Feb 25th, 2021 - The Australian researcher says it’s the only known documentation of the species. It may not be a golden goose, but a feathered friend depicted in an ancient Egyptian painting is still delighting scientists the world over. Anthony Romilio, a researcher in the Dinosaur Lab at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, believes that the speckled goose in a 4,600-year-old painting often referred to as "Egypt’s Mona Lisa" is, in fact, the only known documentation of an ancient and now-extinct species. Called Meidum Geese , the painting was discovered in the 1800s in the Chapel of ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - COVID-19 vaccine by Israel’s Clalit Research Institute published in The New England Journal of Medicine . Major study, conducted in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University, examined data on 600,000 vaccinated individuals in Israel, along with 600,000 matched unvaccinated controls. Two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 by 94% and severe disease by 92%; Single dose reduced symptomatic COVID-19 by 57% and severe disease by 62%; Vaccine effectiveness was found to be similar across age groups; B.1.1.7 variant became dominant in Israel during the study ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - Roughly 400 light years from Earth, a young star named TOI 451 travels within a river of stars. An international team of astronomers has now found three previously unknown exoplanets orbiting that star. The Pisces-Eridanus stream of stars was only recently discovered — at the end of 2018 — despite stretching across one-third of the sky. Stars within this stream average only around 3% of the age of our own solar system . “This system checks a lot of boxes for astronomers. It’s only 120 million years old and just 400 light-years away, allowing detailed observations of this young ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - The US space agency NASA released a spectacular panoramic view on Wednesday of the landing site of the Perseverance rover on Mars. The panorama shows the rim of the Jezero Crater where the rover touched down last week and the cliff face of an ancient river delta in the distance. It was taken by rotating the rover's mast 360 degrees. The mast is equipped with dual, zoomable cameras which can take high-definition video and images. The panorama is composed of 142 individual images stitched together on Earth, NASA said. New postcard from Mars: this high-definition panoramic image from 's ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - NASA has released the first HD 360-degree panorama taken by the Perseverance rover's mast-mounted cameras since it touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021 . The composite image, which was captured on the third Martian day of the mission (Sol 3), is the first of many that the rover will take as it unravels the secrets still harbored by the Red Planet. Putting a rover on Mars is a monumentally difficult task, even for the greatest minds that our planet has to offer. Years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars went into the design, construction and launch of the ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy Sciences A chemical reaction can be understood in detail at the quantum state-resolved level, through a combined study of molecular crossed beam experiments and theoretical quantum molecular reaction dynamics simulations. At a single collision condition, the molecular crossed beam apparatus is able to detect the scattering angle-resolved product with rotational state-resolution. Whereas, with accurate global potential energy surface, quantum reactive scattering theory is able to predict the corresponding reactive scattering information. ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips. The new work, reported in a paper published Thursday, Feb. 25, in the journal Nature Physics , throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A ... [Read More]

Feb 25th, 2021 - Scientists have found that known deaths of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales represent a fraction of the true death toll. This comes as the death of a calf and recent sightings of entangled right whales off the southeastern United States raise alarm. A study co-authored by scientists at the New England Aquarium has found that known deaths of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales represent a fraction of the true death toll. This comes as the death of a calf and recent sightings of entangled right whales off the southeastern United States raise alarm. The study, ... [Read More]