GAVNet Collaborative Curation

Two billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was still very young. However, thousands of huge galaxies, rich in stars and dust, were already formed. An international study, led by SISSA-Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, now explains how this was possible. Scientists combined observational and theoretical methods to identify the physical processes behind their evolution and, for the first time, found evidence for a rapid growth of dust due to a high concentration of metals in the distant Universe. The study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, offers a new approach to investigate the evolutionary phase of massive objects.

Thousands of different genetic mutations have been implicated in cancer, but a new analysis of almost 10,000 patients found that regardless of the cancer's origin, tumors could be stratified in only 112 subtypes and that, within each subtype, the Master Regulator proteins that control the cancer's transcriptional state were virtually identical, independent of the specific genetic mutations of each patient.

If you want to understand the real Deep State, the biggest thing you need to know is it's institutional, impersonal, and operates on a national scale.

Some have taken a stab at putting the pandemic in historical context. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Washington Post visualized the devastating plagues of history, with Covid-19 by comparison a tiny dot. (By today, tragically, it'd be a much bigger dot.) This vivid graphic ranks Covid-19 the ninth deadliest in history

Because thinking minds are different from evolving organisms and self-assembling molecules, we cannot expect them to use the same means-mechanisms like genetic drift and thermal vibrations-to overcome deep valleys in the landscapes they explore. But they must have some way to achieve the same purpose. As it turns out, they have more than just one-many more. But one of the most important is play.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

Aerosols are suspensions of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. Clouds, for example, are aerosols because they consist of water droplets dispersed in the air. Such droplets are produced in a two-step process: first, a condensation nucleus forms, and then volatile molecules condense onto this nucleus, producing a droplet. Nuclei frequently consist of molecules different to those that condense onto them. In the case of clouds, the nuclei often contain sulphuric acids and organic substances. Water vapor from the atmosphere subsequently condenses onto these nuclei.

BPA is an organic compound made from fossil fuel sources. The industrial chemical has been used to make plastics and resins since the 1950s, and products made with it are cheap to make, clear, flexible and strong. BPA can be found in a variety of products, including water bottles, storage containers and sports equipment. It's also widely used in the linings of food and beverage cans and in sales receipt paper. It's one of the most commonly synthesized chemicals today with more than six million tons created in 2018 alone.

If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs-how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences-ecologists can piece together how energy flows through an ecosystem and how stable it is to climate change and other disturbances. Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There's just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record-and researchers' ability to piece together the food webs from the past.

A Purdue University-led team of scientists has evidence that tomatoes may be more sensitive to these types of diseases because they've lost the protection offered by certain soil microbes. The researchers found that wild relatives and wild-type tomatoes that associate more strongly with a positive soil fungus grew larger, resisted disease onset and fought disease much better than modern plants.