Want to take a trip to the center of the Milky Way? Check out a new immersive, ultra-high-definition visualization. This 360-movie offers an unparalleled opportunity to look around the center of the galaxy, from the vantage point of the central supermassive black hole, in any direction the user chooses.
Using high-resolution adaptive optics imaging from the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have uncovered one of the oldest star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. The remarkably sharp image looks back into the early history of our Universe and sheds new insights on how our Galaxy formed.
Employee wellness programs are popular among businesses seeking to increase productivity and cut health care costs. However, many firms have struggled to reap those benefits due to low employee motivation. New research from Brigham Young University finds the problem may lie in how the employees are choosing to reward themselves.
The field of metamaterials involves designing complicated, composite structures, some of which can manipulate electromagnetic waves in ways that are impossible in naturally occurring materials.
The dramatic difference in gonad size between honey bee queens and their female workers in response to their distinct diets requires the switching on of a specific genetic program, according to a new study publishing March 21 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Annika Roth and Martin Beye of Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf and colleagues. The finding is likely to allow more detailed analysis of the interplay of genes and nutrition that drive caste dimorphism in honey bees.
An international team based in Ghent, Belgium (VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology) and Basel, Switzerland (University of Basel), found a link between a class of enzymes and immune signals that is rapidly triggered upon physical damage in plants. This new discovery will increase the understanding of the plant immune system, and might be exploited to improve crop health and yield in the future.
Constituting over 78 % of the air we breathe, nitrogen is the element found the most often in its pure form on earth. The reason for the abundance of elemental nitrogen is the incredible stability and inertness of dinitrogen (N2), a molecule comprising two nitrogen atoms and the form in which most nitrogen exists. Only in very harsh environments, such as in the ionosphere, can dinitrogen be assembled into longer nitrogen chains, forming N4 ions with very short lifetimes.
Facebook on Thursday admitted that millions of passwords were stored in plain text on its internal servers, a security slip that left them readable by the social networking platform's employees.
Forests have a special magic for many of us. Steeped in folklore and fantasy, they are places for enchantments, mythical creatures and outlaws. But if they are to survive into the future, they may also need a helping hand from science.
The Great Lakes region is warming faster than the rest of the U.S., a trend likely to bring more extreme storms while also degrading water quality, worsening erosion and posing tougher challenges for farming, scientists reported Thursday.
The world of food and drug regulation was rocked earlier this month by the news of a change in leadership at the Food and Drug Administration. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned and will step down in early April. His temporary replacement is Dr. Ned Sharpless, director of the National Cancer Institute.
When word broke that the massacre in New Zealand was livestreamed on Facebook, I immediately thought of Robert Godwin Sr. In 2017, Godwin was murdered in Cleveland, Ohio, and initial reports indicated that the attacker streamed it on Facebook Live, at the time a relatively new feature of the social network. Facebook later clarified that the graphic video was uploaded after the event, but the incident called public attention to the risks of livestreaming violence.
Intentionally false news stories were shared more than 35m times during the 2016 US presidential election, with Facebook playing a significant role in their spread. Shortly after, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that 50m Facebook profiles had been harvested without authorisation and used to target political ads and fake news for the election and later during the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum.
Billions of image pixels recorded by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission have been used to generate a high-resolution map of land-cover dynamics across Earth's landmasses. This map also depicts the month of the peak of vegetation and gives new insight into land productivity.
Test subjects in Cologne, Germany will take to their beds for 60 days from 25 March as part of a groundbreaking study, funded by European Space Agency ESA and US space agency NASA, into how artificial gravity could help astronauts stay healthy in space.
My family and I were on vacation in Florida recently and took advantage of a free afternoon to do some gift shopping for local memorabilia – not your ordinary T-shirts and key chains. Our adventure took us to St. Armand's Key, part of Sarasota, and the many unique shops there.
Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft have demonstrated the first fully automated system to store and retrieve data in manufactured DNA—a key step in moving the technology out of the research lab and into commercial data centers.
The future climate is expected to be warmer and rainfall is expected to be higher than at present, particularly during the winter. This will increase warm periods and rainfall during the winter, which may lead to a thinner snow cover, local flooding and the formation of ice layers on ground surface and inside the snow cover.
The e-bike market is booming. Thanks to electric support, cyclists can choose their routes more freely, elderly people can stay mobile, and commuters reach their workplace stress-free. This makes many people use bicycles instead of cars. Presently, charging of the battery takes about two to four hours. To shorten charging time of e-bikes in particular during daily use in the city, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Coboc GmbH & Co. KG, a company specialized in electric mobility, plan... Читать дальше...
Physicists at EPFL propose a new "quantum simulator": a laser-based device that can be used to study a wide range of quantum systems. Studying it, the researchers have found that photons can behave like magnetic dipoles at temperatures close to absolute zero, following the laws of quantum mechanics. The simple simulator can be used to better understand the properties of complex materials under such extreme conditions.
Archaeologists have struggled to explain the rapid rise and fall of Cahokia—the mysterious Mississippian mound-building culture that sprang up about a thousand years ago in the fertile southern Illinois bottom lands just across the river from modern-day St. Louis.
Roughly 34 million people in the United States and Canada rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water, jobs, recreation and more.
Researchers from Northwestern University and Facebook in March published new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science that sheds light on whether common approaches for online advertising measurement are as reliable and accurate as the "gold standard" of large-scale, randomized experiments.
In 1871, Dimitri Mendeleev presented his periodic table to the world. Many of the current 118 elements were missing, and he left placeholders for those yet to be discovered. Each element has a unique story of scientific discovery.
Superbugs, also known as Gram-negative bacteria, are causing a global health crisis. Each year in the United States, at least two million people contract an antibiotic-resistant infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Of those, 23,000 people die.
