As one of the most abundant organic compounds on the planet, methanol occurs naturally in the environment as plants release it as they grow and decompose. It is also found in the ocean, where it is a welcome food source for ravenous microbes that feast on it for energy and growth. While scientists have long known methanol exists in the ocean, and that certain microbes love to snack on it, they've been stymied by one key question: where does it come from?

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have solved this mystery through the discovery of a massive - and previously unaccounted for - source of methanol in the ocean: phytoplankton.

The study found that these microscopic, plant-like organisms, which form the base of the marine food web, have a unique ability to biologically produce methanol in the ocean in quantities that could rival or exceed that which is produced on land. The results, published in the March 10, 2016, issue of PLOS ONE, challenge previous thinking on sources of methanol in the ocean, and help fill important knowledge gaps about ocean microbiology and the amount of methanol generated on our planet. The discovery may also spur research leading to biofuel applications in the future.

"Methanol can be considered a 'baby sugar' molecule and is rapidly consumed in the ocean by abundant bacteria - called methylotrophs - which specialize in this type of food," said Dr. Tracy Mincer, WHOI associate scientist and lead author of the paper. "However, up until now, the thought was that methanol in the ocean came from an overflow of terrestrial methanol in the atmosphere. So, this discovery reveals a huge source of methanol that has gone completely unaccounted for in global methanol estimates."

Solar storms are sparking spectacular displays of 'Northern Lights' on planet Jupiter that are hundreds of times more powerful than Earth's aurora borealis.

They are also about eight-times brighter than what is normally experienced over a large area of the planet.

Scientists from University College London (UCL) have published new research this week based on data collected from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They studied the impact of a giant solar storm on Jupiter's auroras in X-ray light.

The goal of the research is to analyze the interaction of Jupiter's 'magnetosphere' and the solar wind and its effect on the giant planet, according to lead author William Dunn.

The sun is constantly releasing flows of particles into space, when giant storms known as coronal mass ejections (CME) erupt, strong winds can interfere with this and compress Jupiter's magnetosphere.

Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteristics of modern life forms, making their fossils exceptionally rare.

But University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee paleontologist Stephen Dornbos and his research partners have discovered new clues in the quest. The team found fossils of two species of previously unknown ancient multicellular marine algae, what we now know as seaweed -- and they're among the oldest examples of multicellular life on Earth.

Their age is estimated to be more than 555 million years old, placing the fossils in the last part of Precambrian times, called the Ediacaran Period. They provide a crucial view of Earth's earliest evolution of multicellular life, which scientists now think started millions of years earlier than previously thought.

The team's work is detailed in a paper in the open-access online journal Scientific Reports, published March 17.

"This discovery helps tell us more about life in a period that is relatively undocumented," said Dornbos, UWM associate professor of geosciences and first author on the paper. "It can help us correlate the changes in life forms with what we know about the Earth's ancient environments. It is a major evolutionary step toward life as we know it today."

A new study published today in Nature reports discovery of a rare event—that Earth's moon slowly moved from its original axis roughly 3 billion years ago.

Planetary scientist Matt Siegler at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and colleagues made the discovery while examining NASA data known to indicate lunar polar hydrogen. The hydrogen, detected by orbital instruments, is presumed to be in the form of ice hidden from the sun in craters surrounding the moon's north and south poles. Exposure to direct sunlight causes ice to boil off into space, so this ice—perhaps billions of years old—is a very sensitive marker of the moon's past orientation.

An odd offset of the ice from the moon's current north and south poles was a tell-tale indicator to Siegler and prompted him to assemble a team of experts to take a closer look at the data from NASA's Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. Statistical analysis and modeling revealed the ice is offset at each pole by the same distance, but in exactly opposite directions.

This precise opposition indicates the moon's axis—the imaginary pole that runs north to south through it's middle, and around which the moon rotates—shifted at least six degrees, likely over the course of 1 billion years, said Siegler.

"This was such a surprising discovery. We tend to think that objects in the sky have always been the way we view them, but in this case the face that is so familiar to us—the Man on the Moon—changed," said Siegler, who also is a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.


"Billions of years ago, heating within the Moon's interior caused the face we see to shift upward as the pole physically changed positions," he said. "It would be as if Earth's axis relocated from Antarctica to Australia. As the pole moved, the Man on the Moon turned his nose up at the Earth."

Scientists exploring 4,000 meters below the surface of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean have taken thousands of samples and photographs of life and landforms that have never been seen before.

"Because this is the last unexplored place in the world in a way, it's so common that the creatures we see are new to science," NOAA expedition coordinator Brian Kennedy told the New Scientist.

The scientists used two remotely operated vehicles tethered together to explore the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a World Heritage conservation site in the northwestern region of the Hawaiian Archipelago.

A new study reveals that an unknown continental-scale process is dumping phosphorus into streams and lakes across the U.S. (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b05950). Rising phosphorus measured in these water bodies could lead to toxic algal blooms and degraded habitat for fish, birds and frogs.

