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Yearly Archives: 2020
Native stinging tree toxins match the pain of spiders and scorpions
The painful toxins wielded by a giant Australian stinging tree are surprisingly similar to the venom found in spiders and cone snails, University of...
Using chitin, a bioinspired material, to manufacture tools and shelters on Mars
A simple manufacturing technology based on chitin, one of the most ubiquitous organic polymers on Earth, could be used to build tools and shelters...
Discovery of a new mass extinction
It's not often a new mass extinction is identified; after all, such events were so devastating they really stand out in the fossil record....
Scientists identify gene family key to unlocking vertebrate evolution
New University of Colorado Boulder-led research finds that the traits that make vertebrates distinct from invertebrates were made possible by the emergence of a...
World’s largest DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian
Invaders, pirates, warriors—the history books taught us that Vikings were brutal predators who travelled by sea from Scandinavia to pillage and raid their way...
How cigarette butts can be recycled into bricks: A step-by-step plan
Researchers have shown how industries could work together to recycle cigarette butts into bricks, in a step-by-step implementation plan for saving energy and solving...
E-beam atomic-scale 3-D ‘sculpting’ could enable new quantum nanodevices
By varying the energy and dose of tightly focused electron beams, researchers have demonstrated the ability to both etch away and deposit high-resolution nanoscale...
Meteorite study calls into doubt a popular theory about the early solar system
It is generally accepted that the inner region of the early solar system was subject to an intense period of meteoric bombardment referred to...
How to train a machine to see 3-D in the dark
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have developed a new way to create an almost perfect hologram in near darkness.
Optical holograms are a...
Dust may have controlled ancient human civilization
When early humans began to travel out of Africa and spread into Eurasia over a hundred thousand years ago, a fertile region around the...
COVID-19 virus uses heparan sulfate to get inside cells
A molecule known as ACE2 sits like a doorknob on the outer surfaces of the cells that line the lungs. Since January 2020, researchers...
