Image of the solar protoplanetary nebula. The image on the left is the structure of crystalline silica, and on the right is an electron micrograph of the amoeboid olivine aggregate the research team found in the primitive meteorite, Yamato-793261. (©NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Scientists discovered silica mineral quartz in a primitive meteorite, becoming the first in the world to present direct evidence of silica condensation within the solar protoplanetary disk. They also found ultrarefractory scandium- and zirconium-bearing minerals in the meteorite, which implies that the minerals condensed from nebular gas over a wide temperature range...

Weight scale (stock image).
Credit: © Win Nondakowit / Fotolia

In a new study, researchers at Uppsala University now demonstrate that one night of sleep loss has a tissue-specific impact on the regulation of gene expression and metabolism in humans. This may explain how shift work and chronic sleep loss impairs our metabolism and adversely affects our body composition.

Epidemiological studies have shown that the risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes is elevated in those who suffer from chronic sleep loss or who carry out shift work...

Lithium.
Credit: © vchalup / Fotolia

Chemists from the University of Waterloo have successfully resolved two of the most challenging issues surrounding lithium-oxygen batteries, and in the process created a working battery with near 100% coulombic efficiency. The new work, which appears this week in Science, proves that four-electron conversion for lithium-oxygen electrochemistry is highly reversible. The team is the first to achieve four-electron conversion, which doubles the electron storage of lithium-oxygen, also known as lithium-air, batteries.

“There are limitations based on thermodynamics,” said Linda Nazar, Canada Research Chair of Solid State Energy Materials and senior author on the project...

The snail-shell-shaped part of the inner ear that houses hair cells. Credit: Holt lab/Harvard Medical School

Scientists at Harvard Medical School say they have ended a 40-year-quest for the elusive identity of the sensor protein responsible for hearing and balance. The results of their research, reported Aug. 22 in Neuron, reveal that TMC1, a protein discovered in 2002, forms a sound- and motion-activated pore that allows the conversion of sound and head movement into nerve signals that travel to the brain – a signaling cascade that enables hearing and balance.

Scientists have long known that when the delicate cells in our inner ear detect sound and movement, they convert them into signals. Where and how this conversion occurs has been the subject of intense scientific debate...