Alla Katsnelson, Knowable Magazine
In the murky darkness, blue and green blobs are dancing. Sometimes they keep decorous distances from each other, but other times they go cheek to cheek and when that happens, other colors flare.The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it.
David Bressan, Forbes
On May 25, 1979, the movie Alien was released and quickly terrified audiences worldwide. Its unexpected mix of classic horror and science-fiction elements got at first mixed reviews, however, over the years Alien had come to be regarded as one of the best horror and science-fiction films ever made.
Maddie Stone, Earther
A year and a half ago, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, satellite images of the frozen continent revealed something wild: a gaping hole in the middle of Antartica's sea ice that spanned thousands of square miles. Scientists were fascinated and puzzled by feature, which hadn't appeared at this scale since the 1970s.
Davide Castelvecchi, Nature
Gravitational waves may have just delivered the first sighting of a black hole devouring a neutron star. If confirmed, it would be the first evidence of the existence of such binary systems. The news comes just a day after astronomers had detected gravitational waves from a merger of two neutron stars for only the second time.
Karen Weintraub, Discover
The photograph of two baby monkeys clinging to each other crisscrossed the world early last year. Not just because the long-tailed macaques, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, were adorable, but because they were groundbreaking: They were the first primates ever to have been cloned. No scientist before had managed to make exact replicas of animals so close to us on the tree of life.
Daniel Boffey, The Guardian
A leading American academic journal has refused to publish an article by a respected professor on the grounds that his use of the fairytale Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for ignored scientific work is culturally insensitive and in danger of being sexualised.
Catherine Offord, Sci
J. Huang et al., Adipocyte p62/SQSTM1 suppresses tumorigenesis through opposite regulations of metabolism in adipose tissue and tumor, Cancer Cell, 33:77084, 2018.Obesity is second only to smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer in the US. It's linked not only to cancer incidence, but also to disease progression and outcome. So understanding how fat tissue communicates with tumor cells in vivo has long been a goal for cancer researchers.
Steve Stewart-Williams, Nautilus
A young bank teller is shot dead during a robbery. The robber flees in a stolen van and is chased down the motorway by a convoy of police cars. Careening through traffic, the robber runs several cars off the road and clips several more. Eventually, the robber pulls off the motorway and attempts to escape into the hills on foot, the police in hot pursuit.
Rachel Becker, The Verge
It feels intuitive to compare caffeine and nicotine, two drugs made by plants that can produce a bit of a buzz. But intuition isn't the only thing at the root of that association: a concerted public relations effort by Big Tobacco has helped make it stick.
Michael Worboys, Aeon
Modern dog breeds were created in Victorian Britain. The evolution of the domestic dog goes back tens of thousands of years however, the multiple forms we see today are just 150 years old. Before the Victorian era, there were different types of dog, but there were not that many, and they were largely defined by their function.
David M. Gilbert, The Conversation
For biologists everywhere, April 25 is auspicious. It is DNA Day and commemorates the date in 1953 when scientists Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins published seminal scientific papers describing the helical structure of the DNA molecule. In 2003, April 25 was used to announce the completion of the Human Genome Project.
James Hamblin, The Atlantic
Students are currently being quarantined in Los Angeles. Mandatory-vaccination policies have been implemented in Brooklyn. Even President Donald Trump, contrary to prior assertions, today urged people to get children vaccinated.
