The next great insect repellent might come from a strain of bacteria that lives inside a common parasitic worm. A study published Wednesday in Science Advances has found that a compound derived from these bacteria is three times more potent than DEET in repelling mosquitoes. More research must be done to demonstrate its safety, but this bacterial chemical could play an important role in the fight against mosquito-borne illness.

Cyanobacteria were recently, and unexpectedly, found living in "the dark biosphere," thousands of feet underground. By Mindy Weisberger. (Oct. 3, 2018)

Models and observations indicate that both stars and planets form as a cloud of material collapses into a disk. If the process proceeds in an orderly manner, then the planets will all form from the same disk and thus orbit in the same plane. And—because material from the same disk will fall into the star, bringing its momentum with it—the star will rotate with its equator along the same plane. That should lead to a tidy system with the equator of the star lined up with the plane of any planets orbiting it.

One day in the distant future, a team of intrepid humans might board a starship and set out for a world beyond our solar system — maybe one of the exoplanets of Alpha Centauri, the nearby star system. One place we'll never set foot on is Kelt-9b. In addition to being a gas giant without a solid surface, Kelt-9b lies hundreds of light-years away and is the hottest planet ever observed. Temperatures on its outer layer can exceed 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,000 degrees Fahrenheit) — hotter than some stars — and a new study shows that its superheated atmosphere contains vaporized heavy metals.

Astronomers may have discovered a new way that stars can die. A mysteriously brief and bright burst whimsically called the “Cow” reveals an entirely new type of stellar death. The details of that stellar doom, however, remain hazy. Scientists are still debating whether the flare-up, spotted on June 16, 2018, was from an unusual type of star that was eaten by a black hole, or from an old, massive star exploding in a weird sort of supernova.

While current immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies are largely ineffective against pancreatic cancer, scientists in the U.S. have now identified an immune checkpoint molecule that could represent a promising immunotherapeutic target for this tumor type. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center-led team found that V-domain immunoglobulin suppressor of T cell activation (VISTA) is preferentially expressed at high levels in pancreatic cancer, when compared with melanoma tumors.

It shines with a brightness equivalent to 600 trillion suns. “We don’t expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe,” said the astronomers. Researchers announced this week (January 9, 2019) at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, that they’ve discovered the brightest quasar yet known, detected from the period when the universe was just beginning to make luminous objects, such as stars and galaxies.

Late last year, astronomers announced that they’d found a super-Earth around Barnard’s star – one of the closest suns to our own. The discovery of a planet just six light-years away was enough to excite astronomers and the public alike. However, the researchers who found the planet said that they suspected the icy world couldn’t support life. But now, a group of astronomers are saying such pessimism may be premature. On Earth, geothermal vents produce heat and create unique environments where life thrives in places otherwise difficult to eke out a living – like the frigid, dark deep of the oceans.

Kepler Mission launched by NASA has discovered another world, two months after the Kepler spacecraft ran out of the fuel. They took nine years to complete their mission and meanwhile they unveiled 2,600 confirmed planets in addition to many more which are not yet confirmed.

Increasing the yield of crop plants is a major facet of increasing food security, and one way to do this is from understanding plant biology which begins with the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, popularly termed as the “green engine of the earth”, is the process by which plants convert light energy into chemical energy that is later released to fuel the plant activities such as growth. If we want to keep the planet and its growing population running in a sustainable way, we will need plants to produce far more food, energy and applicable biomass than they do today.

Astronomers think they know how Uranus got flipped onto its side. According to Astronomers think they know how Uranus got flipped onto its side. According to detailed computer simulations, a body about twice the size of Earth slammed into Uranus between 3 to 4 billion years ago. The impact created an oddity in our Solar System: the only planet that rotates on its side. computer simulations, a body about twice the size of

Astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of Earth, and it's within a zone that could allow liquid water to exist on its surface. The finding comes from data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which ran out of fuel in October 2018. K2-288Bb, as the new planet is called, is located within its star's habitable zone, which is why liquid water is a possibility.

A radio telescope in Canada has proved its mettle in finding many new examples of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — giving astronomers one of their best shots yet at unraveling the mystery of these cosmic flashes. “Look! We see FRBs,” Deborah Good, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, on 7 January.

Astronomers have revealed details of mysterious signals emanating from a distant galaxy, picked up by a telescope in Canada. The precise nature and origin of the blasts of radio waves is unknown. Among the 13 fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, was a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away.

Scientists might have seen a black hole being born for the first time ever. A mysterious bright object that lit up the night sky could have been a black hole or neutron star at the moment of its creation, researchers say. The bright glow – spotted from Earth, 200 million light years away – appears to have been the debris of a bright star being swirled around the edge of a black hole. Scientists have been puzzled by the spectacularly bright anomaly spotted deep in space since it was spotted last June.

For those men who suffer from it, erectile dysfunction can cause exceptional mental angst, can ruin relationships, and can also be a red flag that indicates other serious underlying health conditions such as circulation or blood pressure problems. Our new study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics has shown that erectile dysfunction (ED) has a genetic component. We found strong evidence for a link between a particular part of our DNA and the capacity to develop and maintain an erection.

