ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• Zombie movies and psychological resilience
• 2D compound shows unique versatility
• How different plants can share their genetic material with each other
• This tree snake climbs with a lasso-like motion
• ALMA captures distant colliding galaxy dying out as it loses the ability to form stars
• Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create 'living materials'
• Robot displays a glimmer of empathy to a partner robot
• Megalodons gave birth to large newborns that likely grew by eating unhatched eggs in womb

Zombie movies and psychological resilience Posted: 11 Jan 2021 04:01 PM PST Tales of post-apocalyptic landscapes in which few survivors emerge into a new and much different world have long been popular tales woven by screenwriters and authors. While many enjoy these stories, thinking of them as nothing but a guilty pleasure, they may not realize that immersing themselves in fiction has prepared them for the reality of 2020, according to a team of researchers.

2D compound shows unique versatility Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:34 AM PST A unique two-dimensional material shows distinct properties on each side, depending on polarization by an external electric field. The pairing of antimony and indium selenide could have applications in solar energy and quantum computing.

How different plants can share their genetic material with each other Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:22 AM PST The genetic material of plants, animals and humans is well protected in the nucleus of each cell and stores all the information that forms an organism. For example, information about the size or color of flowers, hair or fur is predefined here. In addition, cells contain small organelles that contain their own genetic material. These include chloroplasts in plants, which play a key role in photosynthesis, and mitochondria, which are found in all living organisms and represent the power plants of every cell. But is the genetic material actually permanently stored within one cell? No! As so far known, the genetic material can migrate from cell to cell and thus even be exchanged between different organisms. Researchers have now been able to use new experimental approaches to show for the first time how the genetic material travels.

This tree snake climbs with a lasso-like motion Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:21 AM PST Researchers have discovered that invasive brown tree snakes living on Guam can get around in a way that had never been seen before. The discovery of the snake's lasso-like locomotion for climbing their way up smooth vertical cylinders has important implications, both for understanding the snakes and for conservation practices aimed at protecting birds from them.

ALMA captures distant colliding galaxy dying out as it loses the ability to form stars Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:21 AM PST Galaxies begin to 'die' when they stop forming stars, but until now astronomers had never clearly glimpsed the start of this process in a far-away galaxy. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have seen a galaxy ejecting nearly half of its star-forming gas. This ejection is happening at a startling rate, equivalent to 10,000 Suns-worth of gas a year. The team believes that this event was triggered by a collision with another galaxy.

Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create 'living materials' Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:21 AM PST Engineers have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mix of bacteria and yeast similar to the 'kombucha mother' used to ferment tea. Using this mix, called a Syn-SCOBY (synthetic symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), they produced cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants.

Robot displays a glimmer of empathy to a partner robot Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:21 AM PST Like a longtime couple who can predict each other's every move, a new robot has learned to predict its partner robot's future actions and goals based on just a few initial video frames. The study is part of a broader effort to endow robots with the ability to understand and anticipate the goals of other robots, purely from visual observations.

Megalodons gave birth to large newborns that likely grew by eating unhatched eggs in womb Posted: 10 Jan 2021 04:24 PM PST A new study shows that the gigantic Megalodon or megatooth shark, which lived nearly worldwide roughly 15-3.6 million years ago and reached at least 50 feet (15 meters) in length, gave birth to babies larger than most adult humans.

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