Following the 3,000th orbit of NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) aboard the International Space Station, researchers publicly released the mission’s first trove of scientific data, crucial to investigating how and why subtle changes in Earth’s atmosphere cause disturbances, as well as how these atmospheric disturbances impact+ technological systems on the ground and in space.

“We’ve released the first 3,000 orbits of data collected by the AWE instrument in space and transmitted back to Earth,” said Ludger Scherliess...

Researchers at Duke University and North Carolina State University have discovered a handful of new CRISPR-Cas systems that could add to the capabilities of the already transformational gene editing and DNA manipulation toolbox.

Of the new recruits, one system from bacteria commonly found in dairy cows shows particular promise for human health. Its efficiency is on par with the original and most widely used CRISPR-Cas system, but its small size allows it to be more easily packaged for delivery to human cells. It also can target specific gene sequences that other systems cannot, and human immune systems are unlikely to have been exposed to it.

The results appear online March 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

CRISPR-Cas9 burst onto the broader sc...

-Advancing the search for weird life on weird planets

Scientists have identified a promising new way to detect life on faraway planets, hinging on worlds that look nothing like Earth and gases rarely considered in the search for extraterrestrials.

In a new Astrophysical Journal Letters paper, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, describe these gases, which could be detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.

Called methyl halides, the gases comprise a methyl group, which bears a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, attached to a halogen atom such as chlo...

Keratinocytes produce collagen fibers, while deeper fibroblasts later modify the collagen fibers initially formed by keratinocytes. Challenging the long-standing belief that fibroblasts produce skin collagen, researchers at Okayama University have investigated collagen formation in the ‘glass-skinned’ amphibian axolotl and other vertebrates. They discovered that keratinocytes, the surface cells of the skin, are responsible for producing collagen, which is then transferred deeper to form the dermis. Later, fibroblasts migrate into this collagen layer, modifying and reinforcing its structure.

The skin consists of two primary layers...