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Bacteria could be used to improve the fertility of lunar soil to allow us to live on the Moon, scientists have said. The breakthrough new study combined three different bacteria on lunar soil to see how it would affect the growth of a plant – and found that it dramatically helped improve the fertility of material taken from the Moon. Adding the three bacteria to the soil helped the researchers grow the planet, which was a relative of tobacco named benth. The bacteria work by increasing the amount of a kind of phosphorus in the soil. That is a major nutrient for plants and adding more of it means that plants will grow more easily and populous. Previous studies have shown that it is possible to grow cress using lunar soil. But it has been found to be difficult to support plants, and studies have shown that it is actually worse than volcanic ash from our own planet. What’s more, lunar soil has less nitrogen, which is required to grow plants. What phosphorus there is also comes in a form that cannot be used by plants. If we are to live on the Moon, therefore, scientist will have to find new ways to grow plants. And the researchers suggest that the breakthrough trio of bacteria could be a key step towards that aim. That in turn will help support life in future lunar bases, the researchers note in a new study published today. The work is described in a new paper, ‘Phosphorus-solubilizing bacteria improve the growth of Nicotiana benthamiana on lunar regolith simulant by dissociating insoluble inorganic phosphorus’ published in Communications Biology. Read More One of Saturn’s moons found to have all ingredients essential for life Nasa gets ‘puzzling’ data back from spacecraft exploring distant object Telescope reveals stunning images of the universe as it has never been seen before

Europe’s wildfire threat is spreading to the French Riviera, while firefighters in Greece battle more than 100 blazes.

Logan Paul was one of the first YouTube millionaires, with an estimated net worth of $45 million

Have you ever tried to swear over text, only to find that your intended expletive has been autocorrected to "ducking". Fear no more, because Apple has announced it will upgrade its autocorrect feature so people can swear away to their heart's content. “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino on Monday. We'll leave you to work out what word people really want to say when they end up writing "ducking"... Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter TechCrunch reported that iOS 17, which will roll out to the general public by September, will feature an upgraded autocorrect powered by AI. Over time, the AI model will learn to predict words and phrases that the iPhone user repeats, including swear words. Meanwhile, it comes as the company announced it was making a new mixed-reality headset, which caused quite the stir on social media. Big times for iPhone users and people with potty mouths, then... Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

When can we expect the NBA 2K24 ratings reveal? Here's what we expect based on previous years.

Meta on Tuesday launched a highly anticipated "following feed" option in its Threads app as part of its latest batch of updates that could help the new social platform further chip away at Twitter's position in the market.

UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 21, 2023--

A federal judge has dismissed the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit against Google, which claimed the

League of Legends 2023 patch schedule including all dates to know for Season 13 following Patch 13.10.

Some Assassin’s Creed players got an unwanted surprise this week when a fullscreen pop-up ad