Astronomers have found an exoplanet more than twice the size of Earth to be potentially habitable, opening the search for life to planets significantly larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

A team from the University of Cambridge used the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b and determined that it’s possible for the planet to host liquid water at habitable conditions beneath its hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The exoplanet K2-18b, 124 light-years away, is 2.6 times the radius and 8...

Forget what you know about bile because that’s about to change, thanks to a new discovery made by Michigan State University and published in the current issue of Nature.

Much of our knowledge about bile hasn’t changed in many decades. It’s produced in the liver, stored in our gall bladder and injected into our intestine when we eat, where it breaks down fats in our gut. In fact, the first bile acid was discovered in 1848, and the scientists who revealed the structure of bile acids in 1928 won the Nobel Prize. That’s a long time ago.

“Since then, our understanding of the chemistry of bile production in the liver was that the cholesterol backbone of the bile acid structure is lin...

Research on novel nanoelectronics devices has enabled brain neurons and artificial neurons to communicate with each other over the Internet. Brain functions are made possible by circuits of spiking neurons, connected together by microscopic, but highly complex links called synapses. In this new study, published in the scientific journal Nature Scientific Reports, the scientists created a hybrid neural network where biological and artificial neurons in different parts of the world were able to communicate with each other over the internet through a hub of artificial synapses made using cutting-edge nanotechnology. This is the first time the three components have come together in a unified network.

During the study, researchers based at the University of Padova in Italy cultivate...

A new study identifies a transition in the strong nuclear force that illuminates the structure of a neutron star’s core. Most ordinary matter is held together by an invisible subatomic glue known as the strong nuclear force – one of the four fundamental forces in nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force. The strong nuclear force is responsible for the push and pull between protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus, which keeps an atom from collapsing in on itself.

In atomic nucl...