NASA's space snowman is revealing fresh secrets from its home far beyond Pluto.

More than a year after its close encounter with the snowman-shaped object, the New Horizons spacecraft is still sending back data from more than 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.

"The data rate is painfully slow from so far away," said Will Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, one of the lead authors.

Astronomers reported Thursday that this pristine, primordial cosmic body now called Arrokoth — the most distant object ever explored — is relatively smooth with far fewer craters than expected. It's also entirely ultrared, or highly reflective, which is commonplace in the faraway Twilight Zone of our solar system known as the the Kuiper Belt.

Sifting through a soup of genes sampled from many environments, including human saliva, animal poop, lakes, hospitals, soils and more, researchers have found hundreds of giant viruses - some with abilities only seen before in cellular life.

The international team, led by scientists from University of California, Berkeley, has discovered entire new groups of giant phages (viruses that infect bacteria) and pieced together 351 gene sequences.

Within these they found genes that code for unexpected things, including bits of the cellular machinery that reads and executes DNA instructions to build proteins, also known as translation.

Looking for cancer biomarkers in blood is a promising method for detecting metastatic cancer. It is less demanding than imaging techniques like MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The main challenge to overcome is the extremely low concentrations of these markers, which makes it difficult to detect them. Researchers of the University of Twente and Wageningen University developed a nanosensor that accurately detects biomarkers for cancer in an extremely broad range of concentrations, from 10 particles per microliter to 1 million particles per microliter. Their development was featured on the cover of Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

A child's approach to learning — whether they pay attention, stay organized, follow rules, work independently, etc. — can shape how teachers' perceive their academic ability. A new study suggests that these characteristics, called non-cognitive skills, influence teachers' evaluation of students' academic aptitude differently depending on a child's race, ethnicity, and gender.

The study, published in the journal Du Bois Review and co-authored by Yale sociologist Grace Kao, reveals a variety of racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in the association between first-grade students' non-cognitive skills and their assessed ability in math and reading. For example, the study found that teachers rated black students lower in math skills compared to white students with identical non-cognitive abilities and test scores.

"The bottom line is that even when you control for kids' math and reading abilities through their test scores, we find that teachers' perceptions of their students' non-cognitive and academic skills differ by race, ethnicity, and gender," said Kao, the IBM Professor of Sociology and chair of the sociology department. "It is especially distressing that these disparities, which have important implications on children's academic performance, are emerging as early as the start of kindergarten."

Kao and co-author Calvin Rashaud Zimmermann, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, based their analyses on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011, a nationally representative sample of children surveyed from the start of kindergarten through fifth grade.

Since about October 2019, Betelgeuse (the bright reddish star at Orion's shoulder in the brightest constellation in the sky that is about 600 - 700 ly distant from us) has begun a sharp dimming that has now gone beyond what has been seen in modern observations. As of the end of January, it was down about 2.5 in apparent magnitude.

Israeli aerospace company Rafael has released a video showing its newly-developed defense system - an UAV interceptor called the Drone Dome - literally shooting drones down with a powerful laser beam.

The footage published on YouTube shows the system, mounted on a car, shooting down quadcopters somewhere in a desert in Israel. The video demonstrates the interceptor blasting a small drone that's vigorously maneuvering mid-air and successfully shooting down several unmanned aerial vehicle flying in a formation.

Rafael boasted that its new product provides "effective detection, full identification and neutralization of multiple Micro and Mini UAV threats" and said that it can detect a target as small as two centimeters (about one inch) across at a distance of 3.5 kilometers. It also said that the drone dome has "soft kill" and "hard kill" options allowing an operation to choose between seizing control over the target UAV and simply shooting it down.

A scientific paper entitled "An Overview of Scientific Debate of Global Warming and Climate Change" has recently come out of the University of Karachi, Pakistan. The paper's author, Prof. Shamshad Akhtar delves into earth's natural temperature variations of the past 1000 years, and concludes that any modern warming trend has been hijacked by political & environmental agendas, and that the science (tackled below) has been long-ignored and at times deliberately manipulated.

The published paper - available in full HERE — sets out its intent:

Climate change is NOT a new phenomenon. The palaeo-climatic studies reveal that during the Pleistocene and Holocene periods several warm and cold periods occurred, resulting in changes of sea level and in climatic processes like the rise and fall of global average temperature and rainfall.

Don't look there too closely. Don't worry, it all came together by chance. Show us your PhD in evolutionary biology. Don't you trust the scientists? What right do you have to an opinion of your own?

These are, in effect, the response from Darwinian evolutionists to doubts from the public that the wonders of the living cell evolved without intelligent guidance. Those doubts, though, are not unreasonable.

Asteroids come in all shapes and sizes, and now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have observed an asteroid so heavily cratered that they are dubbing it the "golf ball asteroid."

The asteroid is named Pallas, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, and was originally discovered in 1802. Pallas is the third largest object in the asteroid belt, and is about one-seventh the size of the moon. For centuries, astronomers have noticed that the asteroid orbits along a significantly tilted track compared with the majority of objects in the asteroid belt, though the reason for its incline remains a mystery.

In a paper published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers reveal detailed images of Pallas, including its heavily cratered surface, for the first time.

Have you ever wondered why scientists use complicated, italicized, tongue-twisting terminology to describe living organisms? Why in the world would someone choose to say Canus lupus familiaris, when "Dog" is so much simpler? The truth is there are many advantages to the use of scientific names when referring to living things, beyond sounding sophisticated or impressing those surrounding you. You have likely seen these "scientific names" listed as ingredients in food, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, or in articles about nature. They often appear in parenthesis, following the more familiar "common name." For example: Turmeric (Curcuma longa) or Black Pepper (Piper nigrum). Although it is unlikely that you'd hear "Please pass the Piper nigrum" at the dinner table, there are many situations where scientific names are entirely appropriate, and even preferable.

Names, in any form, are distinctive designations of persons and things. Names differentiate and clarify our identities as people, and instill in us a sense of uniqueness and individuality. They also allow us to differentiate things around us (including other organisms) and clearly communicate observations about these things with other people. In biology, we have developed a formal system of naming living organisms, known as binomial nomenclature. Each species is given a unique scientific name with two terms (bi-nomial), both of which use Latin grammatical forms composed of Latin, Greek and other roots. To use a familiar example, "human" is the common name referring to the species "Homo sapiens." The two parts of a binomial represent the generic name (which identifies the genus to which the species belongs) followed by the specific epithet (which identifies the species within the genus). For example, the Shiitake mushroom belongs to the genus Lentinula and the species Lentinula edodes.

This system was originally developed by Carl Linneus and published in Systema Naturae (The System of Nature), his hierarchical system of classification for nature. In this work, he attempted to describe all living things within the ranks of kingdom, class, order, genus and species. Although the last edition was published in the 1760s, much of Linnean taxonomy is still in use today, with additional ranks added along the way.

Originally, there were only 3 kingdoms: Stones, Plants, and Animals. Fungi, Algae and Lichens were all considered part of the kingdom Plantae, which remained the case until the mid-20th century. In 1969, Robert Whittaker proposed a five-kingdom classification system which recognized an additional kingdom for the Fungi (Whittaker, 1969). This formal distinction, which had previously been proposed by many, was long overdue. Some may recall the following mnemonic phrase from High-School Biology class: King Phillip Can Order Frog Gut Soup, representing the hierarchical taxonomic ranks of Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. Think of binomial nomenclature as the Gut Soup of it all.