Tag Archives: Scientists

Two Gut Bacteria May Hold the Key to Multiple Sclerosis—But Don’t Get Too Excited Yet Nearly a million Americans wake up each day with multiple sclerosis, a disease that turns their own immune system against their brain and spinal cord. For decades, researchers have suspected that something in the gut might trigger this autoimmune assault. Now, a clever twin study …

A tiny red star not far from Earth is turning out to be a heavyweight in the search for rocky worlds. Nestled just 35 light-years away in space, the star L 98-59 is home to a tight-knit pack of exoplanets, including one that now appears to orbit at just the right distance to harbor liquid water.  Using data from NASA’s …

Lightning has long terrified and fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. For something so relatively common, the precise atmospheric events that give rise to a lightning strike have been shrouded in mystery, but new research is offering some tantalizing clues. A team of engineers and meteorologists believe they’ve cracked the curious case of how lightning forms in the cloudtops, and their …

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other telescopes have shown what appears to be a supermassive black hole forming right between two merging galaxies. There have been multiple hypotheses surrounding supermassive black hole formation, but these observations support the hypothesis that suggests these behemoths are the result of immense …

A tiny red star not far from Earth is turning out to be a heavyweight in the search for rocky worlds. Nestled just 35 light-years away in space, the star L 98-59 is home to a tight-knit pack of exoplanets, including one that now appears to orbit at just the right distance to harbor liquid water. Using data from NASA’s …

Microchips power almost every modern device — phones, laptops and even fridges. But behind the scenes, making them is a complex process. But researchers say they have found a way to tap into the power of quantum computing to make it simpler. Scientists in Australia have developed a quantum machine learning technique — a blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and …

Should robots be able to cannibalize each other so they can accelerate their evolution, bringing them closer to resembling self-sufficient lifeforms capable of living independently of their human masters? Good news if your answer to that question is “yes”: a team of researchers from Columbia University have built a robot that can seek out and merge with other robots to …

“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.” Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: A new study says that the organisms in our gut have more direct influence on our actions that we previously thought. Scientists analyzed an ancient protein called flagellin, released from the tail of bacteria (known as …

The controversial claim of microbes that exhibit arsenic rather than phosphorus in their biochemistry has been retracted by the journal Science 15 years after it was first published — but while most in the research community are pleased by the decision, the retraction has angered the authors of the original study. Arsenic, as we know from its use as a …

A silent but deadly threat is hanging in the air, and scientists now believe it may be quietly impairing the brains of millions of Americans. A recent decade-long study tracking over 1.2 million older adults in California found a direct link between exposure to wildfire smoke and a sharp rise in dementia diagnoses.  The findings raise new concerns about the long-term …