the renewable energy sector, the race is on to develop batteries that cost less but have a l … | Continue reading
A University of Michigan researcher stumbled upon a crucial caveat for every study of microplastics that has been scaring us for years now. Lab gloves may have skewed the data in the research. She discovered that residue from latex or nitrile gloves may be unintentionally contami … | Continue reading
Storms, ribbons, and its iconic rings in screaming electric blue, Saturn appears like you’ve never seen it before in a new set of images released by our flagship space telescopes James Webb and Hubble. Whether you want to call it peeling an onion or cutting through a 7 layer cake … | Continue reading
A huge scientific survey of over 1 million German solar installations has revealed a surprising statistic: their potential to degrade year by year has been significantly exaggerated. Previous models have overestimated the rate of degradation in a solar installation’s ability to g … | Continue reading
Australian researchers have developed and tested the world’s first quantum battery. Their prototype is far from anything that will be a perspective power source in an EV or storage facility, but the experiment revealed some important directions for future research. A theoretical … | Continue reading
After documenting the consumption of tea and coffee by healthcare professionals for a staggering 43 years, the resulting data seems to support what many other studies have found: that coffee is associated with better neurological health. The strongest effects were seen in partici … | Continue reading
New AI glasses for people with dementia are able to project visual prompts onto the lenses to help folks live more independently—and they could be available in the UK in 2027. The latest news comes after the glasses wowed both test patients in their homes and a panel of outside j … | Continue reading
A special gene that helps animals like the yak survive at high altitude could enable new treatments for multiple sclerosis after positive findings from a mouse model. The genetic mutation that enables yaks to live in environments with much less oxygen, and may hold the key to rep … | Continue reading
A drug to treat Parkinson’s disease can be made from waste plastic bottles using a pioneering method, a new study shows. The approach harnesses the power of bacteria to transform post-consumer plastic into L-DOPA, a frontline medication for the neurological disorder. It’s the fir … | Continue reading
Light which emanated from a spiral galaxy at the same time the Tyrannosaurus rex was dying out on Earth was captured in striking detail by the James Webb Space Telescope. Two instruments aboard the Webb observatory have combined to create a jaw-dropping image revealing the struct … | Continue reading
Scientists have found that chimpanzees are attracted to crystals, seem to value them, want to keep them where they sleep, and can easily distinguish any stone that shines or glitters from others that don’t. The researchers were hoping to understand whether our own species’ long d … | Continue reading
The risk of potentially deadly heart disease can be detected from routine mammograms using AI technology, a new study demonstrated. By analyzing the build-up of calcium deposits in the arteries of the breast from standard X-ray mammography scans currently used in breast cancer sc … | Continue reading
A University of Houston scientist is helping reveal the world’s weakest bridges—and how to fix them before it’s too late. In a study of 744 bridges across the globe, an international team found that by combining radar and satellite imaging into risk calculations, engineers can id … | Continue reading
The butterfly-mad British are celebrating what seems to be a permanent return of this large and spectacular species after Dutch elm disease killed it off from the island. Unlike the small tortoiseshell butterfly, the large tortoiseshell butterfly hasn’t been a resident of the UK … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a way to turn plastic waste into acetic acid, the main ingredient of vinegar, using sunlight. The breakthrough offers a promising new approach to reducing plastic pollution through photocatalysis, while simultaneously crea … | Continue reading
Scientists wanted to know why the iconic triceratops had such an unusually large nose compared to most species—both past and present. Their new study shows the triple-horned dinosaur had a huge nose to help control its body temperature. The team used CT scans of fossilized Tricer … | Continue reading
The fossilized remains of a creature with a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth have been discovered in the Amazon jungle. Scientists say the plant eating reptiles now called Tanyka consisted of “living fossils” even when they stalked the Earth around 275 million years ago. A i … | Continue reading
Last week, GNN reported that fungi were being trailed by scientists in Austria for their potential to extract valuable metals from electronic and industrial wastes. Now from the ISS comes a very similar story where, rather than ‘mushroom mining,’ scientists were able to extract p … | Continue reading
Researchers in Brazil have demonstrated that ultrasonic waves can be used to extract polyphenolic nutrients from leftover cocoa bean husks, as long as you add honey first. Few things are tastier than dark chocolate dipped in honey, but the researchers weren’t only creating a tast … | Continue reading
A research team led by scientists at the University of Waterloo, Ontario is developing a novel tool to treat cancer by engineering hungry bacteria to literally eat tumors from the inside out. Key to the approach is a bacterium called Clostridium sporogenes, which is commonly foun … | Continue reading
In an experiment that exceeded scientists’ expectations, mice had their type-1 diabetes cured through a double-transplant method. Additionally, there was no host rejection of one one of the two types of transplanted cells, and the immune system didn’t attack the other, resulting … | Continue reading
As it often tends to, the fossilized remains of a tiny bird-like dinosaur are rewriting history. A team of North and South American scientists described Alnashetri cerropoliciensis as the “missing link”—not from dinosaurs to birds, as the phrase has often been used to describe—bu … | Continue reading
