ScienceDaily: All - April 20, 2025
Today's top research news
How thoughts influence what the eyes see
A new study by biomedical engineers and neuroscientists shows that the brain's visual regions play an active role in making sense of information.
Turning down starlight to spot new exoplanets
Researchers have developed a new coronagraph that could make it possible to see distant exoplanets obscured by light from their parent stars.
Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria, the 'powerhouses' of our cells, allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth. Scientists have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate -- a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars -- into our mitochondria.
Scientists report adaptive divergence in cryptic color pattern is underlain by two distinct, complex chromosomal rearrangements, where millions of bases of DNA were flipped backwards and moved from one part of a chromosome to another, independently in populations of stick insects on different mountains.
Lake deposits reveal directional shaking during devastating 1976 Guatemala earthquake
Sediment cores drawn from four lakes in Guatemala record the distinct direction that ground shaking traveled during a 1976 magnitude 7.5 earthquake that devastated the country, according to researchers.
Seismology: How wide are faults?
Researchers posed a seemingly simple question: how wide are faults?
Scientists probe the mystery of Titan's missing deltas
New research finds that despite large rivers and seas of liquid methane, Saturn's moon Titan seems mostly devoid of river deltas, raising new questions about the surface dynamics on this alien world.
Nonalcoholic beer yeasts evaluated for fermentation activity, flavor profiles
Food scientists evaluated 11 commercially available yeast strains to identify their strengths based on chemical analysis and sensory panel opinions. Most of the yeasts that were tested are strains that have been developed or screened to not ferment maltose, the primary sugar created from malted barley in the beer-making process.
Scientists uncover quantum surprise: Matter mediates ultrastrong coupling between light particles
A team of researchers has developed a new way to control light interactions using a specially engineered structure called a 3D photonic-crystal cavity that could enable transformative advancements in quantum computing, quantum communication and other quantum-based technologies.
A new study provides solutions to the pressing need to identify factors that influence Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk or resistance while providing an avenue to explore potential biological markers and therapeutic targets. The researchers integrated computational and functional approaches that enabled them to identify not only specific genes whose alterations predicted increased AD risk in humans and behavioral impairments in AD fruit fly models but also showed that reversing the gene changes has a neuroprotective effect in living organisms.