Astronomers from the Giant Outer Transiting Exoplanet Mass (GOT ’EM) Survey have discovered a long-period giant planet circling the 7.4-billion-year-old star Kepler-1704. An artist’s impression of the giant exoplanet Kepler-1704b. Image credit: Sci-News.com. “Giant planet migration is typically invoked to explain the present day architecture of exoplanetary systems,” University of California,...

Archaeologists say they have found a 65,000-year-old leaf point in a cave in the Swabian Jura, Germany. The 65,000-year-old leaf point from Hohle Fels Cave, Germany. Image credit: University of Tübingen. “This discovery represents the first time a leaf point has been recovered from a modern excavation, allowing us to study the fresh find with state-of-the-art methods,” said Professor Nicholas...

Paleontologists have found possible sponge body fossils in 890-million-year-old microbial reefs in northwestern Canada. If verified, they may pre-date the next-oldest undisputed sponge fossils by around 350 million years. The 890-million-year-old tube-shaped structures occluded by clear blocky calcite enclosed by cloudy calcite groundmass of slightly smaller crystals. Image credit: E.C. Turner, doi:...

Caffeine is a widely occurring plant defense chemical that occurs in the nectar of some plants, e.g., coffee and citrus, where it may influence pollinator behavior to enhance pollination. New laboratory tests show that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) locate new food sources emitting a learned floral odor more consistently if they have been fed caffeine. Feeding bumblebees caffeine helps...

The new exotic particle discovered by physicists from the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) contains two quarks and two antiquarks. Labeled Tcc+, it is the longest-lived exotic particle ever discovered and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks. An artist’s impression of Tcc+, a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark....

In a study of 336,309 UK Biobank participants, researchers found that the increased body fat incrementally leads to the increased atrophy of gray matter and consequently the higher risk of declining brain health. Mulugeta et al. found that middle to elderly age groups (37-73) gray brain matter decreased by 0.3% for every extra 1 kg/m2, which is equivalent of an extra 3 kg of weight for person of...

An analysis of the high-quality nuclear genomes previously published from three Neanderthals and one Denisovan shows that these extinct hominins were polymorphic for ABO blood groups and shared blood group alleles — different versions of the same gene — recurrent in modern sub-Saharan populations. Condemi et al. analyzed the blood types of Neanderthals and Denisovans by looking at their...

Reconstructing the emergence and weathering of Earth’s continental crust in the Archean eon is crucial for our understanding of early ocean chemistry, biosphere evolution and the onset of plate tectonics. An artistic conception of the early Earth. Image credit: Simone Marchi / NASA. Once land becomes established through dynamic processes like plate tectonics, it begins to weather and add crucial...

Insulating materials can in principle be made metallic by applying pressure. In the case of pure water, this is estimated to require a pressure of 48 Mbars (roughly 48 million times the atmospheric pressure), which is beyond current experimental capabilities and may only exist in the interior of large planets or stars. In new research, chemists from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry...