An international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It and the galaxy it calls home, CAPERS-LRD-z9, are present 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was…
In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a captivating image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that is shaped like a hand. i> X-rays from Chandra have been combined with radio data obtained by the Australian Telescope Compact Array to reveal new structures. At the center of this image is a pulsar, a rapidly spinning…
A new treatment has been shown to significantly lower blood pressure in people whose levels stay dangerously high, despite taking several existing medicines, according to the results of a Phase III clinical trial led by a UCL Professor. Globally around 1.3 billion people have high blood pressure (hypertension), and in around half of cases the…
A new research perspective was recently published in Agingtitled “Exercise as a geroprotector: focusing on epigenetic aging.” In this perspective, led by Takuji Kawamura from Tohoku University, researchers reviewed existing evidence from scientific studies showing that regular exercise, physical activity, and fitness may influence epigenetic aging and potentially reverse it, offering a promising way to…
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have spotted a contradiction in worldwide wildfire trends: Despite a 26 percent decline in total burned area from 2002 to 2021, the number of people exposed to wildfires has surged by nearly 40 percent. The study, published on August 21 in Sciencerevealed another statistic that may…
When injured, cells have well-regulated responses to promote healing. These include a long-studied self-destruction process that cleans up dead and damaged cells as well as a more recently identified phenomenon that helps older cells revert to what appears to be a younger state to help grow back healthy tissue. Now, a new study in mice…
Over the past 50 years, rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes have soared, while sperm quality has plummeted. Driving these changes could be the increasing popularity of ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to a range of poor health outcomes. However, scientists still aren’t sure whether it’s the industrial nature of the ingredients themselves, the…
Warwick primatologists, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute, have shown that young orangutans develop their nighttime nest building skills via observational social learning — by closely watching others and then practicing these complex constructions. Nest-building is an often-overlooked behavior in great apes, but for arboreal species, a well-built nest is essential to survival. Nests…
