SPACE

Explore a map of the next 15 total solar eclipses

Ref: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/total-solar-eclipse-explore-map-future

Just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that you can’t make long-term memories without DNA damage and brain inflammation. Their surprising findings were published online today in the journal Nature.

“Inflammation of brain neurons is usually considered to be a bad thing, since it can lead to neurological problems such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said study leader Jelena Radulovic, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and the Sylvia and Robert S. Olnick Chair in Neuroscience at Einstein. “But our findings suggest that inflammation in certain neurons in the brain’s hippocampal region is essential for making long-lasting memories.”

The hippocampus has long been known as the brain’s memory center. Dr. Radulovic and her colleagues found that a stimulus sets off a cycle of DNA damage and repair…

Astronomers have identified what could be two of the Milky Way's earliest building blocks: Named "Shakti" and "Shiva," these appear to be the remnants of two galaxies that merged between 12 and 13 billion years ago with an early version of the Milky Way, contributing to our home galaxy's initial growth. The new find is the astronomical equivalent of archeologists identifying traces of an initial settlement that grew into a large present-day city. It required combining data for nearly 6 million stars from ESA's Gaia mission with measurements from the SDSS survey. The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal. [ Max Planck Institute for Astronomy ]

The early history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of joining smaller galaxies, which makes for fairly large building blocks. Now, Khyati Malhan and Hans-Walter Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have succeeded in identifying what could…

The method can be used by governments in cost-benefit analyses for public infrastructure projects, in which the loss of animal and plant species and ‘ecosystem services’ – such as filtering air or water, pollinating crops or the recreational value of a space – are converted into a current monetary value.

This process is designed to make biodiversity loss and the benefits of nature conservation more visible in political decision-making.

However, the international research team says current methods for calculating the values of ecosystem services “fall short” and have devised a new approach, which they believe could easily be deployed in Treasury analysis underpinning future Budget statements.

Their approach, published in the journal Science, takes into consideration the increase in monetary value of nature over time as human income increases, as well as the likely deterioration in biodiversity, making it more of a scarce resource.

This contrasts with current methods, which do…