Aestus Ajith

A tiny object travelling along the edge of one of Saturn’s rings could be a tiny new moon in the process of formation. Image: manjik/Shutterstock When Carl Murray and his team at Queen Mary University in London were analysing images captured by NASA’s spacecraft  Cassini , they spotted a rare, tiny object travelling around the edges of Saturn's A ring. “We have not seen anything like this before,” said astronomer Carl Murray, the lead author of the   study published in  Icarus  in a statement. “We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.” Made of ice, rock and dust, Saturn’s rings are nurseries in which all of the planet’s moons have been born, but the formation of Saturn’s 53 known moons and nine candidates may have depleted the rings of much of their moon-forming material. “What’s left is enough to keep the overall ring system alive, but not enough to allow the emergence ...

A close-up of chimney structures created in the Icy Worlds lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Chimney structures like these can be found on the sea floor, surrounding warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents. Life took root more than four billion years ago on our nascent Earth, a wetter and harsher place than now, bathed in sizzling ultraviolet rays. What started out as simple cells ultimately transformed into slime molds, frogs, elephants, humans and the rest of our planet's living kingdoms. How did it all begin? A new study from researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Icy Worlds team at NASA's Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., describes how electrical energy naturally produced at the sea floor might have given rise to life. While the scientists had already proposed this hypothesis—called "submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence of life"—the n...

Illustration of the experimental set-up. A liquid droplet is sandwiched between graphene and a SiO2/Si wafer, and drawn by the wafer at specific velocities. Inset: a droplet of 0.6 M NaCl solution on a graphene surface with advancing and … more (Phys.org) —A team of researchers at China's Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, studying graphene properties, has discovered that the act of dragging saltwater over a piece of graphene can generate electricity. In their paper published in the journal  Nature Nanotechnology , the team describes how in seeking to turn the idea of submerging carbon nanotubes in a flowing liquid to generate a voltage on its head, they came upon the idea of simply dragging water droplets across graphene instead. Because of  graphene 's unique electrical properties, researchers have been hard at work trying to determine if it can be used to generate electricity at a lower cost (and in cleaner fashion) than conventional methods. To d...

In the midst of news that engineered organs are being implanted into animals and people, researchers announce the creation of artificial blood for transplant. FLICKR,  ROB PONGSAJAPAN A new source of blood could be just around the corner: red blood cells grown from fibroblasts that have been reprogrammed into mature red blood cells in the lab. The blood, developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS), would be Type O negative, also known as universal donor blood, which currently comprises just 7 percent of the blood donor pool. “We have made red blood cells that are fit to go in a person’s body,” project leader Marc Turner, medical director at SNBTS, told  Forbes . “Before now, we haven’t really had that.” The blood is created by dedifferentiating fibroblasts from an adult donor and reprogramming them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are then cultured in a bone-marrow-like environmen...

Designer Arturo Vittori says his invention can provide remote villages with more than 25 gallons of clean drinking water per day People in the region spend  40 billion hours a year  trying to find and collect water, says a group called the Water Project. And even when they find it, the water is often not safe, collected from ponds or lakes teeming with infectious bacteria, contaminated with animal waste or other harmful substances.  The water scarcity issue—which affects nearly 1 billion people in Africa alone—has drawn the attention of big-name philanthropists like  actor and Water.org co-founder Matt Damon  and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who, through their respective nonprofits, have poured millions of dollars into research and solutions, coming up with things like  a system that converts toilet water to drinking water  and a  "Re-invent the Toilet Challenge,"  among...

These extraordinary pictures of unborn baby animals inside their mother’s womb (or in some cases, eggs) are fascinating, even if somewhat creepy. But don’t let them creep you out too much because they aren’t totally real. Producer Peter Chinn used a combination of dimensional ultrasound scans, tiny cameras and computer graphics to create these truly astonishing embryonic images of unborn animals for a National Geographic documentary that aired several years ago. While not exactly photographs, they are relatively accurate depictions of what these animal fetuses do look like. But enough of that, let’s talk about the elephant in the womb. Elephant Polar bears  Snake  Dolphin  Possum  Tiger  shark  Leopard  Lemon shark  Penguin  Chihuahua  Bats (correction: These are of embryos that had been removed from the womb and preserved for many years)  Horse ...

Meet 'putnisite', a new mineral found in Western Australia. Image:  Dakota Matrix The new mineral is unique in structure and composition among the world's 4,000 known mineral species. 'Putnisite', described in  Mineralogical Magazine  by a visiting research fellow at the University of Adelaide, was found in a surface outcrop at Lake Cowan in central Western Australia. After x-raying a single crystal of the mineral, Dr Peter Elliott realised it was completely unlike anything currently known. “Most minerals belong to a family or small group of related minerals, or if they aren’t related to other minerals they often are to a synthetic compound – but putnisite is completely unique and unrelated to anything.  “Nature seems to be far cleverer at dreaming up new chemicals than any researcher in a laboratory,"  he said in a press release. Named after Australian mineralogists Andrew and Christine Putnis, Putnisite occurs as tiny crystals, no more tha...

