Top stories: a ray of sunshine, a galactic messenger on the ice and a barrier that changes the ecosystem | Science



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(From left to right): COAST PROTECTION BOARD, SOUTH AUSTRALIA; MARTIN WOLF, ICECUBE / NSF; SIMON KING / MINDEN PICTURES

By Frankie Schembri

Ammonia – a renewable fuel made from the sun, air and water – could feed the globe without carbon

Researchers are turning to ammonia, the main ingredient of fertilizer, green "fuel that could fuel the carbon-free world." In this future, scientists would produce carbon dioxide. Ammonia with solar energy, water and air, and convert it into a liquid fuel that could easily be transported around the globe and stored – something that eludes Renewable energies today

Astronomers are right, a ghostly particle that illuminated an instrumented ice band under the South Pole on September 22, 2017 was a messenger from a distant galaxy.The particle was a neutrino , electrically neutral and almost without mbad, whose path could t be traced directly to the violent cosmic events that created it. Hidden by the IceCube Antarctic Neutrino Detector, an orbiting telescope discovered that the neutrino was likely coming from a distant blazar, a brilliant source of radiation fed by a supermbadive black hole.

A fence built to protect wild dogs has drastically altered landscape

A 5000-kilometer long wire fence built almost a century ago to protect wild dogs may have altered some of from the iconic outback of Australia. When scientists compared the images of the fence-free and dingo-free sides of the fence with historical aerial photographs, they discovered that the dingo-free side had more vegetation and higher dunes. The reason? Foxes and cats – the main predators on the non-dingo side – have probably decimated the smaller species that feed on plant seeds and prevent them from rooting.

The last meal of the & # 39; Iceman & # 39; was a high-fat feast

1991, hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled upon a corpse. The man had been dead for about 5,300 years, frozen and perfectly preserved by a mountain glacier that had begun to melt. Known as the Ötzi, or Iceman, he has become one of the most famous and best studied natural mummies in the world. Now the researchers provided a detailed chemical badysis of his last meal and found that it was high in fat.

& # 39; The gene reader & # 39; pbades the first test in mammals, accelerating heredity in mice

Researchers used CRISPR, the genome-editing tool, to accelerate the transmission of specific genes in mammals for the first time . Demonstrated in laboratory-raised insects several years ago, this controversial strategy of "gene stimulation" promises the ability to rapidly propagate a gene in a whole species. The new research aims to create new strains of laboratory mice, not to eradicate wild populations, and it shows that gene drives work less efficiently in rodents than in insects.

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