Discovery

Doctors in Missouri were baffled to spot a fly inside a man's intestines during a routine colon screening.Images taken during the colonoscopy and published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology show the intact fly inside the man's colon.Matthew Bechtold, the chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Missouri, told The Independent that he had prodded the fly and confirmed it was dead.Fly found in a routine colonoscopy (N. Sharma et al., American Journal of Gastroenterology, 2023)The 63-year-old patient told…

The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) located at the Devasthal Observatory in Nainital, India, has recently marked a milestone by identifying its inaugural supernova, SN 2023af. This breakthrough, detailed in a November 8 report on the arXiv preprint server, signals the ILMT's potential to unearth numerous supernovae in the years to come. These cosmic events, known for their intense luminosity and stellar explosions, offer valuable insights into the evolution of stars and galaxies, providing astronomers with…

Three New Brunswickers are enjoying an astronomical surprise: an asteroid has been named after them.It's called Mipach — using the first two letters from the names of Saint Johners Mike Powell, Paul Owen and Chris Curwin."I saw the email and the other two guys hadn't seen it yet. So I was frantically on the phone and messaging them back and forth, getting them to take a look. So it was just overwhelming," Curwin said.The asteroid is 6.37 kilometres in diameter and resides in the main belt, between the orbit of Mars and…

A research team at the Technical University of Munich has made significant progress in organic solar cell technology by incorporating organic dyes. These dyes facilitate the movement of excitons, critical for energy conversion, thus enhancing the efficiency of the solar cells. Their work opens up new possibilities for organic solar cells and light-emitting diodes, offering potential for more sustainable energy solutions.Organic dyes accelerate the transport of buffered solar energy.The sun provides vast amounts of energy…

Our Neanderthal cousins had the capacity to both hear and produce the speech sounds of modern humans, a study published in 2021 found.Based on a detailed analysis and digital reconstruction of the structure of the bones in their skulls, the study settled one aspect of a decades-long debate over the linguistic capabilities of Neanderthals."This is one of the most important studies I have been involved in during my career," said palaeoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University back in 2021."The results are solid and…

November 24, 20233 min readHeat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gasesBy Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazineAir conditioners around the world compress and vaporize environmentally damaging gases to cool and heat air. But a new heat pump technology could change all that. The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype,…

If there's one chemical that causes excitement in the search for biosignatures on other worlds, it's methane. It's not a slam dunk because it has both biotic and abiotic sources.But finding it in an exoplanet's atmosphere means that planet deserves a closer look.Methane captures scientific attention mainly because of its short duration in a planetary atmosphere. Methane can't withstand starlight for very long, at least not in terrestrial atmospheres. It succumbs to photodissociation and needs to be replenished…

Copper is not new to medicine, having been used in infection-fighting nanoparticles and implants, among many other innovations. However, it hasn’t quite been used in the way some chemists from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have achieved, and it paves the way for simpler and much cheaper drug production in the future.Using ozone, a form of oxygen, as a reagent and the metal as a catalyst, the scientists were able to break the carbon-carbon bonds of different types of organic molecules. The ozone broke the…

Quantum scientists have discovered a phenomenon in purple bronze, a one-dimensional metal, that allows it to switch between insulating and superconducting states. This switch, triggered by minimal stimuli like heat or light, is due to ’emergent symmetry’. This groundbreaking finding, initiated by research into the metal’s magnetoresistance, could lead to the development of perfect switches in quantum devices, a potential milestone in quantum technology.Quantum scientists have discovered a phenomenon in purple bronze that…

One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae—exploding stars. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their…