In a new paper, published today in Science Advances, an international team has identified a major extinction of life 233 million years ago that triggered the dinosaur takeover of the world. The crisis has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode.

The team of 17 researchers, led by Jacopo Dal Corso of the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan and Mike Benton of the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, reviewed all the geological and palaeontological evidence and determined what had happened.

The cause was most likely massive volcanic eruptions in the Wrangellia Province of western Canada, where huge volumes of volcanic basalt was poured out and forms much of the western coast of North America.

"The eruptions peaked in the Carnian," says Jacopo Dal Corso. "I was studying the geochemical signature of the eruptions a few years ago and identified some massive effects on the atmosphere worldwide. The eruptions were so huge, they pumped vast amounts of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and there were spikes of global warming".

Today ESA awarded a €129.4 million (US $153.4 million) contract covering the detailed design, manufacturing, and testing of Hera, the Agency's first mission for planetary defense. This ambitious mission will be Europe's contribution to an international asteroid deflection effort, set to perform sustained exploration of a double asteroid system.

Hera - named after the Greek goddess of marriage - will be, along with NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids.

The contract was signed today by Franco Ongaro, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, and Marco Fuchs, CEO of Germany space company OHB, prime contractor of the Hera consortium. The signing took place at ESA's ESOC center in Germany, which will serve as mission control for the 2024-launched Hera.

Solar Cycle 25 is officially underway. NASA and NOAA made the announcement during a media teleconference yesterday, Sept. 15th. According to an international panel of experts, the sunspot number hit rock bottom in Dec. 2019, bringing an end to old Solar Cycle 24. Since then, sunspot counts have been slowly increasing, heralding new Solar Cycle 25.

"How quickly solar activity rises is an indicator on how strong the next solar cycle will be," says Doug Biesecker of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, co-chair of the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel. "Although we've seen a steady increase in sunspot activity this year, it is slow."

The panel believes that new Solar Cycle 25 will be a weak one, peaking in 2025 at levels similar to old Solar Cycle 24. If their prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 25 (like Solar Cycle 24 before it) will be one of the weakest since record-keeping began in 1755.

A University of Central Florida researcher is co-author of a new paper that may help answer why some animals have a magnetic "sixth" sense, such as sea turtles' ability to return to the beach where they were born.

The question is one that has been unresolved despite 50 years of research.

"The search for a mechanism has been proposed as one of the last major frontiers in sensory biology and described as if we are 'searching for a needle in a needle stack,'" says Robert Fitak, an assistant professor in UCF's Department of Biology, part of UCF's College of Sciences.

A group of Russian scientists have taken detailed photos of fossilized microorganisms, including seaweed, which could only have originated from another planet and were inside a meteorite that might be older than Earth itself.

The researchers created high-resolution photos of the fossilized bacteria preserved inside the Orgueil meteorite, found in France in 1864. The largest of the rare CI chondrite group, the celestial body has long captivated the interest of scientists due to high concentrations of mercury and isotopically anomalous xenon that are not typical for meteorites of this type.

ATP synthase is also referred to as complex V of the respiratory chain, a series of protein complexes in the membrane of mitochondria. This respiratory chain creates a proton gradient, which the ATP synthase uses to make ATP. Previously, Sazanov was the first to solve the protein structure of bacterial complex I, and the first to solve the structure of a mammalian complex I. In the new study, Sazanov and lab members Gergely Pinke and Long Zhou turned to mammalian complex V, the final unsolved structure in the mammalian respiratory chain. "F1Fo-ATP synthase is one of the most important enzymes on Earth. It provides energy for most life forms, including us humans, but until now, we didn't know fully how it works," explains Sazanov.

Rotation muddies the picture

As the structure of the mushroom-like F1 soluble domain is known already, Sazanov and his team looked particularly at the Fo domain, embedded in the mitochondrial membrane. Here, protons are translocated at the interface between the so-called c ring, a ring made up of identical protein subunits, and the rest of Fo. Protons are moved across the membrane as each c subunit picks up a proton on one side of the membrane, rotates with the ring, and releases the proton on the other side. This c-ring is attached to the central shaft of F1 and its rotation generates ATP within F1. To solve the structure of the Fo domain and the entire complex, the researchers studied the enzyme from sheep mitochondria using cryo-electron microscopy. And here, ATP synthase poses a special problem: because it rotates, ATP synthase can stop in three main positions, as well as in substates. "It is very difficult to distinguish between these positions, attributing a structure to each position ATP synthase can take. But we managed to solve this computationally to build the first complete structure of the enzyme," Sazanov adds.

It's not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality.

But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way — suggesting that we're living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it's a "possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network."

For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.

In his paper, Vanchurin argues that artificial neural networks can "exhibit approximate behaviors" of both universal theories. Since quantum mechanics "is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales," he writes, "it is widely believed that on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it."

"We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works," reads the paper's discussion. "With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong."

The concept is so bold that most physicists and machine learning experts we reached out to declined to comment on the record, citing skepticism about the paper's conclusions. But in a Q&A with Futurism, Vanchurin leaned into the controversy — and told us more about his idea.

An unexplained chemical has turned up in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Scientists are tentatively suggesting it could be a sign of life.

The unknown chemical is phosphine gas (PH3), a substance that on Earth mostly comes from anaerobic (non-oxygen-breathing) bacteria or "anthropogenic activity" — stuff humans are doing. It exists in the atmospheres of gas giant planets, due to chemical processes that occur deep in their pressurized depths to bind together three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorus atom. But scientists don't have any explanation for how it could appear on Venus; no known chemical processes would generate phosphine there. And yet, it seems to be there, and no one knows of anything that could make phosphine on Venus except for living organisms.

A new study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that we understand dark matter even less than we thought previously. The hypothesized matter is thought to exist based on the mass of galaxies, but has never been directly observed. Now, new research suggests that our predictions about how dark matter affects space-time might be way off.

Hubble researchers used a technique called gravitational lensing, in which distant objects are observed by looking at the way light is bent by the gravity of closer objects, with the closer objects acting like a magnifying glass. This allowed them to spot areas that likely contain dark matter, which can be seen affecting the distortion of space-time even if it can't be seen directly.

The finding that surprised the researchers was that even small amounts of dark matter in clusters created a gravitational lensing effect that was 10 times stronger than they had expected.

A new study from America indicates that people were falling ill with coronavirus-like symptoms in December 2019, but doctors at the time dismissed it as ordinary flu.

A team of doctors from Los Angeles scouring the hospital records from last winter has discovered a series of smoking gun clues which almost guarantee that Covid-19 was present in America well before Christmas.

Scientists from UCLA have been analysing over 10 million hospital records from December 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020. Comparing that winter to previous ones, they noticed a 50-percent increase in 'coughing' as a symptom on admission forms. In addition, 18 more people than would ordinarily be expected were hospitalised with acute respiratory failure.