4 billion ago, during the Archean eon, Earth's mantle temperatures were significantly higher than they are today, according to recent numerical model calculations.

A new paper from researchers at at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz says the Archean crust that formed under these conditions was so dense that large portions of it were recycled back into the mantle. According to the calculations, this dense primary crust would have descended vertically in drip form. In contrast, the movements of today's tectonic plates involve largely lateral movements with oceanic lithosphere recycled in subduction zones.

The findings add to our understanding of how cratons and plate tectonics, and thus also the Earth's current continents, came into being.

Physicists at Yale and Harvard have thrown a new curve at Supersymmetry, the popular hypothesis about what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model. And it involves the electron's almost perfect roundness.

The researchers have reported the most precise measurement to date of the electron's shape, improving it by a factor of more than 10 and showing the particle to be rounder than predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model, including Supersymmetry. Supersymmetry posits new types of particles that help account for ideas like dark matter, a mysterious, unknown substance estimated to make up most of the universe.

Medical researchers have found a way to reverse a cause of aging in animals - and it doesn't involve starvation. 

The work relates to mitochondria, which are our cells' battery packs and give energy to carry out key biological functions, and a series of molecular eventsthat  enable communication inside cells between the mitochondria and the nucleus. As communication breaks down, aging accelerates. 

Though table salt, sodium chloride (NaCl), is one of the best-known and most studied chemical compounds known, it still has a few mysteries.

Under ambient conditions, it crystallizes in a cubic unit cell and is very stable with one sodium atom (Na) and one chlorine atom (Cl). According to the octet rule, all chemical elements strive to fill their outermost shell with eight electrons, which is the most stable configuration, found in noble gases. Sodium has one extra electron and chlorine is missing one, so sodium donates one electron to chlorine, leaving both atoms with an outer shell containing eight electrons and forming a strong ionic bond.  

Stem cell-based gene therapy holds promise for the treatment of devastating genetic skin diseases, but the long-term clinical outcomes of this approach have been unclear.

In a recent study, researchers evaluated a patient with a genetic skin disorder known as epidermolysis bullosa (EB) nearly seven years after he had undergone a gene therapy procedure as part of a clinical trial. The study revealed that a small number of skin stem cells transplanted into the patient's legs were sufficient to restore normal skin function, without causing any adverse side effects. 

An antioxidant called MitoQ, which was designed to try and fight damage within human cells about a dozen years ago, significantly helps symptoms in mice that have a multiple sclerosis-like disease.

Multiple sclerosis affects more than 2.3 million people worldwide and occurs when the body's immune system attacks the myelin, or the protective sheath, surrounding nerve fibers of the central nervous system. Some underlying nerve fibers are destroyed. Resulting symptoms can include blurred vision and blindness, loss of balance, slurred speech, tremors, numbness and problems with memory and concentration.