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The coming year is shaping up to be just as interesting. Here are some of the missions to keep an eye out for. Artemis 1 Artemis 1 is the first flight of the NASA-led, international Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. This will consist of an uncrewed Orion spacecraft which will be sent on a three-week flight around the Moon. IT will reach a maximum distance from Earth of 450,000km – the farthest into space that any spacecraft that can transport humans will have ever flown....

Smilodon lived in North and South America during the Early to Late Pleistocene, 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago. Despite being referred colloquially as saber-tooth tigers, Smilidon is not closely related to tigers or any living felids. The canines have been envisioned as slicing and stabbing weapons, but no clear evidence of this has been uncovered. Initially, it was thought that the canines of Smilodon were used like serrated knives, functioning as stabbing weapons in an attack....

The stellar wind from a newborn star in the Orion Nebula is preventing more new stars from forming nearby, according to new research using NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). This is surprising because until now, scientists thought that other processes, such as exploding stars called supernovas, were largely responsible for regulating the formation of stars. But SOFIA’s observations suggest that infant stars generate stellar winds that can blow away the seed material required to form new stars, a process called “feedback....

After four decades of searching, solar scientists have at long last found evidence of a type of seismic wave in our Sun, thanks to ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. These low-frequency waves, called g-modes, reveal that the solar core is rotating some four times faster than the solar surface. “This is certainly the biggest result of SOHO in the last decade, and one of SOHO’s all-time top discoveries,” said Bernhard Fleck, ESA’s SOHO project scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

Stamp-sized device comprises a suite of clinical-grade sensors, including temperature and pulse oximetryDevice sits at the base of the throat to pick up vibratory signatures of breathing, coughing, swallowingSince developing the device, researchers have tested it on more than 50 physicians, rehabilitation specialists and patients at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and Northwestern Memorial HospitalResearcher: ‘We are already seeing clear vital sign differences collected by the sensor between patients with COVID-19 and healthy-matched controls’Research group has partnered with BARDA to continue developing and deploying the device to help fight the pandemic...

New research presented at this year’s Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain (September 16-20, 2019) reveals that vitamin D deficiency is strongly linked to increased mortality, especially in younger and middle-aged people, and is particularly associated with diabetes-related deaths. The research was conducted by Dr. Rodrig Marculescu and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. It analyzed the effects of low 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25D) (referred to as vitamin D) levels in the blood on overall and cause-specific mortality in a large study cohort covering all age groups, and taken from a population with minimal vitamin D supplementation in old age....

“Goldschmidtite has high concentrations of niobium, potassium, and the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium, whereas the rest of the mantle is dominated by other elements, such as magnesium and iron,” explained Meyer, a graduate student in the Diamond Exploration Research and Training School, part of NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience. “For potassium and niobium to constitute a major proportion of this mineral, it must have formed under exceptional processes that concentrated these unusual elements....

New research shows some of the clearest evidence yet of a discernible human influence on atmospheric temperature. Published online in the November 29 early edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the study compared 20 of the latest climate models against 33 years of satellite data. When human factors were included in the models, they followed the pattern of temperature changes observed by satellite. When the same simulations were run without considering human influences, the results were quite different....

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows an astronomical object whose image is multiplied by the effect of strong gravitational lensing. The galaxy, nicknamed the Sunburst Arc, is almost 11 billion light-years away from Earth and has been lensed into multiple images by a massive cluster of galaxies 4.6 billion light-years away[1]. The mass of the galaxy cluster is large enough to bend and magnify the light from the more distant galaxy behind it....

Astronomers from Flatiron Institute and their colleagues have spotted two ghostly Goliaths en route to a cataclysmic meeting. The newfound pair of supermassive black holes are the closest to colliding ever seen, the astronomers announced on January 9 at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle and in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. While close together in cosmological terms at just 750 light-years apart, the supermassive black holes won’t merge for a few hundred million years....

The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists. The research draws on the discovery of two major pathways governing aging in C. elegans, which is a popular model in aging research because it shares many of its genes with humans and because its short lifespan of only three to four weeks allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of genetic and environmental interventions to extend healthy lifespan....

This time-lapse video, taken on October 8, 2019, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, captures the first time NASA’s Mars 2020 rover has carried its full weight on its legs and wheels. “After years of design, analysis, and testing, it is fantastic to see the rover on her wheels for the first time,” said Ben Riggs, a mechanical systems engineer working on Mars 2020 at JPL. “The whole team looks forward to seeing her in the same configuration on Mars in the not too distant future....

Researchers from Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) developed a novel algorithm called “scArches,” short for single-cell architecture surgery. The biggest advantage: “Instead of sharing raw data between clinics or research centers, the algorithm uses transfer learning to compare new datasets from single-cell genomics with existing references and thus preserves privacy and anonymity. This also makes annotating and interpreting of new data sets very easy and democratizes the usage of single-cell reference atlases dramatically,” says Mohammad Lotfollahi, the leading scientist of the algorithm....

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have found evidence that the language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains that may underlie the way we think. With the help of magnetic resonance tomography, they looked deep into the brains of native German and Arabic speakers and discovered differences in the wiring of the language regions in the brain. Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain....

“Many people care greatly about their reputation and how they will be judged by others, and a concern about appearing honest may outweigh our desire to actually be honest, even in situations where it will cost us money to lie,” said lead researcher Shoham Choshen-Hillel, Ph.D., a senior lecturer at the School of Business Administration and Center for the Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Our findings suggest that when people obtain extremely favorable outcomes, they anticipate other people’s suspicious reactions and prefer lying and appearing honest over telling the truth and appearing as selfish liars....

The researchers, integrating expertise from materials science, chemistry, and physics, conducted exhaustive computational simulations of a structure known as a Weaire-Phelan foam. They found that this foam would allow some frequencies of light to pass through while completely reflecting others. This selective blocking, known as a photonic band gap, is similar to the behavior of a semiconductor, the bedrock material behind all modern electronics because of its ability to control the flow of electrons at extremely small scales....

Time can do tricks. Many of us experienced the illusion that those long summers during childhood felt so much longer than the same 3 months feel like now as an adult. While we can argue why one summer may appear longer than the other and how the percept of time can compress and dilate durations depending on various factors, we can easily set up an experiment to gain more insights....

Researchers at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering and their colleagues are testing polymers based on tubulanes, theoretical structures of crosslinked carbon nanotubes predicted to have extraordinary strength. The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan found tubulanes can be mimicked as scaled-up, 3D-printed polymer blocks that prove to be better at deflecting projectiles than the same material without holes. The blocks are also highly compressible without breaking apart. As detailed in Small, the discovery could lead to printed structures of any size with tunable mechanical properties....

One of these spiders, P. boliviensis, is a medically important species widely distributed in Central and South America, whose behavior, habitat, venom composition, toxicity and bites on humans have already been paid considerable attention in previous research work. Nevertheless, after examining a large pool of museum specimens, biologists from The George Washington University (N. Hazzi and G. Hormiga) began to wonder if samples named P. boliviensis were actually belonging to one and the same species....

The purpose of the ICBM test launch program is to validate and verify the safety, security, effectiveness, and readiness of the weapon system, according to Air Force Global Strike Command. The LLNL Independent Diagnostic Scoring System (LIDSS) was used to collect the downrange data following the launch. The assets used to collect the data included autonomous rafts, camera boxes, and drones. “This mission was the first time the team remotely commanded the LIDSS assets from across the world back at LLNL,” said Steve Jensen, LLNL flight test director....