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Categories: Biology: Evolutionary, Space: Structures and Features

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Researchers have revealed the unique 'cheating' strategy a New Zealand insect has developed to avoid being eaten -- mimicking a highly toxic species.

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Scientists found that trout from lakes stocked decades ago in the Wind River Mountains have higher numbers of gill rakers, which are bony or cartilage structures in the gullets of fish that act as sieves to retain zooplankton and nourish the trout. The difference is likely a result of the trout adapting to the food sources of the once-fishless high-mountain lakes -- a change that has taken place in a relatively short period of time and at a rate that is generally consistent with the historic timing of stocking for each of the lakes.

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The origin of bees is tens of millions of years older than most previous estimates, a new study shows. A team led by Washington State University researchers traced the bee genealogy back more than 120 million years to an ancient supercontinent, Gondwana, which included today's continents of Africa and South America.

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Scientists showed that fixed mutations within a viral population most likely stem from how easy it is to acquire that mutation (i.e., mutation accessibility) rather than just its benefit.

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A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit. It is so close to its parent star that it experiences a consistent, torrential blast of energy, which evaporates its hydrogen atmosphere -- causing it to puff off the planet.

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Many people know that stars appear to twinkle because our atmosphere bends starlight as it travels to Earth. But stars also have an innate 'twinkle' -- caused by rippling waves of gas on their surfaces -- that is imperceptible to current Earth-bound telescopes. In a new study, researchers developed the first 3D simulations of energy rippling from a massive star's core to its outer surface. Using these new models, the researchers determined, for the first time, how much stars should innately twinkle.

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Bees and wasps have converged on the same architectural solutions to nest-building problems, according to new research.

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A new study of the strain of influenza A responsible for the 2009 H1N1 pandemic -- pdm09 -- shows that the virus has passed from humans to swine about 370 times since 2009, and subsequent circulation in swine has resulted in the evolution of pdm09 variants that then jumped from swine to humans.

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As the next generation of giant, high-powered observatories begin to come online, a new study suggests that their instruments may offer scientists an unparalleled opportunity to discern what weather may be like on far-away exoplanets.

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Young stars are rambunctious! NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the 'antics' of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. To find them, trace the bright pink and red diffraction spikes until you hit the center: The stars are within the orange-white splotch. They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars.

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Astronomers have discovered new evidence of how planets as massive as Jupiter can form.

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An international team of scientists, including astrophysicists, report on a dedicated observational campaign on the Galactic microquasar dubbed GRS 1915+105. The team revealed features of a microquasar system that have never before been seen. Using the massive Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, astronomers discovered a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) signal in the radio band for the first time from any microquasar systems.

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The spiral galaxy NGC 1532, also known as Haley's Coronet, is caught in a lopsided tug of war with its smaller neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 1531.

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Researchers have described a new species of armored reptile that lived near the time of the first appearance of dinosaurs. With bony plates on its backbone, this archosaur fossil reveals that armor was a boomerang trait in the story of dinosaur and pterosaur evolution: the group's ancestors were armored, but this characteristic was lost and then independently re-evolved multiple times later among specialized dinosaurs like ankylosaurs, stegosaurs, and others.

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Astronomers have gained new clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

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Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets.

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Current evidence suggests that microparticles of cosmic dust collide and stick together to form larger dust aggregates that may eventually combine and develop into planets. Numerical models that accurately characterize the conditions required for colliding microparticle aggregates to stick together, rather than bounce apart, are therefore paramount to understanding the evolution of planets. Recent modeling suggests that dust aggregates are less likely to stick together after a collision as the size of the aggregates increases.

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Machine-learning system effectively predicts emergence of prominent variants.

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Researchers look at water in galaxies, its distribution and in particular its changes of state from ice to vapor, as important markers indicating areas of increased energy, in which black holes and stars are formed. A new study has now revealed the distribution of water within the J1135 galaxy, which is 12 billion light years away and formed when the Universe was a 'teenager', 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang . This water map, with unprecedented resolution, is the first ever to be obtained for such a remote galaxy. The map can help scientists to understand the physical processes taking place within J1135 and shed light on the dynamics, still partially unclear, surrounding the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies themselves.

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Astronomers have found the possible 'sibling' of a planet orbiting a distant star. The team has detected a cloud of debris that might be sharing this planet's orbit and which, they believe, could be the building blocks of a new planet or the remnants of one already formed. If confirmed, this discovery would be the strongest evidence yet that two exoplanets can share one orbit.