InformerNow

The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as the Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than…

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter mission has split the flood of energetic particles flung out into space from the Sun into two groups, tracing each back to a different kind of outburst from our star. The Sun is the most energetic particle accelerator in the Solar System. It whips up electrons to nearly the…

Climate action is falling behind on the goals as stated in the Paris Agreement. To meet those goals, countries must act according to their ‘fair share’ targets. However, researchers from Utrecht University found a bias in how ambition and fairness assessments were calculated until now: “previous studies assessing countries climate ambition share a feature that…

A first-of-its-kind, federally funded clinical trial has shown it’s possible to identify breast cancer survivors who are at higher risk of their cancer coming back due to the presence of dormant cancer cells and to effectively treat these cells with repurposed, existing drugs. The research, led by scientists from the Abramson Cancer Center of the…

Too little snowfall is now also shaking the foundations of some of the world’s most resilient ‘water towers’, a new study led by the Pellicciotti group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows. After establishing a monitoring network on a new benchmark glacier in central Tajikistan, the international team of researchers was…

The future of plastic recycling may soon get much less complicated, frustrating and tedious. In a new study, Northwestern University chemists have introduced a new plastic upcycling process that can drastically reduce — or perhaps even fully bypass — the laborious chore of pre-sorting mixed plastic waste. The process harnesses a new, inexpensive nickel-based catalyst…

You are mostly but not entirely human. If we crunch the numbers, 8 percent of your genome actually comes from viruses that got stranded there. This viral detritus is a souvenir from our evolutionary past, a reminder that viruses have been with us from the very beginning. Usually, this 8 percent of your DNA —…

Certain brain cells are responsible for coordinating smooth, controlled movements of the body. But when those cells are constantly overactivated for weeks on end, they degenerate and ultimately die. This new observation made by scientists at Gladstone Institutes may help explain what goes awry in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease. Researchers have long…