Research lab
Swiss public university whose research institutes span space science, astrophysics, planetary research, biology and ecology.
COMPASS, an ALMA survey of 11 low-mass protostars, detected methanol masers around more than half of them, the first at that mass. A deuterium-bearing form of methanol turned up at only one of the 11, IRAS 4A2, so that result is a single case.
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The Bern-led BELA team ran the instrument's laser in 10-second, 10-minute and hour-long steps on 14 September, confirming it survived eight years of cruise. The pulses went into open space.
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Sarah Meier and Eric Strobl matched wildfire particulate data to volunteer bird counts on about 2,800 US survey routes from 2008 to 2022, and the diversity dip held on routes where nothing had burned within five kilometres.
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Sticklebacks bred for two generations in identical Bern tanks still did best at the exact stream their grandparents came from. Local adaptation sits at a finer scale than the lake-versus-stream contrast.
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For the first time, the Earth-Theia collision has been simulated with temperature-dependent rock strength. Some runs still make the familiar debris disk; the hottest assemble an intact Moon in about five hours.
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Since 2001, giant-impact models have treated Earth and Theia as strengthless fluid because geology looked irrelevant at those energies. Restoring temperature-dependent strength changes whether the Moon condenses out of debris or arrives whole.
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The first paper built on ESA Hera's Deimos flyby argues a single roughly 320-metre impactor did both jobs, and that the moon is porous and fragile. JAXA's MMX inherits that finding.
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A 168-country study in People and Nature argues that the regions colonial powers targeted hardest were the most species-rich, and that the resulting extraction economies still structure poverty.
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About a hundred SPH runs at the University of Bern converge on a single non-destructive strike as the source of Deimos's south-polar depression and its global regolith. The surface is ejecta, and it is weak.
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