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Freshwater crustacean Daphnia (water flea) is a common research organism in ecology, toxicology, evolutionary developmental biology, and other fields. Credit: Projecto Agua Many crustaceans, including lobsters, crabs, and barnacles, have a cape-like shell protruding from the head that can serve a variety of roles, such as a small cave for storing eggs, or a protective shield to keep the gills moist. This shell (carapace), it has been proposed, did not evolve from a similar structure in a crustacean ancestor, but emerged de novo (or suddenly) through the rather random co-optation of genes that also determine insect wings. However, in a new study from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Research Associate Heather Bruce and Director Nipam Patel provide evidence for an alternative view: The carapace, along with other plate-like structures in arthropods (crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and myriapods) all evolved. from the lateral toe lo...

WOOD HOLE, Mass. – Many crustaceans, including lobsters, crabs, and barnacles, have a cape-like shell protruding from the head that can serve a variety of roles, such as a small cave for storing eggs, or a protective shield to keep the gills moist. This shell (carapace), it has been proposed, did not evolve from a similar structure in a crustacean ancestor, but emerged de novo (or suddenly) through the rather random co-optation of genes that also determine insect wings. However, in a new study from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Research Associate Heather Bruce and Director Nipam Patel provide evidence for an alternative view: The carapace, along with other plate-like structures in arthropods (crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and myriapods) all evolved from the lateral toe lobe in a common ancestor. This evidence underpins their proposal for a new concept of how new structures evolve – which suggests that they are not so new. A study of the carapace of Daphnia crustacea...

One of the most extreme stars in the Milky Way has just gotten even weirder. Scientists have measured the mass of a neutron star named PSR J0952-0607, and found that it is the most massive neutron star ever discovered, registering 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. If true, this is very close to the theorized upper mass limit of about 2.3 solar masses for neutron stars, which is an excellent laboratory for studying these ultra-dense stars at what we think are on the verge of collapse, in hopes of better understanding. strange quantum states of the matter they are made of. “We know roughly how matter behaves at nuclear densities, such as in the nuclei of uranium atoms,” said astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. “A neutron star is like one giant core, but when you have one and a half solar masses of this material, which is about 500,000 Earth masses of cores all stuck together, it’s not at all clear how they’re going to behav...

PPPL main engineer Yuhu Zhai with high temperature superconducting magnet drawing, which can improve the performance of spherical tokamak fusion device. Credit: Kiran Sudarsanan / PPPL Transportation Service Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found a way to build powerful magnets that are smaller than ever, helping design and construct machines that can help the world harness the power of the sun to create electricity. without producing the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Scientists have found a way to build high-temperature superconducting magnets made of materials that conduct electricity with little or no resistance at warmer temperatures than before. Such a powerful magnet would fit more easily into the tight spaces inside the spherical tokamak, which is shaped more like a nucleated apple than a conventional donut tokamak, and is being explore...

Neutron star collisions are an opportunity to see what’s inside these incredible objects Astronomers have for the first time been able to detect collisions with dead suns known as neutron stars, thanks to a powerful new telescope. Neutron star collisions are key to our understanding of the Universe. They are thought to have created the heavy metals that formed the stars and planets like us billions of years ago. The light from the collision was only visible for a few nights so telescopes had to race to find it. Astronomers observed one of these collisions in 2017, but most found it by luck. The British Gravity Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), located above the clouds on the Spanish volcanic island of La Palma will now systematically hunt them down. “When the really good detection comes along, everything has to be done to the max,” Prof Danny Steeghs, from the University of Warwick, told me in La Palma. “Speed ​​is of the essence. We are looking for somethi...

This is one of the new images of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach on March 26, 2022. Credit: ESA Astronomers have proposed a concept mission to fly a neutrino observatory into orbit around the sun to get a better picture of what’s going on in the sun’s core. Astronomers have very few tools to peer into the heart of the sun. Fortunately, the constant nuclear reactions taking place in the sun’s core as hydrogen combine to form helium release a relentless flood of neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that almost never interact with matter. On Earth we’ve built giant detectors to catch the occasional neutrino. Astronomers have used these neutrinos to understand the nuclear processes taking place inside the sun and to probe the edges of known physics. But our observatories on Earth are basically limited because our planet is so far from the sun. So what if we took the ne...

It’s nice to know that someone actually gets paid to watch the night sky to make sure that at least we’ll be notified if an asteroid is about to hit Earth. Technology and near-Earth surveys have advanced enough that the possibility of an asteroid the size of a planet-killer appearing out of nowhere, as is so prevalent in modern media depictions, is highly unlikely. Even the smaller ones, which would only annihilate a city or part of a continent, received enough attention to know whether they posed a threat or not. And ahead of Asteroid Day 2022, which happens on June 30, the ESA is proud to announce that they can remove one of the most threatening asteroids from their list of potential impacts. The asteroid, known as 2021 QM1, was first detected at the Mount Lemmon observatory on August 28, 2021. It was only one of about a dozen near-Earth asteroids discovered that night and did not initially raise any alarm. But follow-up observations put it on a potentially near-miss path...

The story of the origin of our solar system is quite well known. It reads like this: The sun began as a protostar in the “solar nebula” more than 4.5 billion years ago. Over the course of several million years, the planets emerged from this nebula and disappeared. Of course, the devil is in the details. For example, how long exactly did the protoplanetary disk that gave birth to the planet last? A paper was recently submitted to Geophysical Research Journal take a closer look at the planet-born crèche. In particular, it shows how the magnetism of the meteorite helps tell the story. About That Solar Nebula About 5 billion years ago, the environment of our galaxy was a nebula made of hydrogen gas and some dust. It provided the seeds of what became our solar system. Somehow, this part of the molecular cloud started to clump together on its own. Perhaps a passing star sent shockwaves and ripples through the dust and caused it to compress. Or, maybe a nearby supernova...