A general theory describing how life depends on temperature has been lacking – until now. In a paper pubished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Jose Ignacio Arroyo, a Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, introduce a simple framework that rigorously predicts how temperature affects living things, at all scales.

“It is very fundamental,” says SFI External Professor Pablo Marquet, an ecologist at the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile, in Santiago. Marquet, Arroyo’s Ph.D. thesis advisor, also worked on the model. “You can apply this to pretty much every process that is affected by temperature. We hope it will be a landmark contribution.”

Marquet notes that such a theory could help researchers make accurate predictions in a range of a...

Eating chocolate is typically discouraged by nutritionists, as it is can be high in calories, fat and sugar. Cocoa, however, chocolate’s primary ingredient derived from the seed of the cacao plant, has been found to have numerous qualities that could be beneficial for both the body and mind.

Most notably, pure cocoa is highly nutritious and is a powerful source of antioxidants, substances that can prevent or slow down cell damage caused by free radicals. Free radicals are unstable and highly reactive molecules produced by the body when responding to environmental stresses, which are associated with aging and disease. In addition, cocoa has been found to help regulate the blood pressure and prevent cognitive decline.

Despite these potentially beneficial properties, chocolate bars...

In an important step toward bringing transparent solar cells to home windows, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a way to manufacture their highly efficient and semitransparent solar cells.

“In principle, we can now scale semitransparent organic solar cells to two meters by two meters, which brings our windows much closer to reality,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and corresponding author of a study published in Joule.

A team of researchers with affiliations to multiple institutions in the U.S. has found that the metal content of Fermi bubble high-velocity clouds does not match with material in the Milky Way’s galactic center, suggesting that at least some of the material comes from somewhere else. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their analysis of the makeup of the clouds and their conclusions.

Prior research has shown that massive lobes of plasma extend above and below the center of the galactic plane that forms the Milky Way galaxy. Prior research has also suggested that the lobes are globular gas formations which has led to their nickname—Fermi bubbles...