Since large earthquakes are rare, cataloging the tiniest of quakes provides the researchers with a vast untapped dataset that will now allow them to dig deeper and better study the patterns and relationships between events. For areas like the U.S. Midwest, van der Lee says, template matching is also a challenge since earthquake monitoring is scarce and quakes are relatively infrequent. Without past quake templates, many true earthquake signals are left out of the data.

In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs. But in an experimental treatment, blood vessels in the pigs’ brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons.

Concerned that the predatory owl might eat the wood duck chick, Wolf contacted a raptor expert, who confirmed the duckling might be in danger. In that case, the female owl was actually able to incubate and hatch three wood duck chicks, says Artuso, who published the findings in 2007 in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. After all, wood duck eggs are not only more oblong in shape than owl eggs, they’re also about twice the volume.

Later this month, a committee of researchers from around the world will decide whether the Earth sprang into the Anthropocene, a new chapter of its history, in the year 1950. If accepted, this delineation will signal a new reality that human activities, not natural processes, are now the dominant driver of change on Earth’s surface—that carbon pollution, climate change, deforestation, factory farms, mass die-offs, and enormous road networks have made a greater imprint on the planet than any other force in the past 12,000 years. First, should the Anthropocene be added as a new epoch to the Geological Time Scale, the standard scientific timeline of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history?

Pieces of a diamond anvil cell.Photo: Ryan F. Mandelbaum (Gizmodo)
Superconductors haven’t seen widespread commercial applications due to their cost, the effort required to produce them, and perhaps reluctance by old-school companies to adopt such a radically new material, reports IEEE Spectrum. Physicist Neil Ashcroft realized in 1970 that this metallic hydrogen might be a high-temperature superconductor and, later, that materials containing mostly hydrogen plus another element mixed in, called hydrides, might also be high-temperature superconductors. Then in 2014, a team led by Russian physicist Mikhail Eremets would blow the field open by demonstrating superconductivity at temperatures a few hundred degrees above absolute zero by compressing hydrogen sulfide gas.

From a social behavior standpoint, as Sanjuán and his colleagues pointed out in their paper, the wild-type VSV’s suppression of interferon qualifies as an altruistic act because in effect the wild type sacrifices itself for the cheater. Because both the virus and the host’s interferon response spread out from cell to cell, it’s actually quite difficult to avoid the emergence of spatial structures during infection. Another aspect of social evolution of viruses that Sanjuán is investigating is why multiple viral particles sometimes gather and infect a cell together.

Emerging studies show that air pollution is linked to impaired judgement, mental health problems, poorer performance in school and most worryingly perhaps, higher levels of crime. Watch our animated version on BBC Reel: How dirty air is polluting our minds

It was in 2011 that Sefi Roth, a researcher at the London School of Economics was pondering the many effects of air pollution. Lead researcher Joanne Newbury, from King’s College London, says she cannot yet claim that her results are causal, but the findings are in line with other studies suggesting a link between air pollution and mental health.

This researcher, Katie Bouman, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the team running Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to capture visual evidence of a black hole for the first time. After astronomers released that image last week, Bouman’s spread across the internet just as rapidly, on social media and in news stories. A round of stories celebrated Bouman’s work on the algorithms that forged a mesmerizing photograph from a vat of telescope data.

Clausius’s great paper on disorder, ‘On the Moving Force of Heat’ (1850), was published the same year that he became a professor of physics at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin. In that paper, Clausius showed that change in the physical world is associated with the inevitable movement of order to disorder. If that seems like a preposterous statement, consider a glass goblet falling off a table and shattering on the floor – a transformation from order to disorder of the most obvious kind.

And while graphene is made of carbon, this new material–called borophene–is made of the element boron. But the potential of materials that are only one atom thick, like borophene and graphene, to revolutionize computing and energy continues. Before that can be realized, scientists will have to keep studying borophene’s properties and find ways to produce the material at scale.