Sixty years after James Watson and Francis Crick established that DNA forms a double helix, a quadruple-stranded DNA helix has turned up. Quadruple helices that intertwine four, rather than two, DNA strands had been made in the laboratory, but were … Continue reading
Animals evolved gradually, from the lowly sponge to the menagerie of tentacled, winged and brainy creatures that inhabit Earth today. This idea makes such intuitive sense that biologists are now stunned by genome-sequencing data suggesting that the sponges were preceded … Continue reading
“Almost all sun-like stars have a planetary system,” said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been exploring statistical models of Kepler data. via Earth-Like Planets Fill the Galaxy | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network. … Continue reading
The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largest known spiral, based on archival data from … Continue reading
Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, … Continue reading