The star TW Hydrae is located about 150 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Hydrae, the Water Snake. This star is relatively young, about 10 million years old, and has passed out of its infancy but is not yet mature. Astronomers are trying to understand the processes at work in stars at this stage in their lives because, for example, during this period planets might be developing from disks around the stars....
Asymptomatic people who are infected with COVID-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others. But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough....
Noctilucent clouds are Earth’s highest clouds, sandwiched between Earth and space 50 miles above the ground in a layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. Seeded by fine debris from disintegrating meteors, these clouds of ice crystals glow a bright, shocking blue when they reflect sunlight. Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, or AIM, studies noctilucent clouds in order to better understand the mesosphere, and its connections to other parts of the atmosphere, weather and climate....
Disorders such as schizophrenia can originate in certain regions of the brain and then spread out to affect connected areas. Identifying these regions of the brain, and how they affect the other areas they communicate with, would allow drug companies to develop better treatments and could ultimately help doctors make a diagnosis. But interpreting the vast amounts of data produced by brain scans to identify these connecting regions has so far proved impossible....
For years, the U.S. Navy has employed human divers, equipped with sonar cameras, to search for underwater mines attached to ship hulls. The Navy has also trained dolphins and sea lions to search for bombs on and around vessels. While animals can cover a large area in a short amount of time, they are costly to train and care for, and don’t always perform as expected. In the last few years, Navy scientists, along with research institutions around the world, have been engineering resilient robots for minesweeping and other risky underwater missions....
New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal distinct streamers of material being pulled from three smaller galaxies and flowing into the more massive galaxy, which was discovered in 2015 by NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It is by no means the largest or most massive galaxy we know of, but it is unrivaled in its brightness, emitting as much infrared light as 350 trillion Suns....
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have seen a key stage in the birth of giant planets for the first time. Vast streams of gas are flowing across a gap in the disc of material around a young star. These are the first direct observations of such streams, which are expected to be created by giant planets guzzling gas as they grow. The result is published on January 2, 2013, in the journal Nature....
A nasal antiviral created by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons blocked transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in ferrets, suggesting the nasal spray also may prevent infection in people exposed to the new coronavirus, including recent variants The compound in the spray — a lipopeptide developed by Matteo Porotto, PhD, and Anne Moscona, MD, professors in the Department of Pediatrics and directors of the Center for Host-Pathogen Interaction — is designed to prevent the new coronavirus from entering host cells....
The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish. Michigan State University’s Ingo Braasch has helped an international research team show that this connection scheme was already present in ancient fish at least 450 million years ago. That makes it about 100 million years older than previously believed....
The earliest signs of Parkinson’s disease can be deceptively mild. The first thing that movie star Michael J. Fox noticed was twitching of the little finger of his left hand. For years, he made light of the apparently harmless tic. But such tremors typically spread, while muscles stiffen up and directed movements take longer to carry out. Research groups led by Armin Giese of LMU Munich and Christian Griesinger at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have developed a chemical compound that slows down the onset and progression of Parkinson’s disease in mice....
Ivor Jankovic, an associate adjunct professor, and Ivor Karavanic, an adjunct professor, both in UW’s Department of Anthropology, contributed to the new study that is highlighted in a paper, titled “The Genomic History of Southeastern Europe,” published February 21 in Nature, an international weekly journal of science. “The study confirmed that the region of southeastern Europe was a major nexus and a genetic contact zone between the East and West during prehistoric times,” says Jankovic, whose full-time job is assistant director of the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia....
In the absence of approved, effective treatments for COVID-19, some hospitals have been treating patients with severe COVID symptoms with blood plasma from recovering patients. The blood of recovered patients contains antibodies that act against the coronavirus. While plasma hasn’t yet shown a benefit in randomized trials, some small retrospective studies suggest it may reduce illness severity and reduce hospitalization time. This week in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers report that antibody levels in the blood of COVID-19 patients drop rapidly during the weeks after their bodies have cleared the virus and symptoms have subsided....
Collins was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963. In 1966, he served as the pilot on the 3-day Gemini 10 mission, during which he set a world altitude record and became the nation’s third spacewalker, completing two extravehicular activities. His second flight was as command module pilot of the historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. He remained in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon....
The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful and complex observatory ever deployed, not to mention the most expensive, at $10 billion! Because of its complex system of mirrors and its advanced sun shield, the telescope had to be designed so that it could be folded up (origami style) to fit inside a payload fairing, then unfold once it reached space. To ensure everything would work, the telescope had to be rigorously tested, a process that caused numerous delays and cost overruns (a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic)....
Astronomers have found some of the youngest stars ever seen, thanks to the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. Observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, a collaboration involving the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden, and the European Southern Observatory in Germany, contributed to the findings. Dense envelopes of gas and dust surround the fledging stars known as protostars, making their detection difficult....
In the Universe, galaxies are not distributed uniformly. There are some places, known as clusters, where dozens or hundreds of galaxies are found close together. Other galaxies are isolated. To determine how and why clusters formed, it is critical to investigate not only mature galaxy clusters as seen in the present Universe but also observe protoclusters, galaxy clusters in the process of forming. Because the speed of light is finite, observing distant objects allows us to look back in time....
“We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating,” said Diane Brown, Juno program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It was a long trip to get to Jupiter, but these first results already demonstrate it was well worth the journey.” Juno launched on August 5, 2011, entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. The findings from the first data-collection pass, which flew within about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) of Jupiter’s swirling cloud tops on August 27, are being published this week in two papers in the journal Science, as well as 44 papers in Geophysical Research Letters....
Scientists from the University of Leicester and University of Arizona investigated hot, young, white dwarfs — the super-dense remains of Sun-like stars that ran out of fuel and collapsed to about the size of the Earth. Their research is featured in MNRAS- the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, published by Oxford University Press. It has been known that many hot white dwarfs atmospheres, essentially of pure hydrogen or pure helium, are contaminated by other elements – like carbon, silicon and iron....
From 2015 to 2016, citizen scientists — people like Bourassa who are excited about a science field but don’t necessarily have a formal educational background — shared 30 reports of these mysterious lights in online forums and with a team of scientists that run a project called Aurorasaurus. The citizen science project, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, tracks the aurora borealis through user-submitted reports and tweets. The Aurorasaurus team, led by Liz MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, conferred to determine the identity of this mysterious phenomenon....
Using observations and modeling, astronomers pinpointed the origins of 84 SGRBs, quadrupling existing samples.They found that 85% of SGRBs in the catalog come from young, actively star-forming galaxies and 20-40% of SGRBs occurred when the universe was much younger.The team also discovered that several SGRBs were spotted outside their host galaxies, as if they were ‘kicked out’.Researcher: ‘Our catalog will serve as a benchmark for comparison to future detections of neutron star mergers’....
