Aestus Ajith

Why Paternal Mitochondria Aren’t Passed On to Offspring                                                                             Caenorhabditis elegans  WIKIMEDIA,  NIH Researchers have uncovered a clue as to why a mother’s mitochondria are passed on to her offspring while the father’s are not. Studying sperm cells from the roundworm  Caenorhabditis elegans,  researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues found that a gene called  cps-6  encodes a mitochondrial endonuclease that degrades paternal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) following fertilization of an egg. Delaying this process can be fatal to the embryo, the team reported yesterday (June 23) in Science . The research “comes closest to elucidating a key development process that ...

The 4 newest elements on the periodic table have just been named Tennessee, represent! Back in January,  officials announced that four new elements had earned a permanent spot on the periodic table, with elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 rounding out the seventh row. At the time, they all had temporary names and symbols - ununtrium (Uut), ununpentium (Uup), ununseptium (Uus), and ununoctium (Uuo) - but the tyranny of the Uus is finally over, because we now have some shiny new names to get excited about.  Teams of researchers from the US, Russia, and Japan  have all been credited  with the discovery of these new elements, so have been given the naming rights - which come with some very specific criteria. As stipulated by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the organisation responsible for confirming the discovery of new elements, any new element  must be named after either : A mythological concept or character (inclu...

Big, beautiful photos of insane physics experiments chasing the 'ghost particle' Go big or go home. Scientists call it the 'ghost particle'. It has almost no mass, travels at essentially the speed of light, and evaded scientific confirmation for three decades. Meet the neutrino, which scientists hope will help them answer dozens of critical questions about the Universe, including why it's full of matter. Neutrinos are produced when radioactive elements decay. They gush out of the Sun, other stars, and even our own bodies. They also travel through huge amounts of matter without even flinching. So how do you study a particle that can pass through a light-year of lead without being stopped? With some really big experiments. Take a look: The GERmanium Detector Array - helping to uncover why we exist at all The GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) looks for neutrinos by monitoring the electrical activity inside pure Germanium crystals isolated deep...

WATCH: The world's blackest material just got even more black Scientists can't even measure it. Back in 2014 , a team of British researchers made headlines for producing the blackest material  known to science . Called Vantablack, the material was so black, it absorbed all but 0.035 percent of visible light, which means to our eyes, it was borderline invisible. Now the blackest material ever made  is even more black , with the inventors announcing that no spectrometer in the world is powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs. So far, all we know about this record-breaking material  is what's in the video above,  filmed by the Vantablack inventors at Surrey NanoSystems just moments after they removed it from the reactor. "It's resulted in a coating so black that our spectrometers can't measure it!"  the team explains . "Even running a high power laser pointer across it barely reflects anything back to the viewer. We have n...

Wonder material graphene has been turned into a superconductor Graphene: where electrons have no mass and no resistance. Researchers in Japan have found a way to make the 'wonder material' graphene superconductive - which means electricity can flow through it with zero resistance. The new property adds to graphene's already impressive list of attributes, like the fact that it's stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible.   But superconductivity is a big deal, even for graphene, because when electricity can flow without resistance, it can lead to significantly more efficient electronic devices, not to mention power lines. Right now, energy companies are  losing about 7 percent of their energy  as heat as a result of resistance in the grid.  Before you get too excited, this demonstration of superconductivity in graphene occurred at a super cold -269 degrees Celsius, so we're not going to be making power lines out of graphene an...

From Newton to Einstein: the origins of general relativity You probably don't know general relativity as well as you think you do. This article was written by Krzysztof Bolejko from the University of Sydney. It was originally published by  The Conversation. One hundred years ago in November 1915, Albert Einstein presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences his new theory of  general relativity . It is fair to say the theory turned out to be a great success. General relativity was built on Einstein’s  special relativity , which provided solutions to some of the greatest puzzles of the 19th century theoretical physics. So in order to grasp the meaning and significance of general relativity, it is worth reflecting on the state of physics in the 19th century to see how Einstein came to realise that space, time and geometry are not absolute but depend on the physical environment. The beauty of invariance In the 17th century, Isaac Newton developed a...

Scientists say they’ve found a particle made entirely of nuclear force Enter, glueball. After decades of searching, scientists say they’ve finally identified a  glueball  - a particle made purely of strong nuclear force.  Hypothesised to exist as part of the standard model of particle physics, glueballs have eluded scientists since the 1970s because they can only be detected indirectly by measuring their process of decay. Now, a team of particle scientists in Austria say they've found evidence for the existence of glueballs by observing the decay of a particle known as f0(1710). Protons and neutrons - the particles that make up everyday matter - are made of minuscule elementary particles called quarks, and quarks are held together by even smaller particles called gluons.  Also known as 'sticky particles', massless gluons are described as a complicated version of the photon, because just like how photons are responsible for exerting the force of electr...

This is the Universe’s most incredible molecule We can't live without it. This article was written by  Richard Gunderman  from the  Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis , and was originally published by  The Conversation.  It’s the second most abundant substance in the Universe. It dissolves more materials than any other solvent. It stores incredible amounts of energy. Life as we know it would not be possible without it. And although it covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, many parts of the world are in dire straits for lack of it. What is it? The answer, of course, is water. In some ways, water is one of the substances we know best, in part because it makes up 75 percent of our bodies. Every day we drink it, bathe in it, clean with it and use it to dispose of our wastes. Yet scientists are still striving to understand many of water’s remarkable properties, and the 21st century will force us to think about water like we ne...

Scientists are trialling 'hydricity' - a new power source that combines solar energy and hydrogen It's hitting unprecedented levels of efficiency. As ingenious and environmentally friendly as solar energy solutions are, they're not always as efficient as we'd like them to be - and of course, they're only generating new electricity when the Sun is out. But an international team of scientists has come up with a new type of energy system they're calling 'hydricity', which combines the power of sunlight with hydrogen fuel. There are two ways we get energy from the Sun: photovoltaic cells (the panels you see on rooftops) and solar thermal power plants, which concentrate the Sun's rays, then use the generated heat to warm up water and drive turbines using the steam that's produced. The latter method captures more of the Sun's solar spectrum, but is less efficient than a standard solar panel, and can only work in direct sunlight - w...