The early stages of the solar system remain shrouded in mystery. Not much remains from that time, but scientists have developed plenty of theories about what was going on back then. One of those theories attempts to answer a simple question - did the early system prefer “fire” or “ice”? A new paper published in Nature Astrophysics from lead author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and his co-authors, have a definitive answer to that question - the early solar system preferred fire.

Everything from the gold in your smart phone to the calcium in your bones was originally created in a star. But for a long time there has been a question about the levels of one particular element - strontium, which makes fireworks burn bright red and is used in glow-in-the-dark paint. A new paper published in Nature Communications Physics from a large group of researchers led by Caley M. Harris, a graduate student at Michigan State University, thinks they have found an answer for why that particular elemental level was skewed - and doing so required some very elaborate laboratory testing.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have teamed up with pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company to uncover how storage conditions affect mRNA lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), the technology behind COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments, and how to make them more effective.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have developed a way to "supercharge" a plant's natural immune response.

When Pliny the Younger recorded his firsthand experience of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago—a cataclysm that buried Pompeii and killed his uncle, Pliny the Elder—he provided enough detail about the date to allow scientists to benchmark methods for dating volcanic eruptions.