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If you’re a gardener, you may use peat moss - decomposed Sphagnum moss - in soil because it helps retain moisture.  Peatlands, wetlands characterized by a thick layer of water-saturated, carbon-rich peat beneath living Sphagnum moss, trees, and other plant life, cover just 3 percent of Earth’s land area but may store a third of all soil carbon. That's made possible in large part by microbes. Two microbial processes in particular — nitrogen fixation and methane oxidation — strike a delicate balance, working together to give Sphagnummosses access to critical nutrients in nutrient-depleted peatlands. 

Scholars at Tel Aviv University have recorded and analyzed click-like sounds distinctly emitted by plants. The sounds are similar to the popping of popcorn and emitted at a volume similar to human speech, but frequencies human ears don't detect. The researchers believe plants usually emit sounds when they are under stress, and that each plant and each type of stress is associated with a specific identifiable sound. Though the frequency is too high for human ears, it is in the range detectable by bats, mice, and insects.

Radio telescope observations using
the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
have revealed a cold stream of intergalactic atomic carbon gas feeding star formation in a massive radio galaxy in the young Universe. The findings of
galaxy 4C 41.17
provide observational evidence supporting hypothetical cosmological models and offer new insights into the origins of the cosmic materials that enable galaxy and star formation.

An object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun has been detected thanks to gravitational lensing - where a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object and magnifies it.

A recent study found that vaccination with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine resulted in immune cell response considerably lower in people with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection than those without. The level of this key immune cell that targets the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, CD8+ T, was substantially lower in unvaccinated people with COVID-19 than in vaccinated people who had never been infected. People who recover from SARS-CoV-2 infection and then get vaccinated are more protected than people who are unvaccinated and the new paper suggests that the virus damages an important immune-cell response.

In 2014, a new invasive species from Asia was detected in Pennsylvania, but by the time government knows about it, it is too late and spotted lanternflies have since spread to more than 100 counties across 14 states. 

Some companies profited during the government lockdowns and then lingering social stigma about being outside the home. Exercise bikes, office furniture, and coffee machines all did well.It will be decades before we know how many have been impacted in ways that were unanticipated. Being at home, for example, should have given more time to exercise, yet it often did the opposite. Despair, prevalent media discussing disaster in real time, and social isolation don't lead to a desire to exercise in some.

Athletes use custom-​made insoles because they know a fraction of a second can make the difference between victory and defeat, but to do that specialists must first create a pressure profile of the feet. Athletes walk barefoot over pressure-​sensitive mats, where they leave their individual footprints and then orthopedists create customized insoles by hand. The optimization and adjustment takes a lot of time and if you are a wealthy elite, the money is less of a worry but for people with musculoskeletal pain the cost may be out of reach.

Water is over 70 percent of the surface of the earth but how that came to be, through what mix of random chance and extraterrestrial involvement, has been a debate. Earth is a relatively small planet and relatively near its star so creating large surface oceans is difficult.A new study analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system’s formation four and a half billion years ago and found they had extremely low water content, among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites. 

A new study reports abnormalities in functional neural networks of dogs diagnosed with anxiety. Compared with healthy dogs, those with anxiety exhibit stronger connections between the amygdala and other regions of the anxiety network.

Venus is similar to Earth in size and mass but does not have plate tectonics, which are the primary locations of volcanic activity. A lingering question has always been if there is volcanic activity anyway.

A new small molecule may help people with benzodiazepine-resistant epilepsy. Epilepsy affects an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. and millions more worldwide and drugs work for most, but for the rest, Uncontrolled epilepsy and resulting frequent and prolonged seizures lasting five minutes or more that can cause brain cell damage and even death.Epilepsy occurs when the intricate, delicate balance of signaling by neurons in the brain malfunctions, causing neurons to fire too much and trigger seizures. Benzodiazepines slow down the messages traveling between neurons. Yet up to 30 percent develop drug-resistance after a period of time.