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Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

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The drug candidate J147 was able to reverse memory deficits and improve several aspects of brain function in mice with advanced symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study.  

Unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators may help science learn how to stimulate tooth regeneration in people, according to a new study.

We regenerate teeth now. We grow baby teeth and then we replace those with adult teeth.  Yet most vertebrates can replace teeth throughout their lives and we cannot, despite the lingering presence of dental lamina, a band of epithelial tissue crucial to tooth development. Because alligators have well-organized teeth with similar form and structure as mammalian teeth and are capable of lifelong tooth renewal, the authors reasoned that they might serve as models for mammalian tooth replacement. 

Detecting alien worlds is a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). 

A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet and the planet they found, Kepler-76b, was identified by the BEER algorithm; an acronym for relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations. BEER was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at Tel Aviv University in Israel and is a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

We all know that the Earth is in constant motion, rotating beneath our feet, but new research in Nature Geoscience reveals that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet and is frequently speeding up and slowing down.

Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years and discovered that not only did the inner core rotate at a different rate to the mantle – the layer between the core and the crust that makes up most of the planet’s interior – but its rotation speed was variable.
Rather than Draconian measures to cut emissions, which will impact people in various regions and economic spheres unfairly, a better solution may be to simply keep places cooler on hot days, which will reduce fuel needed for air conditioning.

And outer space can help, Stanford researchers say. They designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining - by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. 
The movement of nitrate through groundwater to streams can take decades to occur and that long lag time means that changes in the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer (the typical source of nitrate) may take decades to be fully observed in streams, according to a recent study.

Water quality experts have been noting in recent years that nitrate trends in streams and rivers do not match their expectations based on reduced regional use of nitrogen-based fertilizer.  The long travel times of groundwater discharge, like those documented in this study, have previously been suggested as the likely factor responsible for these observations.