New Horizons' evocative farewell glance at Ultima Thule - An evocative new image sequence from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft offers a departing view of the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) nicknamed Ultima Thule—the target of its New Year's 2019 flyby and the most distant world ever explored.

Rating riverside corridors—the 'escape routes' for animals under climate change - Under climate change, plants and animals will shift their habitats to track the conditions they are adapted for. As they do, the lands surrounding rivers and streams offer natural migration routes that will take on a new importance as temperatures rise.

Nitrogen gets in the fast lane for chemical synthesis - Rice University scientists have given organic chemists a boost with their latest discovery of a one-step method to add nitrogen to compounds for drugs, pesticides, fertilizers and other products.

360 Video: Curiosity rover departs Vera Rubin Ridge - After exploring Mars' Vera Rubin Ridge for more than a year, NASA's Curiosity rover recently moved on. But a new 360-video lets the public visit Curiosity's final drill site on the ridge, an area nicknamed "Rock Hall." The video was created from a panorama taken by the rover on Dec. 19. It includes images of its next destination—an area the team has been calling the "clay-bearing unit" and recently named "Glen Torridon—and the floor of G...

'X-ray gun' helps researchers pinpoint the origins of pottery found on ancient shipwreck - About eight hundred years ago, a ship sank in the Java Sea off the coast of the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. There are no written records saying where the ship was going or where it came from—the only clues are the mostly-disintegrated structure of the vessel and its cargo, which was discovered on the seabed in the 1980s. Since the wreck's recovery in the 1990s, researchers have been piec...

Boosting solid state chemical reactions - A cross-coupling reaction is typically performed in an organic solvent and leads to the production of a large amount of solvent waste, which is often harmful to the environment. A new strategy developed by Hokkaido University researchers in Japan opens the door for more environmentally friendly solvent-free solid-state cross coupling processes using mechanochemistry. It also has many potential applications, including the development of organic mater...

Chimpanzee 'mini-brains' hint at secrets of human evolution - At some point during human evolution, a handful of genetic changes triggered a dramatic threefold expansion of the brain's neocortex, the wrinkly outermost layer of brain tissue responsible for everything from language to self-awareness to abstract thought. Identifying what drove this evolutionary shift is fundamental to understanding what makes us human, but has been particularly challenging for scientists because of ethical pro...

Nested CRISPR enables efficient genome editing using long DNA fragments - CRISPR is a technique that is revolutionizing biomedical research through high-precision genome editing. However, even though it allows the creation or correction of mutations consisting of a single or few nucleotides with relative ease, it still possesses limitations for larger fragments of DNA in the genome. For instance, the genomic insertion of a gene that produces a fluorescent protein such as the widely-used GFP...

Drought, deluge turned stable landslide into disaster - "Stable landslide" sounds like a contradiction in terms, but there are indeed places on Earth where land has been creeping downhill slowly, stably and harmlessly for as long as a century. But stability doesn't necessarily last forever. For the first time, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and collaborating institutions have documented the transition of a stable, slow-moving landslide into catastro...

Gummy-like robots that could help prevent disease - Human tissues experience a variety of mechanical stimuli that can affect their ability to carry out their physiological functions, such as protecting organs from injury. The controlled application of such stimuli to living tissues in vivo and in vitro has now proven instrumental to studying the conditions that lead to disease.