Astronomers know our solar system better than any other, but they're still learning new ways in which it doesn't seem to be particularly normal. One such quirk, in patterns of planetary sizes, was the subject of a news conference held yesterday (Jan. 8) at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The results could prompt scientists to revise a leading theory of how planets form.

Is our reality, including its forces and particles, based on the strange properties of numbers with eight dimensions called "octonions"? A physicist thinks so, having found a way to expand 40-year-old research to reach surprising new directions. First, a brief history of numbers.

Dark matter, it seems, has been clinging to galaxies for a very long time. Most galaxies that existed 10 billion years ago had about as much dark matter as galaxies do today, contradicting earlier studies that suggested less dark matter lurked around galaxies in the early universe.

Astronomers attempting to capture the first images of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way have given early hints that the ambitious project has been successful. The observations, by the Event Horizon Telescope, are expected to be unveiled in the spring in one of the most eagerly awaited scientific announcements of 2019. Now, a senior scientist on the project has said “spectacular” data was gathered during observations of two black holes, including Sagittarius A* at the centre of our own galaxy.

More than twenty years after it was first discovered, an analysis of a remarkable skeleton discovered in South Africa has finally been published – and the specimen suggests we may need to add a new species to the family tree of early human ancestors. The analysis also found evidence that the species was evolving to become better at striding on two legs, helping us to understand when our lineage first became bipedal. The specimen, nicknamed “Little Foot”, is a type of Australopithecus, the group of hominins to which the famous fossil “Lucy” belonged.

Research suggests the winter blues are triggered by specialized light-sensing cells in the retina that communicate directly with brain areas involved in mood.Just in time for the winter solstice, scientists may have figured out how short days can lead to dark moods. Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a brain circuit that connects special light-sensing cells in the retina with brain areas that affect whether you are happy or sad. When these cells detect shorter days...

Wherever humans go, our bacterial companions will follow. That’s as true in space as it is on Earth, and while we’ve known that microbial astronauts are present on the International Space Station, one group of researchers has just found a new reason to worry about them.

As he was working with corals at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, Dr. David Vaughan accidentally discovered a groundbreaking coral reef recovery method that makes corals grow by 40 times faster than usual.

An international team of scientists have detected ripples in space and time, known as gravitational waves, from the biggest known black-hole collision that formed a new black hole about 80 times larger than the Sun – and from another three black-hole mergers. The Australian National University (ANU) is playing a lead role in Australia’s involvement with the gravitational wave discovery through a partnership in the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which is based in the United States.

A long-dead Scandinavian woman has yielded bacterial DNA showing that she contracted the earliest known case of the plague in humans. DNA extracted from the woman’s teeth comes from a newly identified ancient strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, the oldest ever found. The woman’s bones, which date from 5,040 to 4,867 years ago, were found nearly 20 years ago in a mass grave at an ancient farming site in Sweden.

A team of scientists have detected the gravitational waves that resulted from the largest collision of black holes ever observed and that formed a new black hole about eighty times larger than the sun. This and 3 other black hole fusions were detected by an international team of scientists formed by the Advanced laser interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. and the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Efe news reported on Tuesday.

An international team of researchers, including Jessica Spake and Dr David Sing from the University of Exeter, have detected the inert gas escaping from the atmosphere of the exoplanet HAT-P-11b – found 124 light years from Earth and in the Cygnus constellation.

The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of that found in all the world’s oceans. Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.

A pattern of small holes cut into the floor of an ancient rock shelter in Azerbaijan shows that one of the world's most ancient board games was played there by nomadic herders around 4,000 years ago, according to an archaeologist who has investigated the find. Walter Crist, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, visited the rock shelter in a national park in Azerbaijan last year, searching for traces of the ancient game now known as "58 Holes."

Patients with blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma are often treated by irradiating their bone marrow to destroy the diseased cells. After the treatment, patients are vulnerable to infection and fatigue until new blood cells grow back. MIT researchers have now devised a way to help blood cells regenerate faster. Their method involves stimulating a particular type of stem cell to secrete growth factors that help precursor cells differentiate into mature blood cells.

Saltriovenator is the first Italian dinosaur of the Jurassic age and the only dinosaur found in the Lombardy region. Wednesday Italian paleontologists presented evidence that the world’s oldest large-predator dinosaur inhabited the European country some 200 million years ago. "Saltriovenator predates the massive meat-eating dinosaurs by over 25 million years and sheds light on the evolution of the three-fingered hand of birds," Dal Sasso of Milan's Natural History Museum said in a statement.

Winter is coming ... even to the insect world. The final season of “Game Of Thrones” won’t premiere until April, but an entomologist in Nebraska is already helping to hype the show. University of Nebraska-Lincoln entomologist Brett Ratcliffe has named three beetles he discovered after dragons from the HBO series: Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

Our ability to see colors develops in the womb. Now scientists have replicated that process, which could help accelerate efforts to cure colorblindness and lead to new treatments for diseases.

Quantum physicists from the University of Alberta, Canada, announced this week that they have developed a new technique for storing quantum information into pulses of light. The physicists created "a new way to store pulses of light—down to the single-photon level—in clouds of ultracold rubidium atoms, and to later retrieve them on demand by shining a ‘control' pulse of light,” Lindsay LeBlanc, assistant professor of physics and Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gases for Quantum Simulation, said.