Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team of scientists has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos.

As ground-based and space telescopes get larger and can probe the atmosphere of rocky exoplanets, astronomers need a color-coded guide to compare them and their moons to vibrant, tinted biological microbes on Earth, which may dominate frozen worlds that circle different stars.

But researchers need to know what microbes that live in frigid places on Earth look ...

The p53 protein protects our cells from cancer and is an interesting target for cancer treatments. The problem is, however, that it breaks down rapidly in the cell. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now found an unusual way of stabilising the protein and making it more potent. By adding a spider silk protein to p53, they show that it is possible to create a protein that is more stable and capable of killing cancer cells. The study is published in the journal Structure.

P53 plays a key r...

Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the UK’s University of Bath, is described today in Science Advances.

Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modelling on ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots. With further development of the concept, it may be possible to determine the shape, movement and behaviour of a soft solid not by its natural elasticity but by human-controlled activity on its surface.

The surface of an ordinary soft material always shrinks into a sphere...

The record-breaking beam is powered by a pulsar, a rapidly rotating collapsed star with a strong magnetic field.

With its tremendous scale, this beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers first discovered the beam, or filament, in 2020, but they did not know its full length because it extended beyond the edge of the Chandra detector. New Chandra observations by the same pair of researchers taken in February and November 2021 show the filament is about three times as long as originally seen. The filament spans about half the diameter of the full Moon on the sky, making it the longest one from a pulsar as seen from Earth.

“It’s amazing that a pulsar that’s only 10 mile...