Circles, squares, triangles, rhombi and … hemihelices? Yes, meet the hemihelix, the new shape we’ll have to learn. Image: d-e-n-i-s/Shutterstock Katia Bertoldi, a researcher at Harvard University, was trying to come up with a new type of spring. She was intertwining strips of rubber and testing different lengths and widths when she suddenly realised she had formed a shape that looked like "a corkscrew with a mirror in the middle", as described by Jason Koebler over at  Motherboard . Bertoldi and her team were baffled. They developed more experiments to confirm that indeed this was a new shape. After twisting and turning more strips of rubber bands – and even some paper clips – they confirmed their results and published them recently in the journal  PLOS One . What real applications will this corkscrew-like shape have? Researchers believe it could be used in nano devices and to create new sensors, but will have to wait and see. In the meantime watch some of...

Early hematopoietic stem cells (blue) in a blood vessel of a mouse embryo. Credit: Nancy Speck, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Genetic mutations are commonly studied because of links to diseases such as cancer; however, little is known about mutations occurring in healthy individuals. In a study published online in  Genome Research , researchers detected over 400 mutations in healthy blood cells of a 115-year-old woman, suggesting that lesions at these sites are largely harmless over the course of a lifetime. Our blood is continually replenished by hematopoietic stem cells  that reside in the bone marrow and divide to generate different types of blood cells, including  white blood cells . Cell division, however, is error-prone, and more frequently dividing cells, including the blood, are more likely to accumulate genetic mutations . Hundreds of mutations have been found in patients with blood cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML), but it is...

There is new reason to respect the diminutive male Y chromosome. Besides its long-known role of reversing the default state of being female, the Y chromosome includes genes required for the general operation of the genome, according to two new surveys of its evolutionary history. These genes may represent a fundamental difference in how the cells in men’s and women’s bodies read off the information in their genomes. When researchers were first able to analyze the genetic content of the Y chromosome, they found it had shed hundreds of genes over time, explaining why it was so much shorter than its partner, the X chromosome. All cells in a man’s body have an X and a Y chromosome; women’s have two X chromosomes. The finding created considerable consternation. The Y had so few genes left that it seemed the loss of a few more could tip it into extinction. But  an analysis in 2012  showed that the rhesus monkey’s Y chromosome had essentially the same number of genes as the...

Image of the world. Bibliothèque de France, Fr.14964, fol. 117 A 13th century bishop's theory about the formation of the universe has intriguing parallels with the theory of multiple universes. This was uncovered by the the Ordered Universe project at Durham University, which has brought together researchers from humanities and the sciences in a radically collaborative way. The project explores the conceptual world of Robert Grosseteste, one of the most dazzling minds of his generation (1170 to 1253): sometime bishop of Lincoln, church reformer, theologian, poet, politician, and one of the first to absorb, teach and debate new texts on natural phenomena that were becoming available to western scholars. These texts, principally the natural science of the greek scholar Aristotle, were translated from Arabic into Latin during the course of the 12th and 13th centuries, along with a wonderful array of material from Islamic and Jewish commentators. They revolutionised the intellect...

The same freezing which is responsible for transforming liquids into glasses can help to predict some patterns observed in prime numbers, according to a team of scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and Bristol University. At a low enough temperature, water freezes into ice by arranging its molecules into a very regular pattern called crystal. However many other  liquids  freeze not into  crystals , but in much less regular structures called glasses - window glass being the most familiar example. Physicists have developed theories explaining the freezing phenomena, and built models for understanding the properties of glasses. Now, a researcher from Queen Mary’s School of Mathematical Sciences, together with his colleagues from Bristol have found that frozen glasses may have something common with  prime numbers  and the patterns behind them. Dr Fyodorov explained: “The prime numbers are the elements, or building blocks, of arithmetic. Our work p...

The research confirmed that glasses form when their molecules get jammed into fractal 'wells,' as shown on the right, rather than smooth or slightly rough wells (left). Credit: Patrick Charbonneau Colorful church windows, beads on a necklace and many of our favorite plastics share something in common—they all belong to a state of matter known as glasses. School children learn the difference between liquids and gases, but centuries of scholarship have failed to produce consensus about how to categorize glass. Now, combining theory and numerical simulations, researchers have resolved an enduring question in the theory of glasses by showing that their energy landscapes are far rougher than previously believed. The findings appear April 24 in the journal  Nature Communications . "There have been beautiful mathematical models, but with sometimes tenuous connection to real, structural glasses. Now we have a model that's much closer to real glasses," said Patrick...