High phosphorus levels in streams and lakes typically result from sewage discharge and agricultural runoff. But the new work finds phosphorus pollution in remote areas far from such sources, leaving researchers scratching their heads about where it came from.

What evidence they have suggests the phosphorus inputs are probably linked to climate change, and are unlikely to be tamed anytime soon. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient. But when levels top 10 µg/L in water bodies, ecosystems start to change.

The kinds of algae that feed a healthy ecosystem begin to disappear, and undesirable species take over, says Emily H. Stanley, an aquatic biogeochemist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not part of the study.

One group of undesirables, cyanobacteria, can produce toxic blooms that threaten drinking water sources and cost the U.S. economy over $2.2 billion per year.

To track the health of the nation's waters, the Environmental Protection Agency monitors a selection of lakes and streams, measuring the concentration of important ions and nutrients every five years.

EPA stumbled on the new result while analyzing these data, says John L. Stoddard, a biogeochemist with the EPA. Phosphorus was the only measured nutrient that changed, he says. Uniformly across the country, median total phosphorus in streams more than doubled from 26 µg/L to 56 µg/L over the last 10 years. In lakes, levels rose from 20 µg/L in 2007 to 37 µg/L in 2012.

Russian pharmaceutical group Biocad has introduced a breakthrough new cancer drug, with early tests suggesting it is more effective in battling the disease than foreign analogues, the company says.

The new drug activates inner powers to fight cancer, the company's press release said. It was created on the base of monoclonal antibodies, and blocks interactions between the proteins PD-1 and PD-L1, which mask tumor cells as healthy ones. After the neutralization of PD-1, the organism starts to recognize cancer cells and eliminate them.

"The development of drugs for immunotherapy is an innovational approach to curing oncological diseases," said Roman Ivanov, Deputy CEO for Biomedical Studies and Development, according to a press release published on Biocad's website.

"Such drugs have a systematic effect on the whole tumor process, destroying not only the tumor itself but also its metastases including remote ones," he added, stressing that unlike chemotherapy, such treatment does not damage healthy body tissue.

The shockwave generated by the explosion of an ageing giant star has been observed by an international team of astronomers.

The discovery, accepted for publishing in the Astrophysical Journal, will help scientists understand the life cycle of stars, said study co-author Brad Tucker of the Australian National University.

"This is the first time we've seen this in the normal visible colours, and we now know it happens," Dr Tucker said.

"The fundamental way we believe that core collapse happens is related to this shockwave happening. So the physics has been around ... for decades and we've finally now been able to physically examine and test what's going on."

The team of scientists observed the earliest moments of two old stars exploding using the Kepler Space Telescope.

They spotted the shockwave around the smaller of the two stars — a red supergiant over 270 times the radius of the Sun and 750 million light years away.

As the star ran out of fuel it began collapsing and compressing on its central core.

"It's like packing in dirt," Dr Tucker said. "You keep pressing it till it's so dense you can't get it in anymore, and that's when you create a neutron star.

"But you reach a limit when you can't pack it in anymore, and that force pushing in bounces back and it triggers a shockwave to go through the star, causing the star to actually blow up."

Astronomers have identified 53 "super spirals" — spiral galaxies that are huge and incredibly luminous — as part of a project exploring archived observations.

These three images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are examples of 53 super spirals, galaxies much larger and more luminous than the Milky Way. Four of the 53 — including 2MASX J08542169+0449308 (left) and 2MASX J16014061+2718161 (center) — look like they've merged with another galaxy; the two shown here both have double nuclei. The galaxy SDSS J094700.08+254045.7 (right) is one of the biggest and brightest super spirals, with a disk about three times the breadth of the Milky Way's.
SDSS

The Milky Way is an average sort of spiral galaxy. Its disk spans roughly 100,000 light-years (although maybe more like 160,000 light-years, if recently detected, distant ripples are part of it). Each year it produces the equivalent of a Sun's mass in new stars.

Although the Milky Way is one of the largest galaxies in the Local Group, across the cosmos the biggest, brightest galaxies are usually not spirals but ellipticals, gargantuan football-shaped collections of old stars.

But Patrick Ogle (Caltech) and his team have found 53 distant spirals that are bigger, brighter, and starbirthing-mightier than expected from their nearby spiral brethren. These newfound galaxies, which the team calls superlumious spirals or "super spirals" for short, have disks between 180,000 and 440,000 light-years wide, and they're churning out stars at a rate of 5 to 65 Suns each year.

For galaxies this big and this late in cosmic history, that's a lot of stars.

Australian astronomers operating the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) have detected a new radio burst of extraterrestrial origin.

According to Professor Matthew Bailes, director of Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, the signal picked up by MOST was in fact a so called 'fast radio burst' (FRB) — a high-energy astrophysical phenomenon that takes the form of a transient radio pulse which last only a few milliseconds.

The first FRB, named the Lorimer Burst, was detected in 2007 by a team of researchers led by Professor Duncan R. Lorimer, who analyzed archived data collected in 2001 by the Parkes radio dish in Australia.

Due to the isolated nature of this phenomenon, no generally accepted explanation of the source of fast radio bursts yet exists.