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Categories: Biology: Botany, Space: Exploration

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Brown dwarfs are objects that straddle the dividing line between stars and planets. They form like stars, growing dense enough to collapse under their own gravity, but they never become dense and hot enough to begin fusing hydrogen and turn into a star. At the low end of the scale, some brown dwarfs are comparable with giant planets, weighing just a few times the mass of Jupiter.

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This holiday season brings surprising news about your Christmas tree. Scientists just discovered that globally, trees growing in wetter regions are more sensitive to drought. That means if your tree hails from a more humid clime, it's likely been spoiled for generations.

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Plants emit odors for a variety of reasons, such as to communicate with each other, to deter herbivores or to respond to changing environmental conditions. An interdisciplinary team of researchers carried out a study to investigate how biodiversity influences the emission of these substances. For the first time, they were able to show that species-rich forests emit less of these gases into the atmosphere than monocultures. It was previously assumed that species-rich forests release more emissions. The Leipzig team has now been able to disprove this assumption experimentally.

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A new study expands the search for life beyond our solar system by indicating that 17 exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system) could have oceans of liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, beneath icy shells. Water from these oceans could occasionally erupt through the ice crust as geysers. The science team calculated the amount of geyser activity on these exoplanets, the first time these estimates have been made. They identified two exoplanets sufficiently close where signs of these eruptions could be observed with telescopes.

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Like a shiny, round ornament ready to be placed in the perfect spot on a holiday tree, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) gleams in a new image.

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The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) spacecraft is about the size of a cereal box. It has also recorded incredibly detailed measurements of the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth.

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It may soon be time to wake up and smell the lab-grown coffee made from cultured plant cells. But it's not clear whether drinks from this product replicate coffee beans' complex flavors. Now, a study found that some of the comforting aromas and tastes of a conventional cup of coffee could be reproduced by roasting and brewing coffee cell cultures.

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While auroras occur at high latitude, the associated phenomena Steve and the picket fence occur farther south and at lower altitude. Their emissions also differ from aurora. A physics graduate student has proposed a physical mechanism behind these emissions, and a rocket launch to test the theory. She argues that an electric field in the upper atmosphere parallel to Earth's magnetic field could explain the green picket fence spectrum and perhaps Steve and the enhanced aurora.

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According to anthropologists and geologists, it's time to acknowledge humans have become the dominant force shaping the moon's environment by declaring a new geological epoch for the moon: the Lunar Anthropocene. They argue the new epoch may have dawned in 1959 when the USSR's unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 alighted on the lunar surface.

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Paleontologists are getting a glimpse at life over a billion years in the past based on chemical traces in ancient rocks and the genetics of living animals. New research combines geology and genetics, showing how changes in the early Earth prompted a shift in how animals eat.

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The extrasolar planets Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b are supposedly the home worlds of the first known exomoons. A new study now comes to a different conclusion.

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Increasing urbanization worldwide is a growing threat to biodiversity. At the same time, flowering plants are often more diverse in cities than in the countryside. This is due to flowering plants and agricultural crops, which are increasingly being grown in cities. A recent study shows that the interactions between plants and pollinators, which are important for agricultural production, are surprisingly dynamic. For example, the plant and bee species involved in pollination vary greatly between the seasons.

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Researchers re-examined a plant fossil found decades ago in Colombia and realized that it wasn't a plant at all: it's a fossilized baby turtle. It's a rare find, because juvenile turtles' shells are soft and often don't fossilize well.

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How heavy can an element be? An international team of researchers has found that ancient stars were capable of producing elements with atomic masses greater than 260, heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth. The finding deepens our understanding of element formation in stars.

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Galactic winds enable the exchange of matter between galaxies and their surroundings. In this way, they limit the growth of galaxies, that is, their star formation rate. Although this had already been observed in the local universe, an international research team has just revealed the existence of the phenomenon in galaxies which are more than 7 billion years old and actively forming stars, the category to which most galaxies belong. The team's findings thus show this is a universal process.

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In southern Germany just north of the Danube, there lies a large circular depression between the hilly surroundings: the Nördlinger Ries. Almost 15 million years ago, an asteroid struck this spot. Today, the impact crater is one of the most useful analogues for asteroid craters on early Mars. Studying the deposits of the former lake that formed in the crater is particularly informative. These deposits have been of great interest ever since NASA began exploring Martian craters for signs of water and life on Mars.

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Researchers have provided detailed maps of how 144 common invasive plants species will react to 2° Celsius of climate change in the eastern U.S., as well as the role that garden centers currently play in seeding future invasions.

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Researchers have uncovered the intricate molecular mechanism used by parasitic phytoplasma bacteria, known for inducing 'zombie-like' effects in plants.

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Through analysis of high-resolution data from a ten-meter telescope in Hawaii, researchers have succeeded in generating new knowledge about three stars at the very heart of the Milky Way. The stars proved to be unusually young with a puzzling chemical composition that surprised the researchers.

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Researchers have shown unambiguous laboratory evidence that amino acids transported in the ice plumes of Saturn's moon, Eceladus, can survive impact speeds of up to 4.2 km/s, supporting their detection during sampling by spacecraft.