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Category: biological

Impacts from meteors may have helped start life on Earth by creating hydrothermal vents

Meteor impacts may have helped spark life on Earth, creating hot, chemical-rich environments where the first living cells could take shape, according to research integrated by a recent Rutgers University graduate. Shea Cinquemani, who earned her bachelor’s degree from the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences in May 2025, has published a paper based on research she started during the spring of her senior year.

“No one knows, from a scientific perspective, how life could have been formed from an early Earth that had no life,” said Shea Cinquemani, who earned her bachelor’s degree in marine biology and fisheries management from the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences in May 2025. “How does something come from nothing?”

Cinquemani is the lead author of a review, published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, examining where life may have first formed on Earth. The paper focuses on hydrothermal vents, places where hot, mineral-rich water flows through rock and emerges into surrounding water, creating the chemical conditions and energy gradients needed for complex reactions.

How Hair Cells in the Ear Actively Respond to Sound

Tiny hair cells located in the inner ear help us hear and maintain balance. On top of each hair cell is a hair bundle, a sensory organelle that converts mechanical input from sound or movement into electrical output, which is then passed on to the brain. Previous research has shown that hair bundles aren’t simply passive entities. They actively oscillate to amplify weak audio signals or to tune into specific frequencies. Biologists have also observed bundles oscillating in the absence of stimuli. Models have tried to capture this bundle behavior, but the connection between active oscillation and the audio response has not been made clear. A new thermodynamic model of energy flow within hair bundles suggests that they work like tiny machines [1]. Depending on the stimulus, the bundles either extract power from incoming sound waves or inject power into them—corresponding, respectively, to sensing or amplifying a stimulus.

In the inner ear, an active process called cochlear amplification helps humans (and other mammals) hear the faintest of sounds. When a faint whisper enters the ear, for example, the outer rows of hair cells respond to the weak signal by moving in a way that amplifies the sound waves for the inner hair cells, which are the ones that send a message to the brain. Molecular motors propel the movement or twisting of hair bundles required for these functions.

Previous work has explored how much energy a hair cell consumes to drive bundle oscillations, but the resulting models have typically assumed that bundles are moving spontaneously—that is, in the absence of external stimuli. Roman Belousov from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany and his colleagues have developed a stochastic thermodynamic model that includes an energy input from sound waves. “Instead of just looking at how a hair bundle moves on its own, we wanted to add what happens when it interacts with sound,” Belousov says.

Chiral metasurfaces guide twisted light into free space

Light can carry angular momentum in two distinct ways. One comes from polarization, which describes how the electric field rotates. The other comes from the shape of the wavefront itself, which can twist like a corkscrew as it travels. This second form, known as orbital angular momentum, has attracted wide interest because it allows light to encode information, interact with matter in new ways, and probe physical and biological systems. Despite this promise, producing well-defined twisted light in free space remains technically challenging, especially when the light originates from small or localized sources.

Recent research reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus demonstrates a route to generating twisted light beams by combining a dielectric multilayer with a patterned metallic surface. The work shows that surface-bound light waves can be converted into free-space beams with controlled angular momentum and polarization. Importantly, the approach avoids several limitations of earlier designs and points toward future integration with single-photon emitters.

Many existing methods for generating orbital angular momentum rely on reshaping a laser beam using holograms, liquid-crystal plates, or patterned films known as metasurfaces. While effective for large, externally illuminated beams, these approaches struggle when light must be generated directly on a chip or from nanoscale emitters such as quantum dots or single molecules. Such sources cannot uniformly illuminate a structure or arrive at a precisely defined angle, making efficient beam shaping difficult.

Strained liquid crystals steer soliton ‘bullets’ along two diagonal paths

In physics, some waves behave in a surprising way: instead of spreading out and fading, they hold their shape as they travel at constant speeds. These unusual waves, called solitons, have interested scientists since they were first observed in canals in the 19th century. Today, researchers study solitons in everything from optical fibers to biological systems.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that these stubborn waves can be guided and steered through materials by carefully designing internal strain, offering new ways to move energy or information at microscopic scales.

AlphaFold Can Now Predict Protein Complex Structures at Scale

As proteins perform complicated tasks inside a cell, they rarely act alone.

Now, researchers have added structural information for almost 2 million protein complexes to the AlphaFold Database.

In an ambitious collaboration, researchers added 1.8 million high-confidence protein complex structure predictions to the AlphaFold Database, accelerating molecular biology research.

New NMR method allows the observation of chalcogen bonds

Toward the right side of the periodic table below oxygen, are the chalcogens, or “ore-forming” elements. The chalcogens that occur naturally, including sulfur, selenium and tellurium, are all somehow involved in biological processes. Molecules containing sulfur, like the antioxidant glutathione, play a central role in redox regulation, the balance between oxidation and reduction that is essential for maintaining cellular health.

Recent studies have suggested that the heavier selenium and tellurium are active in biological redox systems as well, but the instability of molecules containing chains of different chalcogen atoms has made structural analysis difficult.

Traditional methods have largely relied on mass spectrometry, which cannot be used to directly observe molecular bonds. This limitation motivated a team of researchers at Kyoto University to develop a method that would allow them to more clearly observe chains of chalcogens. The paper is published in the journal ACS Measurement Science Au.

Recent Scientific findings that support the Phantom Primal Eye as a comprehensive Biological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

The Primal Eye (the pineal/ parietal eyes predates the paired lateral eyes, so “third eye” is technically a misnomer) theory breaks this deadlock by moving the goalposts from philosophy to evolutionary physiology. It suggests that consciousness is

Superconducting chip generates tunable terahertz waves for compact imaging

A tiny crystal chip which uses terahertz radiation to see clearly through a wide range of materials could find applications in health care, biological research, and security screening. Researchers from Scotland and Japan have developed a lightweight superconducting chip, which they say could unlock the full potential of terahertz imaging technologies and lead to the development of more powerful and portable devices.

The team’s paper, titled “Terahertz Imaging System with On-Chip Superconducting Josephson Plasma Emitters for Nondestructive Testing,” is published in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.

Terahertz radiation lies between the microwave and infrared frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. It passes easily and harmlessly through a wide range of materials, and can be used to identify the characteristic “fingerprint” of molecules and biological materials as it does so, allowing them to be detected and analyzed.

Mysterious Structure on Mars Looks Uncannily Like an Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

It would be tempting to assume there’s nothing much of note happening on Mars, but that dusty rusty planet has a lot of interesting stuff going on.

Most of it has to do with rocks. Mars has a lot of rocks. In fact, Mars has so many rocks that have undergone all sorts of weathering over the eons that, occasionally, it manages to produce something that looks a bit like an artificial or biological structure, if you squint.

It’s a bit like monkeys and typewriters. We may not get Shakespeare, but every once in a while, we might see some rocks that look enough like bugs to fool an entomologist.

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