Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the solar system was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the solar system was formed.

Just at the edge of our solar system and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud. Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travelers towards the sun, and we see them as comets with long tails. Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice.

Theoretically, the very basis of understa...

Combustion engines, propellers, and hydraulic pumps are examples of fluidic devices—instruments that utilize fluids to perform certain functions, such as generating power or transporting water.

Because fluidic devices are so complex, they are typically developed by experienced engineers who manually design, prototype, and test each apparatus through an iterative process that is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. But with a new system, users only need to specify the locations and speeds at which fluid enters and exits the device. The computational pipeline then automatically generates an optimal design that achieves those objectives.

The system could make it faster and cheaper to design fluidic devices for all sorts of applications, such as microfluidic labs-on-a-c...

Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to...

The findings shed a rare light on mitoribosomes, the unique ribosomes found within the cell’s mitochondria. Ribosomes, the tiny protein-producing factories within cells, are ubiquitous and look largely identical across the tree of life. Those that keep bacteria chugging along are, structurally, not much different from the ribosomes churning out proteins in our own human cells.

But even two organisms with similar ribosomes may display significant structural differences in the RNA and protein components of their mitoribosomes...