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Now, the future that Apollo-era scientists envisioned has come. Their successors, many of whom weren’t even born when the last astronauts scooped up the Moon samples they’ll now be probing in their labs, are ready to take a giant leap toward answering long-standing questions about the evolution of our solar system. Two teams based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are among the nine science groups selected to study Moon samples that have been sealed for half a century....

The cutting-edge Earth science satellites launching in the next couple of years will give more detailed views of our planet than ever before. We’ll be able to track small-scale ocean features like coastal currents that move nutrients vital to marine food webs, monitor how much fresh water flows through lakes and rivers, and spot movement in Earth’s surface of less than half an inch (a centimeter). But these satellites will also produce a deluge of data that has engineers and scientists setting up systems in the cloud capable of processing, storing, and analyzing all of that digital information....

Europa has long been a high priority for exploration because beneath its icy crust lies a salty, liquid water ocean. NASA’s Europa Clipper, targeted to launch in 2022, will be equipped with the instruments necessary to determine whether Europa possesses the ingredients necessary to support life as we know it. Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD), and JoAnna Wendel, PSD communications lead, will host the chat....

The emergence of COVID-19 variants such as delta and omicron have sent scientists scrambling to determine whether existing vaccinations and boosters are still effective against new strains of SARS-Cov-2. A new response to the rapidly mutating virus might be found right at the door to our lungs, says Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Immunobiology. In a new study, she and her colleagues found that intranasal vaccination provides broad-based protection against heterologous respiratory viruses in mice, while so-called systemic immunization, which uses an injection to elicit body-wide protection, did not....

Building on their previous findings, scientists from the Immuno-Pharmacology and Interactomics group at the Department of Infection and Immunity of the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), in collaboration with the Center for Drug Discovery at RTI International (RTI), a nonprofit research institute, have demonstrated that conolidine, a natural painkiller derived from the pinwheel flower and traditionally used in Chinese medicine, interacts with the newly identified opioid receptor ACKR3/CXCR7 that regulates opioid peptides naturally produced in the brain....

For astrophysicists neutron stars are extremely complex astronomical objects. Research conducted with the collaboration of SISSA and published in the journal Physical Review Letters demonstrates that in certain respects these stars can instead be described very simply and that they show similarities with black holes. In how many ways can one describe an object? Take an apple: by just looking at it we can easily estimate its weight, shape and color but we are unable to describe it at any other level, for example, to evaluate the chemical composition of its flesh....

A high-performance composite sponge that works effectively to filter particulate matter in high temperature and high humidity environments has been designed by a team of researchers. Featuring excellent mechanical properties, the sponge is made of environmentally friendly materials. This filter has great potential for helping to fight air pollution in automobiles and in industry. The work, by a team of Chinese researchers from Fuzhou University, is published today (October 3, 2022) in the journal Particuology....

Pulsars are the compact remnants from explosions of massive stars. Some of them spin around their own axis hundreds of times per second, emitting beams of radiation into space. Until now, they could only be found through their pulsed radio emissions. Now, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Hanover assisted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have discovered a millisecond pulsar solely via its pulsed gamma radiation....

The researchers report their findings in the journal NPJ Breast Cancer. FOXM1 is a naturally occurring protein that ramps up the expression of genes that are important to cell proliferation and development. It plays an important role during early development, but normally is present only at very low levels in adult tissues. The researchers focused on FOXM1 because it is found in higher abundance in cancer cells than in healthy human cells, said Benita Katzenellenbogen, a University of Illinois professor of molecular and integrative physiology who led the study with U....

In a new study, researchers from University of Copenhagen show that the phenomenon cell fitness could predict the host immune response to a COVID-19-infection. The discovery could prove to be important for pandemic management. As parts of the Western world are slowly returning to normal, many countries in the low- and middle-income countries are still fighting and fearing new outbreaks of COVID-19. And for most it feels almost unbearable to endure another new wave of the virus, which could end in more deaths and long-term persistent symptoms from COVID-19 infection....

