As South Korea prepares to send a lander to the Moon by 2030, researchers are developing a rover with innovative origami-inspired wheels, which they hope will join the mission. “The wheels are made of multiple flexible strips that interlock,” PhD candidate Seong-bin Lee of the Aerospace Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (ARML) at the Korea Advanced … Read more
Are there secret underground caves on the moon? NASA has a new program that aims to find out. Although we see it in the sky most nights, the moon still holds an incredible amount of mystery. One such mystery is a large underground cave, or cavernous tube carved by ancient lava, that scientists believe extends … Read more
NEW YORK – The Draconid meteor shower will briefly light up the sky Thursday night, and won’t even keep viewers out after midnight. The shower is expected to peak at 7 p.m. MDT on Thursday, but depending on the location of viewers, the meteors will be visible until the early hours of Friday morning, according … Read more
If you’re willing to lose a little sleep tonight, there might be a good reason to go outside and look north. The Northern Lights could appear in New England overnight, thanks to a coronal mass ejection (CME), essentially a cloud of magnetized solar material speeding past Earth. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center expects a moderate … Read more
Millions of stargazers watched Jupiter disappear from the night sky on Tuesday (Oct. 6) as the moon’s thin crescent moon passed directly in front of the gas giant in a spectacular display of orbital mechanics. The complete occultation was visible in a swath of North America, West Africa and the Atlantic Ocean, where the moon … Read more
AI executives are betting big on biology. They say their big language models, which have already dramatically changed the fields of coding, software development and mathematics, can disrupt biological research in the same way. But one company’s attempt to do so has already unleashed a wave of skepticism and controversy. Anthropic, the research and artificial … Read more
Some parts of our DNA can copy themselves to new locations. Copies derived from a gene active in human brain cells appear to have taken that journey further: into a virus. The researchers found two such sequences, derived from a gene called BC200, within the molluscum contagiosum virus, which infects our skin and causes small, … Read more
About 10 to 15 million years ago, an extinct species of side-necked turtle called Chelus colombiana inhabited the vast wetlands of what is now northern South America. A recently described shell from the Peruvian Amazon suggests that the species grew to enormous sizes. An artistic reconstruction of Colombian Chelus. Image credit: Juan Giraldo. First described … Read more
Attention stargazers! The Draconid meteor shower peaks tonight (October 8) and you don’t even have to stay up late for a chance to see them. Draconid meteors can be observed from October 6 to 10 as Earth moves through the debris stream left by comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, which returns to the inner solar system once every … Read more
Draper, D. E., Grilley, D. & Soto, A. M. Ions and RNA folding. Annu. Rev. Biophys. Biomol. Struct. 34, 221–243 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.biophys.34.040204.144511 (2005).Article CAS PubMed Google Scholar Bowman, J. C., Lenz, T. K., Hud, N. V. & Williams, L. D. Cations in charge: magnesium ions in RNA folding and catalysis. Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol. 22, 262–272 … Read more