The hunt for new and potentially potent therapeutic molecules in nature is a vital quest spurred on by parallel health crises: antibacterial resistance and the growing global cancer burden.

Now, a team of scientists has discovered that a rare soil microbe produces some peculiar yet familiar molecular 'building blocks' with drug-like activity. This could be a boon for drug design and discovery programs.

"Our genomics-based approach allowed us to identify an unusual peptide for future drug design efforts," says Joshua Blodgett, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and senior author of the new study.

The focus of their exploration was a group of spindly, soil-dwelling bacteria called actinomycetes, which lucky for us are prolific producers of medicinal compounds.

Two decades worth of observations revealed unexpected cooling of the solar system's most distant planet Neptune amid its astronomical summer.

Neptune is orbiting 30 times farther away from the sun than Earth with one year lasting 165 Earth years. The ice giant's seasons, too, last much longer than those on Earth — more than 40 Earth-years each.

As the planet moved into its southern summer over the past two decades, astronomers observed its average global temperatures plummet by a staggering 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).

"This change was unexpected," Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester and lead author on the new paper, said in a statement. "Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we would expect temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder."

VW may have developed a major hydrogen breakthrough...cars could travel 2000 km on a single tank of fuel.

VW often rails against hydrogen cars, but the German automaker is reported to have filed a patent that could mean a major breakthrough for hydrogen powered vehicles, reports Patrick Freiwa of the German Kreiszeitung here.

Though the latest trend has been electric cars, these have also a number of technical drawbacks like range, cost, mining and weight. Moreover there is also the problem of how to dispose of millions of tons of batteries at the end of their lives.

Nasa has spotted a record-breakingly large comet headed nearer to Earth.

Its icy nucleus is bigger than any ever seen - measuring around 80 miles across, and 50 times bigger than the heart of most known comets. It is also thought to have a mass of about 500 trillion tons - a hundred thousand times more massive than the typical comet found closer to the Sun.

And the object, known as C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), is headed in this direction, quickly. Travelling at 22,000 miles per hour, it is moving from the edge of the solar system towards its the centre.

However, we should be entirely safe. The comet will not get closer than a billion miles from the Sun - further away even than the planet Saturn - and that will not happen until 2031.

If you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know about the energy storage problem that is inherent in the effort to eliminate dispatchable fossil fuels from the electricity generation system and replace them with wind and solar. As discussed here many times, other than with nuclear power, the storage problem is the critical issue that must be addressed if there is ever going to be "net zero" electricity generation, let alone a "net zero" economy based on all energy usage having been electrified. For a sample of my prior posts on this subject just in the last few months, go here, here and here.

The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the "net zero" agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for "net zero" in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.

Classified data prevented scientists from verifying their discovery for 3 years.
A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC).

The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv.

That 2019 study argued that the wee meteor's speed, along with the trajectory of its orbit, proved with 99% certainty that the object had originated far beyond our solar system — possibly "from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy," the authors wrote. But despite their near certainty, the team's paper was never peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, as some of the data needed to verify their calculations was considered classified by the U.S. government, according to Vice (opens in new tab).

Now, USSC scientists have officially confirmed the team's findings. In a memo dated March 1 and shared on Twitter on April 6, Lt. Gen. John E. Shaw, deputy commander of the USSC, wrote that the 2019 analysis of the fireball was "sufficiently accurate to confirm an interstellar trajectory."

An agreement between NASA and the U.S. Space Force recently authorized the public release of decades of data collected by U.S. government sensors on fireball events (large bright meteors also known as bolides) for the benefit of the scientific and planetary defense communities. This action results from collaboration between NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the U.S. Space Force to continue furthering our nation's efforts in planetary defense, which include finding, tracking, characterizing, and cataloguing near-Earth objects (NEOs). The newly released data is comprised of information on the changing brightness of bolides as they pass through Earth's atmosphere, called light curves, that could enhance the planetary defense community's current ability to model the effects of impacts by larger asteroids that could one day pose a threat to Earth.

Bolides, very bright meteors that can even be seen in daylight, are a regular occurrence - on the order of several dozen times per year - that result when our planet is impacted by asteroids too small to reach the ground but large enough to explode upon impact with Earth's atmosphere. U.S. government sensors detect these atmospheric impact events, and the bolide data is reported to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) fireballs database, which contains data going back to 1988 for nearly one thousand bolide events. Now, planetary defense experts will have access to even more detailed data - specifically, light curve information that captures the optical intensity variation during the several seconds of an object's breakup in the atmosphere. The data will be available to scientists as soon as it is properly archived, with the reported events and made easily accessible. This uniquely rich data set has been greatly sought after by the scientific community as an object's breakup in Earth's atmosphere provides scientific insight into the object's strength and composition based on what altitudes at which it breaks up and disintegrates. The approximate total radiated energy and pre-entry velocity vector (i.e., direction) can also be better derived from bolide light curve data.

"The growing archive of bolide reports, as posted on the NASA CNEOS Fireballs website, has significantly increased scientific knowledge and contributes to the White House approved National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan" said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters. "The release of these new bolide data demonstrates another key area of collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Space Force and helps further the pursuit of improved capabilities for understanding these objects and our preparedness to respond to the impact hazard NEOs pose to Earth."

Paris - After a decade of meticulous measurements, scientists announced Thursday that a fundamental particle -- the W boson -- has a significantly greater mass than theorised, shaking the foundations of our understanding of how the universe works.

Those foundations are grounded by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best theory scientists have to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe, and what forces govern them.

The W boson governs what is called the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, and therefore a pillar of the Standard Model.

However new research published in the Science journal said that the most precise measurement ever made of the W Boson directly contradicts the model's prediction.

Ashutosh Kotwal, a physicist at Duke University who led the study, told AFP that the result had taken more than 400 scientists over 10 years to scrutinise four million W boson candidates out of a "dataset of around 450 trillion collisions".

These collisions -- made by smashing particles together at mind-bending speeds to study them -- were done by the Tevatron collider in the US state of Illinois.

It was the world's highest-energy particle accelerator until 2009, when it was supplanted by the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, which famously observed the Higgs boson a few years later.

The Tevatron stopped running in 2011, but the scientists at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) have been crunching numbers ever since.

Western countries are heavily sanctioning Russia's space program. The European Union has decided to suspend cooperation with Russia on exploring Mars. But the head of Russia's space program, known as "Roscosmos" told CGTN that Moscow's role in space exploration is indispensable.

LI JIANHUA CGTN Reporter "Mr. Rogozin, thank you for accepting our interview. The EU has halted cooperation with Russia on ExoMars. How has this affected the Russian Space Agency and what is the impact on manned space exploration?"

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos "It's a cooperative mission. If Russia doesn't join, Europe won't go ahead with the mission, because Russia's contribution to the mission is huge. It is not only about the heavy rockets that send these instruments into orbit and to Mars. It's also about the landing vehicles. These vehicles must help achieve a soft landing on Mars or the research rovers. The module itself is a research station. We have been waiting so long to realize this mission. If it is delayed, it will never happen. They may change Russia's landing module, but that decision could take a lot of time and money."