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science

SCIENCE: Could Sticky Corn Fight Pollution?

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sticky corn

It probably doesn’t look like any corn you’ve seen. At 16 feet (5 meters), it stands about twice as tall as conventional corn. And sticking out of the stalks, high above the ground, are aerial roots, red finger-like protrusions coated in slime. But despite this alien-like goo, this species of corn — indigenous to the Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where the locals have long been cultivating and eating it — is remarkable for another reason. It’s the only corn that scientists know of that can take in nitrogen directly from the air and use it to grow. Nitrogen … Read more

SCIENCE: Where Dreams Come From

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Enjoy dreaming? Two key genes may be to thank. A new study in mice finds that these “dream genes” are essential to that phase of slumber that brings people bizarro-world visions of taking high school math tests naked, losing teeth and soaring through the air. Without the genes, called Chrm 1 and Chrm 3, mammals would not experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which the brain is as active as it is during wakefulness but the body is paralyzed. The discovery is important, researchers said, because poor sleep and psychiatric disorders are linked. So, understanding the basic control of … Read more

SPACE: There’s Ice on the Moon!

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Lunar Ice - NASA

Scientists have detected the first-ever evidence of frozen water on the moon, on the darkest and coldest parts of the lunar surface. While prior analysis of the moon hinted at some ice reserves, this is the first time that ice has been observed at the north and south poles ­— and the signs of water ice are “direct and definitive,” according to a new study. Researchers peered at suspected icy patches using an instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), which used the near-infrared spectrum to pinpoint the signature activity of ice molecules interacting with infrared light. This helped the … Read more

SCIENCE: Catching a Zombie (Virus)

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zombie - pixabay

There’s no way around it: Viruses are scary. They’re invisible to the naked eye, they can be difficult to get rid of and many are capable of spreading quickly. That’s why it’s important to detect a disease-causing virus before it has the chance to infect so many people that it’s impossible to contain. Failure to detect and contain a deadly virus early enough to prevent an outbreak is a key component of the story in AMC’s sci-fi series “Fear the Walking Dead” (which airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT, starting Aug. 12). The show, now in its … Read more

STUDY: Sound Has a Negative Mass

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sound waves - pixabay

Sound has negative mass, and all around you it’s drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly. That’s the conclusion of a paper submitted on July 23 to the preprint journal arXiv, and it shatters the conventional understanding that researchers have long had of sound waves: as massless ripples that zip through matter, giving molecules a shove but ultimately balancing any forward or upward motion with an equal and opposite downward motion. That’s a straightforward model that will explain the behavior of sound in most circumstances, but it’s not quite true, the new paper argues. [The Mysterious Physics of … Read more

SCIENCE: Hobbits Not Related to Pygmies, Study Says

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Hobbit Home - pixabay

Ever since finding the remains of the “hobbits” — a small-statured species of ancient human — on the island of Flores in Indonesia, scientists have wondered whether the modern Pygmy people who now call the island home were in any way related to them. Now, researchers have found that the answer is “no,” the modern-day Pygmies on Flores are not related to the ancient hobbits, who go by the scientific name Homo floresiensis. While the genomes of modern Pygmy people on Flores have DNA sequences from other ancient human relatives — the Denisovans and the Neanderthals — they have “no … Read more

SCIENCE: What If Earth Turned into a Giant Pile of Blueberries?

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Blueberries - pixabay

If our planet suddenly turned into an Earth-size pile of blueberries, things would start exploding. This is science. Specifically, it’s the conclusion of a juicy paper submitted to the preprint server arXiv on July 27. (Papers on arXiv have not yet passed through the peer-review process or been published in journals.) The author, Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist with a broad research portfolio at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, addresses the problem — originally posed on the website Stack Exchange — in thorough, blueberry-bursting fashion. Sandberg’s paper aims to answer the question, “What if the entire Earth … Read more

SCIENCE: Killing the Arrow of Time

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Time - Pixabay

A new technique for quantum computing could bust open our whole model of how time moves in the universe. Here’s what’s long seemed to be true: Time works in one direction. The other direction? Not so much. That’s true in life. (Tuesday rolls into Wednesday, 2018 into 2019, youth into old age.) And it’s true in a classical computer. What does that mean? It’s much easier for a bit of software running on your laptop to predict how a complex system will move and develop in the future than it is to recreate its past. A property of the universe … Read more

SCIENCE: CRISPR Is “Not As Safe As We Thought”

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DNA - Pixabay

Like a molecular ninja, the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 slices through ultraspecific segments of DNA to cut out unwanted bits of genetic code. It’s a precise and promising method of genetic editing that’s widely used in scientific research. And scientists hope it could one day be used to selectively remove genes that result in medical problems such as HIV, sickle cell disease and cancer. Unfortunately, a new study published today (July 16) in the journal Nature Biotechnology suggests that this day may be further off than expected — and that CRISPR’s cellular swordsmanship may result in much more collateral damage than … Read more