Happy Birth-ray! Mystic the cownose ray turns 27 - Popular Science

A facial mass detected before birth prompted the early delivery of identical twin sisters. A fetal MRI at 33 weeks showed the mass on one baby's face. When the sisters were born a week later, tumors were found in both. Two children had the same cancer, raising a question that their shared beginnings alone could not answer. Had the disease started separately in each sister, or had cancer cells crossed from one to the other before birth? Researchers turned to a record hidden within their cells. DNA changes, accumulated as their bodies developed, allowed the team to reconstruct events that had happened months before anyone saw a tumor. The study in Nature Communications shows that the cancer began in one sister and passed to the other in the womb, most likely through a single transfer late in the second trimester. The same investigation uncovered clues to how the sisters themselves had formed. The two girls, Amelia and Amaya, died soon after birth. Their family consented to post-mortem examinations for research. The authors dedicate the study to the sisters, whose mother wanted them acknowledged by name.

With the 10th anniversary of Mystic Messenger nearly upon us, the dating sim has inexplicably begun issuing wide-spread bans for its most active players. Mystic Messenger, arguably one of the best dating sims around, has been dormant for about seven years. Despite not receiving new content or any meaningful updates in all that time, the game remains popular with its core fans, many of whom just woke up to some shocking news about their accounts.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.