Untangling life's origins

Researchers in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory at the University of Illinois in collaboration with German scientists have been using bioinformatics techniques to probe the world of proteins for answers to questions ...

Why are there so many species of beetles and so few crocodiles?

There are more than 400,000 species of beetles and only two species of the tuatara, a reptile cousin of snakes and lizards that lives in New Zealand. Crocodiles and alligators, while nearly 250 million years old, have diversified ...

Two Solar System puzzles solved

Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, ...

Rewriting the Organofluorine Playbook

(Phys.org) -- Sometimes it is easy to overgeneralize, to conclude that simply because a group of things are pretty much all the same, they're identical in all respects, even interchangeable. But such assumptions can cause ...

Nanotube growth theory experimentally confirmed

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, has experimentally confirmed a theory by Rice University Professor Boris Yakobson that foretold a pair of interesting properties about nanotube growth: That ...

First stars in universe were not alone

The first stars in the universe were not as solitary as previously thought. In fact, they could have formed alongside numerous companions when the gas disks that surrounded them broke up during formation, giving birth to ...

Rice physicists find reappearing quantum trios

Using atoms at temperatures colder than deep space, Rice University physicists have delivered overwhelming proof for a once-scoffed-at theory that's become a hotbed for research some 40 years after it first appeared. In a ...

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