Many COVID-19 patients have reported symptoms affecting the ears, including hearing loss and tinnitus. Dizziness and balance problems can also occur, suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be able to infect the inner ear. A new study from MIT and Massachusetts Eye and Ear provides evidence that the virus can indeed infect cells of the inner ear, including hair cells, which are critical for both hearing and balance. The researchers also found that the pattern of infection seen in human inner ear tissue is consistent with the symptoms seen in a study of 10 COVID-19 patients who reported a variety of ear-related symptoms....

A new study offers clues on the origins of life, providing data to support the idea that the 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt (halophile) environment. A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago....

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to “clear” its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit. Since Neptune’s gravity influences its neighboring planet Pluto, and Pluto shares its orbit with frozen gases and objects in the Kuiper belt, that meant Pluto was out of planet status. However, in a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Icarus, UCF planetary scientist Philip Metzger, who is with the university’s Florida Space Institute, reported that this standard for classifying planets is not supported in the research literature....

The newly discovered ice is amorphous — that is, its molecules are in a disorganized form, not neatly ordered as they are in ordinary, crystalline ice. Amorphous ice, although rare on Earth, is the main type of ice found in space. That is because, in the colder environment of space, ice does not have enough thermal energy to form crystals. For the study, published in the journal Science, the research team used a process called ball milling, vigorously shaking ordinary ice together with steel balls in a jar cooled to -200 degrees Centigrade....

The old cousins of the common woodlice were crawling on Irish land as long as 360 million years ago, according to new analysis of a fossil found in Kilkenny. The research, published today (Wednesday, June 16, 2021) in the science journal Biology Letters, used state-of-the-art modern imaging technology to create a new picture of the Oxyuropoda — a land-based creature larger than the modern woodlice — using a fossil found in Kiltorcan, Co Kilkenny in 1908....

In a recent project, Dr. Assaf Hochman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s (HU) Fredy & Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences, along with Drs. Thaddeus D. Komacek of the University of Maryland and Paolo De Luca of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, successfully developed a framework to study the atmospheres of far-off planets and find the planets suitable for human habitation without having to physically visit them. Their findings were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal....

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have discovered a long-sought gene-encoded protein that allows the brain to communicate a number of signals across synapses, or gaps between neurons. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature. The protein, known as synaptotagmin-3 (SYT3), aids in replenishing the supply of chemical neurotransmitters that transmit signals between neurons. “When brain cells are active, they release neurotransmitters to communicate with their neighbors,” said senior author Skyler Jackman, Ph....

The maps provide unprecedented detail of the structure of the Orion A molecular cloud, the closest star-forming region of high-mass stars. Orion A hosts a variety of star-forming environments, including dense star clusters similar to the one where Earth’s Sun is believed to have formed. “Our maps probe a wide range of physical scales needed to study how stars form in molecular clouds, and how young stars impact their parent cloud,” said Yale postdoctoral associate Shuo Kong, first author of a study about the group’s research that has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Supplements....

Coating particles with “right-handed” molecules could help them penetrate cancer cells more easily. MIT engineers have shown that they can enhance the performance of drug-delivery nanoparticles by controlling a trait of chemical structures known as chirality — the “handedness” of the structure. Many biological molecules can come in either right-handed or left-handed forms, which are identical in composition but are mirror images of each other. The MIT team found that coating nanoparticles with the right-handed form of the amino acid cysteine helped the particles to avoid being destroyed by enzymes in the body....

But the drumhead is tens of trillions times (10 followed by 12 zeros) smaller in volume and 100,000 times thinner than the human eardrum. The advances will likely contribute to making the next generation of ultralow-power communications and sensory devices smaller and with greater detection and tuning ranges. “Sensing and communication are key to a connected world,” said Philip Feng, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and corresponding author on a paper about the work published March 30 in the journal Science Advances....