A team of physicists, including NJIT’s Gregory Fleishman, has discovered previously undetected energy in the Sun’s coronal loops. Credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory

The Sun’s corona, invisible to the human eye except when it appears briefly as a fiery halo of plasma during a solar eclipse, remains a puzzle even to scientists who study it closely. Located 1,300 miles from the star’s surface, it is more than a hundred times hotter than lower layers much closer to the fusion reactor at the Sun’s core...

CHAnGE enables rapid generation of genome-wide yeast disruption mutants and directed evolution of complex phenotypes.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has given researchers the power to precisely edit selected genes. Now, researchers have used it to develop a technology that can target any gene in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and turn it off by deleting single letters from its DNA sequence. Such genome-scale engineering – in contrast to traditional strategies that only target a single gene or a limited number of genes – allows researchers to study the role of each gene individually, as well as in combination with other genes. It also could be useful for industry, where S. cerevisiae is widely used to produce ethanol, industrial chemicals, lubricants, pharmaceuticals and more.

Understanding and...

The particular dynamics of the instability between the giant planets kept Mars from growing to an Earth-mass planet. Credit: University of Oklahoma

A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team explains why the growth of Mars was stunted by an orbital instability among the outer solar system’s giant planets in a new study on the evolution of the young solar system. The OU study builds on the widely-accepted Nice Model, which invokes a planetary instability to explain many peculiar observed aspects of the outer solar system. An OU model used computer simulations to show how planet accretion (growth) is halted by the outer solar system instability. Without it, Mars possibly could have become a larger, habitable planet like Earth.

“This study offers a simple and more elegant solution for why Mar...

Rutgers University-New Brunswick Professor Dennis Kent with part of a 1,700-foot-long rock core through the Chinle Formation in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. The background includes boxed archives of cores from the Newark basin that were compared with the Arizona core. Credit: Nick Romanenko/Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Gravity of Jupiter and Venus elongates Earth’s orbit every 405,000 years, Rutgers-led study confirms. Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth’s orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet’s climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The findings are published onlin...