Tag Archives: Scientists

Scientists may have just toppled a 100-year-old theory about what holds up the highest mountain range on Earth, new research shows. The Himalayan mountains formed in the collision between the Asian and Indian continents around 50 million years ago, when tectonic forces squeezed Tibet so hard that the region crumpled and its area shrank by almost 620 miles (1,000 kilometers). …

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How did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology — and scientists just got a major clue. In a new study published in the journal Nature, a team of biologists say they’ve demonstrated how RNA molecules and amino acids could combine, by purely random interactions, to …

Scientists Say These Foods Could Be Quietly Wreaking Havoc on Your Gut and Hindering Weight Loss  AOL.com Ultra-processed diet decreases male sex hormones, new study suggests  The Washington Post Ultra-processed foods cause negative health effects within weeks, study finds  Le Monde.fr Ultra-processed foods vs minimally processed foods: how can you tell the difference?  The Conversation The five ultra-processed food ingredients to avoid – and …

NEW ORLEANS — Just southwest of New Orleans, in a tranquil fishing village on the Louisiana bayou, Linard Lyons spent the morning on his 19-foot boat, preparing crab traps for his grandchildren just like he had done thousands of times before. This time, he noticed a tiny scratch on his leg – a scratch that nearly cost him his life. …

Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know …

Deep below the seafloor, locked in a layer of 100-million-year-old sediment, a lifeform quietly lives. It’s not quite Godzilla, nor a long-lost Megalodon, but it does go to show how life on Earth can dwell under the most extreme and bizarre circumstances. Scientists discovered that communities of microbes living beneath the seafloor are able to survive in rock sediments for …

There are all sorts of cruel parasites out there, and more are being uncovered all the time. Scientists have recently found several invasive species of parasitic wasps that have now landed in the U.S. Researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Iowa made the discovery. For the first time ever, they detected the presence of two closely related parasitic …

For the first time, scientists have used ultrafast X-ray flashes to take a direct image of a single electron as it moved during a chemical reaction. In the new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers accomplished this incredible feat by imaging how a valence electron — an electron in the outer shell of an …

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ago. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, the “workhorses” of life essential to nearly every living process. But proteins cannot replicate or produce themselves — they require …