Strange diamonds from an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system may have formed shortly after the dwarf planet collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, according to scientists.

The research team says they have confirmed the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal form of diamond, in ureilite meteorites from the mantle of the dwarf planet.

Lonsdaleite is named after the famous British pioneering female crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, who was the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society.

The team—with scientists from Monash University, RM...

University of Pittsburgh researchers describe for the first time a pathway by which cells repair damaged lysosomes, structures that contribute to longevity by recycling cellular trash. The findings are an important step towards understanding and treating age-related diseases driven by leaky lysosomes.

“Lysosome damage is a hallmark of aging and many diseases, particularly neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s,” said lead author Jay Xiaojun Tan, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and member of the Aging Institute, a partnership between Pitt and UPMC. “Our study identifies a series of steps that we believe is a universal mechanism for lysosomal repair, which we named the PITT pathway as a nod to the University of Pittsburgh.”

As the c...

A thin device triggers one of quantum mechanics’ strangest and most useful phenomena. An ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, according to new research recently published in the journal Science.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the...

The wall of dense gas and dust resembles a massive winged creature, its glowing maw lit by a bright star as it soars through cosmic filaments.

An international research team on Monday revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, leaving astronomers “blown away.”

The stellar nursery is situated in the constellation Orion, 1,350 light-years away from Earth, in a similar setting in which our own solar system was birthed more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Astronomers are interested in the region to better understand what happened during the first million years of our planetary evolution.

The images were obtained as part of the Early Release Science program and involved more than 100 scientists in 18 countries, with insti...