Thousands of fossilized bones from a Cretaceous-period bonebed in Wyoming, the United States, offer rare physical evidence that Tyrannosaurus rex fed on the carcasses of a duck-billed dinosaur species called Edmontosaurus annectens.
The post Tyrannosaurus rex Scavenged Duck-Billed Dinosaurs in Ancient Wyoming, Bite Marks Reveal appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Paleontologists in Uruguay have identified a new species of aeolosaurine titanosaur from a pair of remarkably well-preserved tailbones unearthed in the 1980s near the Uruguay River.
The post Paleontologists Discover New Species of Titanosaur in Uruguay appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Anthony Albanese will deliver a landmark speech on AI this week as MPs are torn between attracting datacentre investment and protecting the rights of creatives
When Anna Funder stood before a pack of journalists at Parliament House this month, she presented herself not just as a writer but also a “victim of crime”.
The Stasiland author was using the analogy to illustrate how technology companies have flagrantly “hoovered up” her literary works for their own profit.
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© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images
© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images
© Composite: Victoria Hart/AAP/Getty Images
Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space—60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts—died on Wednesday at 87 years old.
Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the Mercury 13), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same physical and psychological tests as the United States' first spacemen.
Despite performing as well or better than their male counterparts, though, the Lovelace Woman in Space Program was conducted separately from NASA, and the space agency required that its astronauts be test pilots with jet time. The US military, however, did not accept women into its flight programs.
© Blue Origin
Here's an observing guide to both familiar and lesser-known deep-sky objects that inhabit our galaxy's equatorial zone.
The post Steamy Nights at the Galactic Equator appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
A team of physicists set out to recreate a 60-year-old quantum mystery using a large water tank. While their experiment produced the expected results, it also revealed an unexpected behavior in the water.
The experiment centered on the Aharonov–Bohm effect, a strange quantum phenomenon where electrons respond to a magnetic field even when they never actually pass through it. First predicted back in 1959, this effect has been notoriously difficult to confirm because the changes it causes in electron waves are incredibly subtle.
Instead of using electrons and a particle accelerator, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), along with collaborators in Oslo and Chile, recreated the effect using water waves, making an otherwise invisible quantum effect visible in a tabletop experiment. The team reported their findings in Communications Physics.
“With waves traveling the opposite direction, you see a mirror image pattern,” says Jonas Rønning, co- author and former postdoc in the OIST unit. “The question for us was, what happens if you send waves from both directions at the same time? We thought that the patterns might cancel each other out, or both pitchfork-like patterns would be visible, but our intuition was completely wrong.”
The researchers constructed a custom tank, created a vortex at its center, and sent waves from opposite sides to meet in the middle. They used a high-speed camera to observe how the waves interacted on the water’s surface.
Without a vortex, the peaks and troughs remain in place. When the vortex is there, the standing wave breaks down. The vortex shifts the phase of the waves as they travel around it, altering the standing-wave interference pattern and creating rotating nodal lines. These are lines of momentarily flat water that spiral outward and turn in the opposite direction of the vortex.
“This was something new and unexpected,” says Aditya Singh, a PhD student in the Nonlinear and Non-equilibrium Physics Unit and co-first author of the study. “That’s what makes this fluid analogue system so valuable. It reveals topological effects — wave behaviors that occur across the whole system — that can’t be seen in quantum experiments.”
At first, the team suspected their equipment was causing the rotating lines. However, the same pattern also appeared in their computer simulations.
“When we first saw these lines, we thought they were an experimental artifact,” Singh says. “But when we also saw them in our simulations, we dropped everything and quickly worked out the mathematics underlying how they arise.”
As the strength of the vortex increased, more rotating nodal lines appeared, always moving in the direction opposite to the vortex. The study showed that the number of lines is quantized, meaning it is fixed to whole-number values determined by the vortex’s circulation. In other words, the topology of the vortex determines how many rotating nodal lines appear. This effect was observed across the entire wave field, not just near the vortex core as earlier models suggested.
This finding differs from Berry’s original experiment, which observed changes only near the vortex. In this case, the researchers discovered a non-local effect, a pattern that covers the entire system and depends on the overall setup. Instead of being limited to the area near the vortex, the rotating nodal lines appeared throughout the whole standing-wave pattern.
Although the practical uses of these newly discovered nodal patterns are not yet clear, the study shows that simple classical systems can reveal behaviors that are challenging to observe in quantum experiments. By making these effects visible, the researchers plan to explore more complex wave systems that could offer new insights into superconductivity and other quantum phenomena.
