Phys.org

NASA's Apollo moonshots are a tough act to follow, even after all this time.

California's Bay Area may be a culinary hot spot for people, but food options for fish in the San Francisco Estuary have been limited and declining in recent decades. A new study from the University of California, Davis, shows there is a part of the estuary that is teeming with fish food—the managed wetlands of Suisun Marsh.

Hygiene in everyday items that touch the body—such as clothing, masks, and toothbrushes—is critically important. The underlying principle of how graphene selectively eliminates only bacteria has now been revealed. In Advanced Functional Materials, a KAIST research team presents the potential for a next-generation antibacterial material that is safe for the human body and capable of replacing antibiotics.

Wildfire smoke is teeming with them. Researchers have employed them to develop energy-dense biofuels like rocket, marine, and jet fuels. Scientists have engineered rice paddies that interact differently with them, causing lower methane "burping." They can be used to extract valuable metals like lithium and copper from plants like seaweed.

With artificial intelligence (AI) as an essential tool, San Diego State University researchers have discovered surprising similarities among ancient writing systems from Africa and the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Their study suggests that the Armenian alphabet may be more closely related in structure to the ancient Ethiopic writing system than linguists and historians previously thought. The paper is published in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Ribonucleic acids (RNAs) serve as messengers between DNA and protein production, and perform a wide variety of regulatory functions across different cellular processes. This makes them an interesting target for drug designers. Molecular genetics researcher Danny Incarnato (University of Groningen) studies how small-molecule drugs could interfere with RNA structure and function. In a new paper published on March 23 in the journal Nature Communications, he shows that small molecules that bind to RNA only rarely affect its function... Читать дальше...

CERN scientists on Tuesday pulled off the unprecedented feat of transporting antiprotons by road, successfully test-driving the world's first antimatter delivery system, with an eye to one day supplying research labs across Europe.

While humans often struggle to find a partner who is both physically attractive and a reliable co-parent, yeast may already have cracked the formula for the perfect match. When choosing mates, these single-celled organisms tend to pick partners that may increase the chances of their offspring's success, according to a new study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, published in Cell Reports.

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is detailed in a paper published March 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For more than 40 years, the Golden State Killer haunted California. A serial rapist and murderer active in the 1970s and '80s, he eluded detectives for decades. By 2018, hope of identifying him was fading, until a woman—curious about her ancestry—spat into a plastic tube and mailed it to a genealogy company.