The full Moon in March will appear orange-red in the early morning sky as a result of a total Lunar eclipse, and North Americans are positioned almost perfectly to see it. Sometimes called a Blood Moon in the media for the coloration, it should probably be called a coral or a jas … | Continue reading
Insects play a critical role in ecosystems but, because they are so rarely preserved as fossils, it’s hard to study their roles from habitats millions of years old. But fossilized tree resin can occasionally preserve an insect within its amber, freezing a moment in time. Most rar … | Continue reading
A neat feat of calculation and deduction may have solved one of our solar system’s greatest mysteries. Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is bigger than Mercury, yet for all its conspicuousness, scientists don’t know exactly how it came to be so large that it’s gravitational infl … | Continue reading
Capable of undergoing 120,000 charge cycles and being disposed of anywhere, an experimental new battery design might be thought of as truly state-of-the-art. To the contrary, the magnesium chloride or calcium chloride electrolytes used to carry the charge between the negative and … | Continue reading
250 million years ago, the giant ancestors of today’s salamanders swam from the area of today’s Norwegian Arctic to the west coast of Australia. This monumental trip placed it, many years later, under the brushes and picks of paleontologists who incorrectly identified it. The fos … | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from World at Large News In South Africa, a strategy 6 years in the making to protect rhinos from poaching, as ingenious as it is dramatic, is now being implemented on the ground in the country’s game reserves and parks. Called the Rhisotope Project, it … | Continue reading
Long before antibiotics were invented, biotics—i.e. bacteria—had developed resistance to them. When researchers examined a bacterial strain called Psychrobacter discovered in 5,000-year-old layers of cave ice, they found it was resistant to 10 modern antibiotics. Yet it also show … | Continue reading
The mighty Yangtze river has experienced a dramatic improvement in ecological health halfway through a 10-year fishing moratorium. The focus of a $2.7 billion restoration project, this crucial aquatic artery had been severely degraded by decades of damming, overfishing, fragmenta … | Continue reading
A gold-standard scientific trial revealed an existing mosquito control method works not only to reduce insect numbers, but also the diagnoses of dengue fever in the area. Dengue, also known as “breakbone” fever, is a severe viral infection spread by mosquitoes that can be debilit … | Continue reading
Scientists called “astonishing” the first indisputable evidence of a new species of Spinosaurus found in over a century—uncovered in a remote area of the Sahara Desert. The newly discovered scimitar-crested dinosaur was described as a “hell heron” that fed on fish despite living … | Continue reading
Next Saturday, the 28th of February, stargazers will have the chance to spot Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all clustered together in the sky. Called a planetary alignment, they occur when the planets, which orbit atop the same horizonal line—called the ecli … | Continue reading
22 massive granite blocks that once formed the Great Lighthouse of the Alexandria have been hauled up from the bottom of city’s ancient harbor. The blocks weighed dozens of tons each and consisted of upright pillars, frames, and crossbeams called lintels that once formed the entr … | Continue reading
Amid the scorching/freezing desert of Atacama in Chile, one of South America’s largest botanical storehouses aims to protect both the wild and cultivated heritage of the country’s plant life. Called the Initihuasi Seed Bank, this genetic mothership is the central node in a nation … | Continue reading
A scientist who figured out the secret behind ancient Rome’s self-repairing concrete has recently confirmed his theory at a Pompeii building site where such concrete was in use. This marriage of theoretical and historical knowledge combined with hard evidence has inspired the ver … | Continue reading
The whiskers on an elephant’s trunk are key to its “amazing” sense of touch, reveals new research. The 1,000 hairs that cover the trunk have unusual properties that highlight where contact happens along each whisker allowing the largest land animal to grab something as small as a … | Continue reading
In January, India recorded a mini-outbreak of the Nipah virus, an often lethal disease spread by contact between humans and animals. There was little that could be done for the victims, as no specialized treatment for Nipah virus exists other than normal supportive care procedure … | Continue reading
New archaeological evidence reveals that seabird guano—nutrient-rich bird droppings—may have the driver of behind the prosperity of the most influential pre‑Incan societies. In ancient Andean cultures, fertilizer was power, said archaeologist Dr. Jacob Bongers, whose findings hig … | Continue reading
Apes share the human ability to imagine and pretend, suggests new research that included a series of tea party experiments. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, called it the first study to show the capacity for pretending is not unique to mankind. They … | Continue reading
The reproductive spores of a moss species were able to somehow survive the vacuum of space during a 9-month stint outside the International Space Station. In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum, life, uh, finds a way. Physcomitrella patens is known as a hardy pioneer species of s … | Continue reading
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has topped itself once again, delivering the confirmation of a bright galaxy that existed a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang; so close to the beginning of the universe as we understand. GNN reported on the last such discovery, a galaxy 3 … | Continue reading
If a physician needs to see what’s gone wrong inside a human body, it’s easy enough to order an ultrasound scan. But if the structural engineer wants to do the same in a block of concrete, his options are of limited effectiveness. The range of materials that concrete contains, su … | Continue reading
In a story that proves you don’t have to be a star to find a star, astronomers are excited to train the next generation of telescopes at an Earth-like exoplanet discovered by a citizen scientist. Alexander Venner, currently studying studying at the Max Planck Institute for Astron … | Continue reading