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Approximately 70 percent of all human proteins include at least one sequence consisting of a single amino acid repeated many times, with a few other amino acids sprinkled in. These “low-complexity regions” (LCRs) are also found in the proteins of most other organisms. Although the proteins that contain these sequences have many different functions, MIT biologists have now come up with a way to identify and analyze them as a unified group....

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have made a breakthrough that could pave the way for the development of a revolutionary rechargeable lithium battery. This new design is expected to be more lightweight, compact, and safer than existing models. The key to this potential leap in battery technology is replacing the liquid electrolyte that sits between the positive and negative electrodes with a much thinner, lighter layer of solid ceramic material, and replacing one of the electrodes with solid lithium metal....

In the years since her lab discovered that exposing Alzheimer’s disease model mice to light flickering at the frequency of a key brain rhythm could stem the disorder’s pathology, MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai and her team at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have been working to understand what the phenomenon may mean both for fighting the disease and understanding of how the brain works. Two papers earlier this year in Cell and in Neuron replicated and substantially extended the initial findings reported in Nature in 2016 and clinical trials with human volunteers recently began....

To better understand the human genome and its variability from person to person, scientists at Harvard Medical School developed a set of molecular and statistical tools to scrutinize a particularly intriguing region of the genome associated with female fertility and neurological disease, finding that 17q21.31 exists in nine distinct structural forms, with each differing in the gain, loss or rearrangement of more than a 100,000 base pairs of genetic code....

All molecular motors developed by Dube are based on the same class of molecules, so-called hemithioindigo dyes, which the scientists chemically modified. The movement occurs when the motors rotate in different ways around chemical bonds within the molecule. “All known molecular motors to date, however, were only able to move linearly or rotate in circles,” says Dube. The scientists discovered the new motor when they inserted a so-called julolidine group to improve the switching properties of their motors....

We are living in the period of fastest urban growth in human history, with more than 2 billion additional people expected in cities by 2030 — a pace that is the equivalent to building a city the size of New York City every 6 weeks. But what do scientists know and not know about how urban growth is affecting biodiversity? To answer this question, an international team of researchers reviewed more than 900 studies....

Globular star clusters are huge spheres of tens of thousands of stars that orbit most galaxies. They are among the oldest known stellar systems in the Universe and date back to near the beginning of galaxy growth and evolution. More than 150 are currently known to belong to the Milky Way. A new national facility at ESO’s La Silla Observatory has successfully made its first observations. The ExTrA telescopes will search for and study Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby red dwarf stars....

On April 28, a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar blasted out a simultaneous mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before. The flare-up included the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever seen from within our Milky Way galaxy and shows that magnetars can produce these enigmatic and powerful radio blasts previously only seen in other galaxies. “Before this event, a wide variety of scenarios could explain the origin of FRBs,” said Chris Bochenek, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Caltech who led one study of the radio event....

Every year, nearly half a million people in Germany develop cancer. Approximately 2,100 cancer patients are children under the age of 18. The fact that the majority of cancers develop in old adults is due to the mechanisms contributing to cancer development. A range of exogenous factors, including tobacco smoke and radiation, can cause damage to cellular DNA. If this type of DNA damage is left to accumulate over many years, affected cells may lose control over cell division and growth....

Directional antennas convert electrical signals to radio waves and emit them in a particular direction, allowing increased performance and reduced interference. This principle, which is useful in radio wave technology, could also be interesting for miniaturized light sources. After all, almost all Internet-based communication utilizes optical light communication. Directional antennas for light could be used to exchange data between different processor cores with little loss and at the speed of light....

At 7:42 a.m. on Saturday, November 26, Orion surpassed the distance record for a mission with a spacecraft designed to carry humans to deep space and back to Earth. The record was set during the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 miles (400,171 km) from our home planet. At its maximum distance from the Moon, Orion will be more than 270,000 miles (435,000 km) from Earth Monday, November 28. Engineers also completed the first orbital maintenance burn by firing auxiliary thrusters on Orion’s service module at 3:52 p....

On July 20, 2001, two NASA astronauts took the first “steps” out of the International Space Station’s Quest airlock, marking the start of two decades of successful spacewalks in support of station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades enabling all of the life and work onboard to take place. On the same date 32 years before this milestone spacewalk outside the space station, two Apollo astronauts were taking historic steps of their own on the lunar surface for the first time....

Africa is front and center in this image of Earth taken by a NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. The image, taken July 6 from a vantage point one million miles from Earth, was one of the first taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). Central Europe is toward the top of the image with the Sahara Desert to the south, showing the Nile River flowing to the Mediterranean Sea through Egypt....

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is responsible for operational hurricane forecasting and monitoring in the United States. NASA’s role as a research agency is to develop new types of observational capabilities and analytical tools to learn about the fundamental processes that drive hurricanes and the connections between hurricanes and regional rainfall variability to incorporate data that capture those mechanisms in forecasts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Atlantic hurricane season has already shown signs of increased activity, with five named storms already in the books early in the season, Morton said....

Percy woke up early in the morning at 02:07 LMST (Local Mean Solar Time on Mars) to conduct a data management activity for an onboard instrument called MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer), which uses a suite of sensors to monitor weather throughout the Sol. After a short nap, it was time to wake up again and send data from the previous Sol’s observations down to scientists on Earth via Mars orbiters and the Deep Space Network (DSN)....

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft is nearing its scheduled September 21 insertion into Martian orbit after completing a 10-month interplanetary journey of 442 million miles. Flight Controllers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado, will be responsible for the health and safety of the spacecraft throughout the process. The spacecraft’s mission timeline will place the spacecraft in orbit at approximately 9:50 p.m. EDT. “So far, so good with the performance of the spacecraft and payloads on the cruise to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

As many of you know, we carry a piece of the original Wright Flyer aboard our helicopter. Even though we are conducting our flight tests in a tenuous atmosphere over 180 million miles (290 million kilometers) from Earth, we model our methodical approach to experimental flight on the Wright brothers’ approach. Our plan from Day One has been to prepare like crazy, fly, analyze the data (like crazy), and then plan for an even bolder test in the next flight....

“The first launch of the Space Launch System rocket was simply eye-watering,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager. “While our mission with Orion is still underway and we continue to learn over the course of our flight, the rocket’s systems performed as designed and as expected in every case.” The twin solid rocket booster motors responsible for producing more than 7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff reached their performance target, helping the rocket and spacecraft travel more than 27 miles from its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and reaching a speed of about 4,000 mph in just over two minutes before the boosters separated....

The radiation-detecting suite of research instruments is planned to launch inside the first module of the multipurpose international outpost, which will be in a highly elliptical seven-day orbit around the Moon. The Gateway will provide vital support for a sustainable, long-term human return to the lunar surface under the Artemis program and serve as a staging point for deep-space exploration, in addition to hosting science and technology demonstrations. Space radiation is one of the primary concerns for crew health, safety, and mission success during deep space exploration missions, as it poses a considerable health risk to astronauts in space....

Overlapping the farthest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and the very beginning of space, the ionosphere stretches roughly 50 to 400 miles above the surface. Solar radiation cooks tenuous gases there until they lose an electron (or two or three), creating a sea of electrically charged ions and electrons. Neither fully Earth nor space, the ionosphere reacts both to winds and weather from the lower atmosphere below and solar energy streaming in from above, changing constantly to form conditions we call space weather....