Southwest Research Institute has collaborated with Yale University to summarize the scientific community’s notable progress in advancing the understanding of the formation and evolution of the inner rocky planets, the so-called terrestrial planets. Their paper focuses on late accretion’s role in the long-term evolution of terrestrial planets, including their distinct geophysical and chemical properties as well as their potential habitability.

The Review paper is published in the journal Nature.

Solar systems form when clouds of gas and dust begin to coalesce. Gravity pulls these elements together, forming a central star, like our sun, surrounded by a flattened disk of consolidating materials...

UM-led study explores how sea cucumber sugars could be used in cancer therapy. Sea cucumbers are the ocean’s janitors, cleaning the seabed and recycling nutrients back into the water. But this humble marine invertebrate could also hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer.

A sugar compound found in sea cucumbers can effectively block Sulf-2, an enzyme that plays a major role in cancer growth, according to a University of Mississippi-led study published in Glycobiology.

“Marine life produces compounds with unique structures that are often rare or not found in terrestrial vertebrates,” said Marwa Farrag, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the UM Department of BioMolecular Sciences.

“And so, the sugar compounds in sea cucumbers are unique...

Researchers at Boise State University have developed a novel, environmentally friendly triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that is fully printed and capable of harvesting biomechanical and environmental energy while also functioning as a real-time motion sensor. The innovation leverages a composite of Poly (vinyl butyral-co-vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) (PVBVA) and MXene (Ti3C2Tx) nanosheets, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional TENGs that often rely on fluorinated polymers and complex fabrication.

TENGs are innovative energy-harvesting devices that convert mechanical energy into electricity using the triboelectric effect. They were invented by Prof...

An international team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison has produced the most accurate measurement of the gases swirling around young stars and how their mass changes over time. The discovery joins many pieces of a puzzle that may reveal which kinds of planets form—rocky Earth-types, gas giants like Jupiter, or balls of ice in the Neptune mold—as star systems mature.

The researchers used an array of 66 massive radio telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, perched at 16,000 feet in the Chilean Andes Mountains, to study the disks of gas spinning in the gravity of each of 3...