In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers created a model that describes the spread and speed of tornado-like vortex tubes in superfluids. This work expands on a previous study that reported experimental results obtained in superfluid helium-4 within a narrow temperature range.

An international team of researchers have discovered 1.2-billion-year-old groundwater deep in a gold- and uranium-producing mine in Moab Khotsong, South Africa, shedding more light on how life is sustained below the Earth’s surface and how it may thrive on other planets. The findings were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications. “For the first time, we have insight into how energy stored deep in the Earth’s subsurface can be released and distributed more broadly through its crust over time,” says Oliver Warr, research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Think of it as a Pandora’s Box of helium-and-hydrogen-producing power, one that we can learn how to harness for the benefit of the deep biosphere on a global scale.”

Robotic ammonites, evaluated in a university pool, allow researchers to explore questions about how shell shapes affected swimming ability. They found trade-offs between stability in the water and maneuverability, suggesting that the evolution of ammonite shells explored different designs for different advantages, rather than converged toward a single best design.

Anthony Rios, assistant professor of information systems and cyber security in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business at UTSA, has received a five-year $550,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. One of the most prestigious NSF awards, CAREER supports early-career faculty who demonstrate potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. Rios will use the award to study natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand and interpret human language. It is used in everyday applications such as Google Translate and Amazon Alexa.

According to a new study, the first louse to take up residence on a mammalian host likely started out as a parasite of birds. That host-jumping event tens of millions of years ago began the long association between mammals and lice, setting the stage for their coevolution and offering more opportunities for the lice to spread to other mammals.