Wataru Kimura and colleagues at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) in Japan have discovered how the hearts of newborn marsupials retain the ability to regenerate for several weeks. Using this knowledge, the team was able to repair mouse hearts that were damaged a week after birth. The findings, published in the journal Circulation, are expected to contribute to the development of regenerative heart medicines.

Heart disease is a leading cause of human death and is associated with numerous other secondary illnesses. For humans and other mammals, damaged heart muscle—such as occurs after a heart attack—cannot be naturally repaired because matured heart-muscle cells do not regenerate...

NASA this week shared an audio clip on social media that allows you to “hear” a black hole.
No surprise, the sound is terrifying.

NASA Exoplanets, a team at the agency focused on planets and other information outside of our solar system, tweeted the 34-second clip on Sunday and said there’s a “misconception” that there is no sound in space.

But they explained that “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole.”

NASA initially released the so-called “sonification” earlier this year, explaining that researchers have “associated” the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster with sound since 2003.

“This is because astronomers discovered that pressure wave...

Collaboration builds on decades-old research to engineer advanced material. Someone taps your shoulder. The organized touch receptors in your skin send a message to your brain, which processes the information and directs you to look left, in the direction of the tap. Now, Penn State and U.S. Air Force researchers have harnessed this processing of mechanical information and integrated it into engineered materials that “think.”

The work, published today (Aug. 24) in Nature, hinges on a novel, reconfigurable alternative to integrated circuits...