Worlds smallest reptile is discovered in the Caribbean forest.
At just 16 mm from nose to tail, the Jaragua lizard is the worlds smallest. In fact, its the smallest vertebrate that can reproduce on dry land 1 .
The newly discovered lizard lives on Isla Beata, a small, forest-covered island in the Caribbean off the Dominican Republic. Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University, together with Richard Thomas of the
A balanced portfolio of programs could mean a faster quantum computer.
Strategies from the world of finance could help get the best out of quantum computers, say US researchers 1 . The right portfolio of programs could solve a problem many times faster than a single strategem.
Quantum computers – purely hypothetical as yet – would be fast, but you could never be sure whether a program was going to work or not. You would have to keep running the program until
Radon may pose a greater cancer threat than has been thought.
Radon damage from irradiated cells spreads to their neighbours, a new study finds 1 . The result suggests that small amounts of this radioactive gas could cause widespread harm.
The study “is a reason for concern but not panic”, says Gerhard Randers-Pehrson of Columbia University, New York, a member of the team that performed the study. “We’re talking about the acceptable level of radon changing pe
The question of which forces control terrestrial ecosystems lies at the heart of a long-standing debate among ecologists. One theory, the so-called bottom-up theory, suggests that plant defense mechanisms exert control by limiting food availability for herbivores. Top-down theorists, however, suggest that predators limit the numbers of herbivores and hence their impact on the vegetation. Now new findings in the current issue of the journal Science that describe animal communities isolated for 15 year
For more than 150 years, people around the world have made ample use of the explosive trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as TNT. Its use has had unintended consequences, however: the manufacture, storage and disposal of TNT—which ranks among the most toxic explosives employed by the military—have left large areas of land contaminated and polluted. So far, effective and affordable cleanup technologies have remained out of reach. But new research suggests that help may come from what might seem an unlike
Surprising black hole weigh-in has astronomers scratching their heads.
Forty thousand light years away, on the other side of the Milky Way, lies object GRS1915+105. It is a giant star and a black hole orbiting one another, blasting out X-rays and ejecting gas and dust at close to the speed of light.
Now measurements of this “extreme and puzzling” object are casting doubt on current theories of how such binary systems form and behave. Astronomers have weighed its black hole,
Looking like a glittering cosmic geode, a trio of dazzling stars blaze from the hollowed-out cavity of a reflection nebula in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The…
Research examines the nature of explosive events in the magnetosphere. Southwest Research Institute is investigating an unusual event in the Earth’s magnetotail, the elongated portion of the planet’s magnetosphere trailing…
The SPECULOOS project has revealed the existence of an Earth-sized planet around SPECULOOS-3, a nearby star similar in size to Jupiter and twice as cold as our Sun. The SPECULOOS…
A new paper published in Nature Nanotechnology outlines a way to create dozens of new “colors” to multiplex single-molecule measurements. Researchers often study biomolecules such as proteins or amino acids…
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in millions of deaths. Despite an unparalleled collaborative research effort that led to effective vaccines and therapies being produced in record-breaking time, a complete understanding of…
How Bitter Food Constituents Influence Gastric Acid Production. In the stomach, so-called parietal cells are responsible for acid production. They react not only to the body’s own messenger molecules, but…
Good vibrations… What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off….
The new technique can modify the nanostructure of bulk and 2D crystals without a cleanroom or expensive etching equipment. In a new paper published on May 1 in the journal…
Research led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated that small changes in the isotopic content of thin semiconductor materials can influence their optical…
First neuromorphic vision and control of a flying drone. A team of researchers at Delft University of Technology has developed a drone that flies autonomously using neuromorphic image processing and…
Humboldt Professor Dieter Schmalstieg does research at the University of Stuttgart. Dieter Schmalstieg, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Visual Computing at the University of Stuttgart, has been awarded the Humboldt…
In the battle against climate change, mangroves are important allies – they store up to five times more carbon dioxide than other trees. A recently developed method from researchers in…