Black holes – regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape – are a hot topic in the news these days. Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for his mathematical work showing that black holes are an inescapable consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared the other half for showing that a massive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy....
Tzanidakis recently reported at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society that follow-up analyses revealed that Gaia17bpp wasn’t undergoing any changes itself. Instead, it is likely a part of a unique binary system and its apparent brightening was the conclusion of a multi-year eclipse caused by its unusual stellar partner. “We believe that this star is part of an exceptionally rare type of binary system, between a large, puffy older star — Gaia17bpp — and a small companion star that is surrounded by an expansive disk of dusty material,” said Tzanidakis, a UW doctoral student in astronomy....
Partnerships between ant and plant species appear to arise from—but not drive—the rapid diversification of ants into new species. Katrina Kaur of the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology. Some plants and ants have mutually beneficial, or “mutualistic,” interactions: plants provide ants with food or shelter, while ants protect plants against herbivores or disperse their seeds. Previous research has shown that plants with ant partners diversify faster—showing a bigger net difference between extinction rates and the rise of new plant species—than do other plants....
“Once birds got into the air, these two species were so poorly capable of being in the air that they just got squeezed out,” says first author Thomas Dececchi, Assistant Professor of Biology at Mount Marty University. “Maybe you can survive a few million years underperforming, but you have predators from the top, competition from the bottom, and even some small mammals adding into that, squeezing them out until they disappeared....
The Orion spacecraft is back in Florida after Artemis I, a direct deposit on Mars, and an insightful mission comes to an end. These are a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA! The Orion spacecraft is back in Florida, after Artemis I … A direct deposit on Mars … And an insightful mission comes to an end… a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!...
Massive Galaxies like the Milky Way typically consist of hundreds of billions of stars and host a black hole with a mass of several million up to several 100 million solar masses at their centers. The galaxy known as NGC 6240 is known as an irregular galaxy due to its particular shape. Until now, astronomers have assumed that it was formed by the collision of two smaller galaxies and therefore contains two black holes in its core....
The authors of a commentary from the Division of Infectious Disease and Geographic Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center say that lessons from SARS, MERS, and Ebola suggest that early case identification through ascertaining travel history is critical to protect both patients and those caring from them. In 2014, a patient presented to a Dallas emergency department after returning from Liberia with low-grade fever, abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, and headache....
Korean researchers have screened 48 FDA-approved drugs against SARS-CoV-2, and found that two, that are already FDA-approved for other illnesses, seem promising. The FDA approval for other uses would greatly reduce the time needed to gain FDA approval of use in COVID-19. The research is published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The investigators tested the drugs in Vero cells, a cell line developed from kidney cells of the African Green Monkey, which are commonly used to grow viruses for vaccine production....
N95 respirators, which are widely worn by health care workers treating patients with COVID-19 and are designed to be used only once, can be decontaminated effectively and used up to three times, according to research by UCLA scientists and colleagues. An early-release version of their study has been published online, with the full study to appear in September in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. N95 respirators reduce exposure to airborne infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and are one of the key pieces of personal protective equipment used by clinical workers in preventing the spread of the virus....
Stars produce their energy through nuclear fusion by converting hydrogen into helium — a process known to researchers as “hydrogen burning.” There are two ways of carrying out this fusion reaction: on the one hand, the so-called pp cycle (proton-proton reaction) and the Bethe Weizsäcker cycle (also known as the CNO cycle, derived from the elements carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and oxygen (O)) on the other hand. The pp cycle is the predominant energy source in our Sun, only about 1....
The findings, published today (October 14, 2019) in the journal Nature Materials, hold the potential for advances in gels, pastes, foods, nonwovens, and coatings, among other formulations. The soft dendritic particle materials with unique adhesive and structure-building properties can be created from a variety of polymers precipitated from solutions under special conditions, says Orlin Velev, S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State and corresponding author of the paper....
This presents a challenge to researchers attempting to design artificial trees or other methods of capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air. That challenge is one a Sandia National Laboratories-led team of scientists is attempting to solve. Led by Sandia chemical engineer Tuan Ho, the team has been using powerful computer models combined with laboratory experiments to study how a kind of clay can soak up carbon dioxide and store it....
Chemists employ a similar process when developing new compounds. A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, and The University of Chicago has created a new technique for identifying and synthesizing crystalline materials that contain two or more elements. “We expect that our work will prove extremely valuable to the chemistry, materials, and condensed matter communities for synthesizing new and currently unpredictable materials with exotic properties,” said Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern with a joint appointment at Argonne....
By invoking the “cosmological collider,” physicists from the University of California, Riverside, and Tsinghua University in China have now opened a new pathway for studying the cosmic origin of matter. Not just any collider High-energy colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider, have been designed to generate very heavy subatomic elementary particles that might reveal new physics. However, certain new physics, such as those explaining dark matter and the origin of matter, can involve far heavier particles, necessitating much more energy than a human-made collider can deliver....
On April 11th, 2012 a pair of massive earthquakes rocked the Indian Ocean. Scientists think that these may be the latest step in the formation of a new plate boundary on Earth’s surface. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. The geological stresses are rending the Indo-Australian plate apart, and this probably caused the 8.6 and 8.2 magnitude quakes that broke along numerous faults and unleashed aftershocks for six days....
These bodies, called Patroclus and Menoetius, are targets of NASA’s upcoming Lucy mission. They are around 70 miles (110 kilometers) wide and orbit around each other as they collectively circle the Sun. They are the only large binary known in the population of ancient bodies referred to as the Trojan asteroids. The two swarms of Trojans orbit at roughly the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter, one swarm orbiting ahead of, and the other trailing, the gas giant....
According to data from the US Geological Survey (USGS), the Great Salt Lake’s surface water elevation fell to the lowest level since records began in the mid-1800s, to an average of 1277 m (4,190 feet) above sea level. As a result of this drop in water level, the lake has lost nearly half of its surface area from the historical average, exposing around 2000 sq km (770 square miles) of lakebed – an area the same size as Tenerife....
The scientists will publish their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, but a preprint is available through arXiv. Astronomers have learned that the star spins fast, about once every 17 hours, which stirs up the star’s interior, and forces the surface composition to match the overall composition of the star. This means that scientists had been overestimating the star’s abundance of heavy metals, meaning that they overestimated its mass and underestimating its age....
With its ambitious mission, the VGP aims to address fundamental questions in biology, conservation, and disease including identifying species most genetically at risk for extinction and preserving their genetic information for future generations. The high-quality VGP genomes will become the main references for their species and will be stored in the Genome Ark, a digital open-access library of genomes. The current Phase 1 of the VGP – the VGP orders project – aims to create reference assemblies of selected species representing all 260 vertebrate orders that have diverged from each other shortly after the last mass extinction 66 million years ago....
Something was holding back oxygen’s rise. A new interpretation of rocks billions of years old finds volcanic gases are the likely culprits. The study led by the University of Washington was published in June in the open-access journal Nature Communications. “This study revives a classic hypothesis for the evolution of atmospheric oxygen,” said lead author Shintaro Kadoya, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. “The data demonstrates that an evolution of the mantle of the Earth could control an evolution of the atmosphere of the Earth, and possibly an evolution of life....
