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During an equinox, the Sun shines directly over the equator, according to Alphonse Sterling, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He says that this results in nearly equal amounts of day and night throughout the world – except for the North and South Pole where the Sun approximately straddles the horizon for the entire day. Following the autumnal equinox, the Northern Hemisphere gradually experiences later sunrises and earlier sunsets – making the days shorter and the nightfall longer....

The researcher’s new cooling material is a nickel-titanium alloy that was sculpted using additive technology (3-D printing). Their work is published in the November 29, 2019, issue of Science. Cooling technology, used in refrigeration and HVAC systems around the globe, is a multi-billion dollar business. Vapor compression cooling, which has dominated the market for over 150 years, has plateaued in efficiency, and uses chemical refrigerants with high global-warming potential. Solid-state elastocaloric cooling, in which stress is applied to materials to release and absorb (latent) heat, has been under development for the last decade and is a front-runner for alternative cooling technologies....

What’s Up for December? Your early evening highlights, a chance to catch a comet, and the annual Geminid meteors. On December 6th through the 10th, look westward following sunset for the Moon visiting Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter in turn. The Moon’s crescent fills out as it appears higher in the sky each evening over the course of the week. Enjoy the view of dazzling Venus as the “evening star” while it lasts, though....

What’s Up for January? New year, new Moon; midnight meteors; and Mars rises. January begins with a new moon on the 2nd. And that means the first week of the month is ideal for stargazing because the few days before and after the new moon are the darkest. Head outside around 8 or 9 p.m. all week and look southward to be dazzled by all the bright stars of the Winter Circle, along with the Pleiades, and Orion....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science Translational Medicine. This condition is known as hypersomnia, and it’s different from narcolepsy since patients have more persistent daytime sleepiness instead of sudden sleep attacks. David Rye, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta, and his colleagues began a new study after getting a hunch about what was really happening. Several drugs used to treat insomnia promote sleep by targeting receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that dampens neural activity....

Quasars are perhaps the best-known luminous AGN, and their nuclei are visible and relatively unobscured by dust. But there are cases where the torus of material around the nuclei happens to block our line of sight. These obscured AGN have no visible emission lines and so are often omitted from studies, but they are needed to provide a more complete view of the population. A foremost question is whether these very luminous AGN are powered by moderate accretion onto very massive black holes, or instead by extreme accretion rates onto moderate-mass black holes, or perhaps something in between....

Dog brains, just as human brains, process speech hierarchically: intonations at lower, word meanings at higher stages, according to a new study by Hungarian researchers at the Department of Ethology, Faculty of Science, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) using functional MRI on awake dogs. The study, which reveals exciting speech processing similarities between us and a speechless species, will be published in Scientific Reports. Humans keep talking to dogs whose sensitivity to human communicative signs is well known....

As far back as ancient Rome, spider silk has been used as a remedy to treat everything from skin lesions to warts. In the past, doctors have covered open wounds in cobwebs or advised patients to place cocoons on infected teeth. In modern times, however, the literature contains conflicting reports of whether or not spider silk has antimicrobial properties. In the journal iScience on October 5th, researchers revisit these old experiments and debunk the myth of antibiotic spider silk....

As Hurricane Ian headed toward a third landfall, this time in South Carolina, NASA scientists were scrutinizing the latest imagery of the storm and analyzing the forces that made it so catastrophic. On September 28, the Landsat 8 satellite passed directly over Ian’s eye as the storm approached southwest Florida. The natural-color image above was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) at 11:57 a.m. local time (15:57 Universal Time), which was three hours before the storm made landfall in Caya Costa....

New research from stem cell biologists at Harvard University demonstrates the ability to turn one type neuron into another within the brain of young mice, possibly providing another step toward the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head by demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated neuron into another within the brain....

Although Einstein’s gravitation theory corresponds to the recent discovery of gravitation waves, it still leaves open some questions, including the nature of the singularity, dark matter, dark energy, and the question of quantum gravity. Also, even observations of gravity waves do not exclude that alternative gravitation theories may be accurate, and they can be used to describe black holes. Such theories, which include additional quantum components, do not contradict the observed picture of black hole mergers....

Newly published research shows that low to moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy is not associated with an increased risk of specific birth outcomes and measures of fetal growth. Heavy alcohol consumption during pregnancy has long been linked to a range of developmental problems and birth defects including fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), low birth weight, and preterm delivery, but a new study from Yale and Brown University shows that low to moderate alcohol consumption is not associated with an increased risk of specific birth outcomes and measures of fetal growth....

Scientific ‘by-catch‘ solves decades-old mystery The scientists have been investigating for years the processes of a novel type of cell death, known as ferroptosis. In this context, the enzyme GPX4, which normally contains selenium in the form of the amino acid selenocysteine, plays an important role. In order to better understand the role of GPX4 in this death process, we established and studied mouse models in which the enzyme was modified,” said study leader Conrad....

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT (4:14 p.m. PDT). As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s collision with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a feasible mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered. “At its core, DART represents an unprecedented success for planetary defense, but it is also a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson....

Material Science and Engineering Professor Paul Braun (Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, Materials Research Laboratory Director), Dr. Sungbong Kim (Postdoc, MatSE, current assistant professor at Korea Military Academy, co-first author), and Arghya Patra (Graduate Student, MatSE, MRL, co-first author) recently published a paper detailing their findings in Cell Reports Physical Science. The team demonstrated hermetically sealed (tightly closed to prevent exposure to ambient air), durable, compact, lithium batteries with exceptionally low package mass fraction in single-, double-, and triple-stacked configurations with unprecedented operating voltages, high power densities, and energy densities....

New technology developed by the University of Bristol has the potential to accelerate uptake and development of on-chip diagnostic techniques in parts of the world where rapid diagnoses are desperately needed to improve public health, mortality, and morbidity. Microfluidic devices underpin lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technologies which are developed to provide the rapid diagnoses at that are needed at point of care (POC) for the swift and effective treatment of many diseases....

“Roman has the unique ability to image very large areas of the sky, which allows us to see the environments around galaxies in the early universe,” said Nicole Drakos, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, who led the study. “Our study helps demonstrate what a Roman ultra-deep field could tell us about the universe, while providing a tool for the scientific community to extract the most value from such a program....

Vaccines such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are designed to prevent severe Coronavirus-19 Disease (COVID-19) due to acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and are highly efficacious. The efficacy is not different in people with and without obesity except for AstraZeneca which is not known, according to a new position statement from The Obesity Society (TOS), the leading scientific membership organization advancing the science-based understanding of the causes, consequences, prevention and treatment of obesity....

Geologists from the UNIGE and Peking University have developed a technique that makes it possible to estimate the maximum size of a future super-eruption of Toba volcano in Sumatra. It is estimated that about 5-10 volcanoes worldwide are capable of producing a super-eruption that could catastrophically affect global climate. One of these volcanoes hides below the waters of Lake Toba in Sumatra and has caused two super-eruptions in the last one million year....

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science investigated this using data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases. The results are published today in the journal JAMA Network Open. Key findings for the study period 1 August 2021 to 31 July 2022: Among children and young people aged 0 – 19 years in the US, COVID-19 ranked eighth among all causes of death; fifth among all disease-related causes of death; and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases....