Evidence that Venus is Volcanically Active

Image from research paper.
The panels show the east-looking first (A) and west-looking second (B) images of the vent.

Venus appears to have volcanic activity, according to a new research paper that offers strong evidence to answer the lingering question about whether Earth’s sister planet currently has eruptions and lava flows.

Venus, although similar to Earth in size and mass, differs markedly in that it does not have plate tectonics. The boundaries of Earth’s moving surface plates are the primary locations of volcanic activity.

New research by University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute research professor Robert Herrick revealed a nearly 1-square-mile volcanic vent that changed in shape and grew over eight months in 1991...

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Memories could be lost if Two Key Brain Regions Fail to Sync together, study finds

Neurons brain cells

Learning, remembering something, and recalling memories is supported by multiple separate groups of neurons connected inside and across key regions in the brain. If these neural assemblies fail to sync together at the right time, the memories are lost, a new study led by the universities of Bristol and Heidelberg has found.

How do you keep track of what to do next? What happens in the brain when your mind goes blank? Short-term memory relies on two key brain regions: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The researchers set out to establish how these brain regions interact with one another as memories are formed, maintained and recalled at the level of specific groups of neurons. The study, published in Current Biology, also wanted to understand why memory sometimes fails.

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Controlling the Degree of Twist in Nanostructured Particles for the First Time

For the first time, controlling the degree of twist in nanostructured particles
The graphic shows light waves approaching the twisted metal bowties and being turned by the bowtie shape. The ability to control the degree of twist in a curling, nanostructured material could be a useful new tool in chemistry and machine vision. Credit: Ella Maru Studio

Micron-sized “bow ties,” self-assembled from nanoparticles, form a variety of different curling shapes that can be precisely controlled, a research team led by the University of Michigan has shown.

The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for machine vision and producing medicines.

While biology is full of twisted structures like DNA, known as chiral structures, the degree of twist is locked in—trying to change it breaks the structure...

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Where did Earth’s Water come from? Not Melted Meteorites, according to scientists

The dashed white line in this illustration shows the boundary between the inner solar system and outer solar system, with the asteroid belt positioned roughly in between Mars and Jupiter. A bubble near the top of the image shows water molecules attached to a rocky fragment, demonstrating the kind of object that could have carried water to Earth. Credit: Jack Cook/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Click image to download hi-res version.

Water makes up 71% of Earth’s surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question...

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