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The Strange Story of Turkey Tails Speaks Volumes About Our Global Food System

Lead Image: Headed for export? Intensive livestock farming is a huge global industry that serves up millions of tons of beef, pork, and poultry every year. When I asked one producer recently to name something his industry thinks about that consumers don’t, he replied, “Beaks and butts.” This was his shorthand for animal parts that consumers – especially in wealthy nations – don’t choose to eat. On Thanksgiving, turkeys will adorn close to 90 percent of U.S. dinner tables. But one part of the bird never makes it to the groaning board, or even to the giblet bag: the tail.…

Astronomers Discover Ancient “Failed Star” With Lithium Deposits Intact

The Spanish-Mexican team has found that the boundary between those objects which destroy lithium and those which preserve it lies at 51.5 times the mass of Jupiter. The brown dwarf Reid 1B is a major deposti fo lithium which will never be destroyed. Planets such as Jupiter and the Earth are even less massive and do not destroy their lithium. The Sun has destroyed all the lithium that was in its nucleus and preserves some in its upper layers, which are slowly mixing with its interior. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC) A team of researchers at the Instituto de…

NASA’s DART Kinetic Impactor Spacecraft Launches in World’s First Planetary Defense Test Mission

Lead Image: NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission. Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, DART took off Wednesday, November 24, from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Lighting up the California coastline early in the morning of November 24, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft off the planet to begin its one-way trip to crash into an asteroid. DART — a mission designed, developed, and managed…

MIT Chemists Get Quantum Dots To Stop Blinking

Lead Image: MIT chemists have come up with a way to control the unwanted blinking of quantum dots, depicted here as yellow spheres, without requiring any modification to the formulation or the manufacturing process. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers New approach solves a persistent problem of intermittency that has hindered use of the tiny light emitters for biological imaging or quantum photonics. Quantum dots, discovered in the 1990s, have a wide range of applications and are perhaps best known for producing vivid colors in some high-end televisions. But for some potential uses, such as tracking biochemical pathways of a drug…

A Fossil of a Bizarre Snake-Like Lizard Has Generated Controversy Beyond Its Identity

With four tiny legs and an extraordinarily long body, a fossil of the snake-like lizard Tetrapodophis amplectus has created controversy. Credit: Julius Csotonyi More than 120 million years ago in what is now modern Brazil, an ancient waterway was filled with all manner of strange creatures. These included dinosaurs, pterosaurs, sharks, bony fishes, a dizzying array of insects, strange plants and an oddly long and small lizard: Tetrapodophis amplectus. In 2015, the journal Science published a paper claiming that this elongate lizard was a snake with four legs. The discovery of such a specimen could tell us a great deal…