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Silent since its last call to mothership Rosetta seven months ago, the Philae lander is facing conditions on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from which it is unlikely to recover.

These surprising results could in many cases make the search for better crystals obsolete and fundamentally change the way scientists study the complex biological machinery involved in photosynthesis, catalysis and many other important processes in living things. A better understanding of these processes could drive innovation in a number of areas, from clean energy production to drug development.

New measurements from a NASA satellite have allowed researchers to identify and quantify, for the first time, how climate-driven increases of liquid water storage on land have affected the rate of sea level rise.

A newly formed star lights up the surrounding cosmic clouds in this new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Dust particles in the vast clouds that surround the star HD 97300 diffuse its light, like a car headlight in enveloping fog, and create the reflection nebula IC 2631. Although HD 97300 is in the spotlight for now, the very dust that makes it so hard to miss heralds the birth of additional, potentially scene-stealing, future stars.

In a new study, Hao Yan, director of the Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute presents a clever means of localizing and confining enzymes and the substrate molecules they bind with, speeding up reactions essential for life processes.

Researchers in Japan and France artificially created such unique 1D nano electronic systems on the surface of a solid, and observed the 1D electronic state (energy and kinetic momentum of electrons) by analyzing photo-emitted electrons from the sample, and verified the electronic structure. This group's research will help elucidate the mystery of unique electronic properties of 1D nano metals and provide, for example, information helpful for the prediction of electrons confined in extremely fine metal nanowires used in next-generation semiconductor devices.

New, detailed maps of the world's natural landscapes created using NASA satellite data could help scientists better predict the impacts of future climate change.

Phagosomes carried by the Motors initially move in a back-and-forth manner near the cell periphery, and mature by fusing with other compartments. As time passes, there is a switch that causes the phagosomes to move in an almost unidirectional manner towards the cell centre. Here, they fuse with acidic lysosomes so that the pathogen can be degraded.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed the first known statistical theory for the toughness of polycrystalline graphene, which is made with chemical vapor deposition, and found that it is indeed strong (albeit not quite as strong as pristine monocrystalline graphene), but more importantly, its toughness--or resistance to fracture--is quite low. Their study, "Toughness and strength of nanocyrstalline graphene," was published recently in Nature Communications.

A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in cooperation with Russian and foreign colleagues learnt to grow organic semiconductor crystals with extremely high light-emitting efficiency that promise a bright future for wet-processed organic optoelectronics.