The Petersburg Post

Wednesday, Dec 1st, 2021 - Just 89 million light-years away, in the galaxy NGC 7727, two supermassive black holes are destined to become one. New measurements that probe the heart of the galaxy have found that the nucleus consists of a binary supermassive black hole pair. It's the closest such binary we have found to date, beating out the previous record-holder of 470 million light-years by a significant margin. Moreover, the two ...

Wednesday, Dec 1st, 2021 - Solar wind may have primed comets and asteroids to release their water, researchers found. About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, the most of any known rocky planet. According to the U.S. Geological Survey , there are 332,519,000 cubic miles of water on the globe. So, this brings about an interesting question. Where did it all come from? Turns out a lot of it probably originated from space dust. In ...

Wednesday, Dec 1st, 2021 - Searching for omicron: Is NJ's testing network ready for the new COVID variant? NorthJersey.com When COVID-19 variants were first detected in New Jersey in January, the state to identify these new mutations on a large scale, causing setbacks in determining their prevalence and tracking outbreaks. But over 11 months, laboratories have made significant improvements to speed up the process. Now, with the new omicron ...

Wednesday, Dec 1st, 2021 - A Newcastle University academic has contributed to a new report which says animal welfare must be at the heart of plans to approve new breeding technologies in farming and food production. The report, "Genome editing and farmed animal breeding: social and ethical issues," is published today by The Nuffield Council on Bioethics. In the report, The Nuffield Council on Bioethics recognizes that genome editing could ...

Tuesday, Nov 30th, 2021 - AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine. To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction — and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, ...

Tuesday, Nov 30th, 2021 - "There are huge ramifications of these changes," said the lead researcher, "all of which have implications on wildlife populations and human livelihoods." Research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests rainfall will become more common in the Arctic than snowfall, and decades sooner than previously thought—findings that elicited fresh warnings about the necessity of ambitious climate ...