“One direction is to make the system more complex by introducing multiple vortices and arranging them into a lattice,” senior author Mahesh Bandi says. “That setup would mirror conditions in some superconducting materials, with the water waves behaving like a supercurrent. We don’t yet know what we’ll see — and that’s exactly what makes it worth doing.”
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
A groundbreaking study unveils how the ARP2/3 complex orchestrates the dynamic behavior of neurites, providing fresh insights into neuronal growth and polarity. Researchers utilized advanced optogenetic tools to manipulate RAC1, an upstream regulator of ARP2/3, revealing spatially distinct roles of actin assembly in neuronal morphology.
By employing photoactivatable RAC1 (PA-RAC1), the team demonstrated that ARP2/3-mediated actin assembly at neurite tips promotes growth cone activation and neurite extension. Local activation of PA-RAC1 triggered robust growth cone dynamics, driving neurite elongation. Conversely, activation of a dominant-negative RAC1 mutant led to collapse of the growth cone and neurite retraction, underscoring ARP2/3’s role in sustaining neurite advancement.
Intriguingly, PA-RAC1 activation at the soma induced lamellipodia formation reminiscent of nascent actin waves, which were associated with neurite retraction events. This phenomenon mirrored intrinsic cellular behaviors where somatic actin waves correspond with retracting neurites. The study elegantly showed that the emergence of these waves reduced somatic actin patch intensity, indicating a tightly regulated cytoskeletal oscillator mechanism.
The authors further explored the effects of ARP2/3 inhibition using CK-666 perfusion at distinct cellular locales. When applied over the soma and proximal neurites, CK-666 induced neurite retraction, whereas neurites outside this region continued growing unabated. Notably, actin waves were initiated in neurites outside the inhibited zone, propagating retrogradely toward the soma but dissipating upon entering CK-666-exposed areas. This highlights a spatial dependence of ARP2/3 activity for wave initiation and propagation.
Remarkably, simultaneous activation of PA-RAC1 at multiple growth cones revealed competitive dynamics in actin assembly, with enhanced growth cone activity limited to one or two sites. This suggests an intrinsic cellular mechanism balancing cytoskeletal resources and neurite growth across the complex neuronal arborization.
Together, these findings articulate a dual role for ARP2/3: driving actin wave initiation at the soma that triggers neurite retraction, and supporting growth cone expansion at neurite tips to promote extension. This oscillatory interplay mediated by ARP2/3 and RAC1 underscores the cytoskeleton’s fundamental role in establishing neuronal polarity.
This study not only provides a mechanistic framework for how neurons spatially regulate growth and retraction but also suggests that intrinsic cytoskeletal oscillators underpin the dynamic remodeling necessary for proper neuronal circuit formation. These insights pave the way for future investigations into cytoskeletal dysregulation in neurodevelopmental disorders and neuronal regeneration strategies.
The precise spatial control of actin dynamics mediated by ARP2/3 complex activity advances our understanding of neuronal development, highlighting how local cytoskeletal modulators can dictate overall neuronal architecture through oscillatory growth behaviors.
Subject of Research: Neuronal cytoskeletal dynamics and polarity establishment
Article Title: An intrinsic cytoskeletal oscillator establishes neuronal polarity
Article References:
Lin, Tc., Coles, C.H., Alfadil, E. et al. An intrinsic cytoskeletal oscillator establishes neuronal polarity. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10755-6
Image Credits: AI Generated
Suspicions grow in Lanarkshire that local people have been misled on supposed benefits of the huge development
Revealed: landmark Scottish AI project has no prospect of meeting renewables promise
What are Britain’s AI growth zones and are the plans feasible or ‘complete bunk’?
The promise was that a Scottish community would be transformed by massive investment and empowered to chase “the jobs of the future”. Instead, local people in Lanarkshire fear they may have to sell their properties and lose green belt land because of the errors of a badly planned AI datacentre complex, even as those jobs and investments never arrive.
Late last year, representatives of Oakes Energy Services began to knock on doors in Newarthill, a village east of Glasgow. In letters reviewed by the Guardian, they invited residents to individual meetings. They told them about plans for a solar farm, say local people, and made offers: free solar panels, tree planting, or even cash for their properties.
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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
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WASHINGTON — Vantor has chosen BAE Systems to build its next generation of high-resolution imaging satellites. The selection reunites Vantor with the former Ball Aerospace business that helped develop DigitalGlobe’s […]
The post Vantor selects BAE Systems to build next-generation imaging satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
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