Date Time
Deep Ocean Reveals Surprising Discovery about Immunity
In the largest and deepest marine protected area in the world, a team of ocean experts peered over 3,000 meters below the surface to find new types of microbial organisms that people would have never encountered before. These microbes-types of bacteria-could now open up doors to new ways of understanding how the immune system responds to completely foreign invaders.
A collaborative study between the Rotjan Marine Ecology Lab at Boston University, the Kagan Lab at the Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital, the government of Kiribati, and others has found that there are some bacteria so foreign to humans that our immune cells can’t register that they exist, overriding the long-held belief of universal immunity, or that our cells can recognize any bacteria they interact with. Rather, the study found, some bacteria are solely defined by their local habitat or surroundings. Their findings were published F
Top 10 Species Discovered in 2020 Include a Harry Potter Snake and Desert-Dwelling Broccoli
While
homo sapiens sheltered in place, 2020 also saw explorers diving out into the wilds of the world, finding astonishing new species never before seen by science.
Some slither, others skitter. There are monkeys, snakes, spiders, frogs, plants, and even the longest animal ever recorded.
They were found all across the continents; from Madagascar to Bolivia, from India to Namibia, from Iran to Australia, and from North Carolina, to Heathrow Airport.
There are plenty of reasons to feel like 2020 deserves to be remembered with a shutter, but the colors and characters of these newcomers to scientific textbooks will give you something nice to remember the year by.
PALO ALTO, Calif. (KGO) Scientists have long noted that we ve mapped more of the moon s surface than we have the floor of our oceans. That is about to change. The daunting task has a small team of researchers off the Australian coast spending the New Year, battling high winds and churning seas. Their work has ties to the Bay Area.
Scientists off the east coast of Australia are pinging in the New Year. They re sending out sonar beams from a research vessel as a 10-year international effort gets underway to map the entire ocean floor. We have a huge task ahead of us, said Dr. Helen Bostock, an oceanographer on the faculty at the University of Queensland in Australia. So far, less than 20 percent of the oceans have been mapped, and so we still have 80 percent to go.
9 Things You Should Know About Events and Discoveries in 2020
Over the past 12 months, a global pandemic caused the world to come to a near standstill. Yet despite COVID-19 being the primary event of 2020, numerous other significant discoveries and events occurred during this disruptive year. Here are nine such events and discoveries from 2020 you may not have heard much about.
1. Due to the complexity of vaccine development, creating a new vaccine can take more than a decade. The fastest vaccine developed before 2020 was for the mumps, and that process took four years. But the biotech company Moderna was able to create a COVID-19 vaccine in just two days. The speed of creation was due in large part to advances in technology and biomedical knowledge. For instance, a key first step in creating modern vaccines is determining the genetic sequence of the virus. The first complete genome sequence from a free-living organism (Haemophilus Influenzae) only occurred in 1995. When the coron
The Wildest Animal News From 2020
These are the stories about birds, bugs, fish and mammals that surprised and delighted readers the most this year.
Credit.Lily Benson
Dec. 23, 2020
It was a rough year for Homo sapiens. The coronavirus pandemic highlighted our vulnerabilities in a natural world that is constantly changing. Many were pushed to find new levels of resolve and creativity to survive.
While humans quarantined, birds, bugs, fish and mammals put their own ingenuity on display. The year 2020 was when murder hornets appeared in the United States, scientists introduced us to an octopus as cute as the emoji and researchers discovered that platypuses glow under a black light.