All Subjects

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) found that there is an exponential increase in the sale of infant and baby formula, which is concerning because of the impact it can have on the health of babies. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia discovered that ‘Pelagibacterales,’ a group of bacteria, have a significant role to play in maintaining the stability of the Earth’s atmosphere by increasing the cloud droplets. This bacteria, which are the smallest genomes of all free-living organisms, are found in abundance on the Earth. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers from Cardiff University's Systems Immunity Research Institute found that T-cells – a type of white blood cell that defends humans from germs – get activated by some types of bacteria, leading the T-cells to attack beta cells that produce insulin. Read more about their research here.

The interaction between the sun and Earth’s magnetic fields sometimes cause storms of explosive nature in the space near Earth. Understanding these interactions is important to help protect and improve the performance of satellites. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission’s results have provided the first direct and detailed observation of magnetic reconnection. Read more about these findings here.

Researchers from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology worked together to find out whether the Asian Zika virus led to microcephaly in mammals. They injected the virus directly into the brains of fetal mice and found that embryos at a nascent stage failed to survive the virus attack. Read more about their research here.

A team of engineers and marine biologists at the University of California, San Diego, led by Michael Frank, a Ph.D. candidate at the Jacobs School of Engineering, have designed a space exploration device modeled on sea urchin’s mouth and teeth. Read more about their research here.

How any species inhabit Earth? The Indiana University researchers have answered this daunting question by collecting large datasets and basing their estimate using scaling laws. Read more about these findings here.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for more than a decade, has revealed that Saturn’s moon Titan has a sea filled with liquid methane. It is known that Saturn’s atmosphere consists primarily of methane, and the extreme cold weather on the planet have led researchers to speculate that it could have reserves of hydrocarbon in the form of seas. This was proved right by the Cassini spacecraft’s data which showed that more than 1.6 million square kilometers of the planet’s surface is covered in liquid. Read more about these findings here.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California, led by stem cell researcher Lindsey Barske, have identified the molecular signals that control the development of the vertebrate face. They studied the early development in zebrafish using hi-tech genetic, genomic and imaging tools to understand how facial patterns form. Read more about their research here.

The carbon dating processes require an accelerator mass spectrometer that can measure the amount of carbon-14, or radiocarbon, present in bones, wood, fabrics or anything of biological origin. However, the process can take up to several weeks as there are only about 100 facilities in the world that have spectrometers. Researchers from Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO) in Italy have devised a new approach called saturated-absorption cavity ring-down (SCAR) that can cut down on the time and expense it takes to carbon date samples. Read more about their research here.