SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
A thin film that reflects light in intriguing ways could be used to make road signs that shine brightly and change color at night, according to a study that will be published on Aug. 9 in Science Advances. The technology could help call attention to important traffic information when it’s dark, with potential benefits for both … Read more
Researchers have found a way to use polymer printing to stretch and flatten twisted molecules so that they conduct electricity better. A team led by chemical and biomolecular engineers from the University of Illinois report their findings in the journal Science Advances. Conjugated polymers are formed by the union of electron-rich molecules along a backbone of … Read more
Stem cells hold the key to wound healing, as they develop into specialised cell types throughout the body – including in teeth. Now an international team of researchers has found a mechanism that could offer a potential novel solution to tooth repair. Published today (Friday 9 August) in Nature Communications, the study showed that a gene … Read more
Materials science and engineering researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demonstrated that the rules of metal-bending aren’t so hard and fast after all. They described their findings Aug. 9 in the journal Nature Communications. Their surprising discovery not only upends previous notions about how metals deform, but could help guide the creation of stronger, more … Read more
Lack of sleep can be dangerous; it is thought to play a role in up to 30% of all motor vehicle crashes and even implicated in catastrophic events, such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1, 2). As sleepy individuals are often unaware of their performance impairments, there is a critical need for objective measures of … Read more
People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains. There they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant rodents for nourishment. This discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Martin … Read more
Thunderstorms generated by a group of giant wildfires in 2017 injected a small volcano’s worth of aerosol into the stratosphere, creating a smoke plume that lasted for almost nine months. CIRES and NOAA researchers studying the plume found that black carbon or soot in the smoke was key to the plume’s rapid rise: the soot … Read more
The Devonian period, which was 419 million to 359 million years ago, is best known for Tiktaalik, the lobe-finned fish that is often portrayed pulling itself onto land. However, the “age of the fishes,” as the period is called, also saw evolutionary progress in plants. Researchers reporting August 8 in the journal Current Biology describe the largest … Read more
As this year’s Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria is finally ebbing, the total tally came to more than 600 infected people, one-quarter of them dead. Thousands more die each year, uncounted in rural villages throughout West Africa. With an annual wave of infections and new viral strains emerging, it has never been more important to … Read more
Long-lived mushrooms that grow in ‘fairy rings’ accumulate surprisingly few mutations over time. This finding indicates that their protection against harmful mutations is well developed. The results, to be published in the esteemed journal Current Biology, are interesting in terms of both medicine and evolutionary biology. In all living creatures, every cell contains DNA, which encodes … Read more