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The world of an atom is one of random chaos and heat. At room temperatures, a cloud of atoms is a frenzied mess, with atoms zipping past each other and colliding, constantly changing their direction and speed. Such random motions can be slowed, and even stopped entirely, by drastically cooling the atoms. At a hair above absolute zero, previously frenetic atoms morph into an almost zombie-like state, moving as one wave-like formation, in a quantum form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. Mitochondrial defects affect 1 in every 4,000 children, and can cause rare and fatal illnesses. They are also implicated in a wide range of common diseases, like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. Mitochondria have their own DNA and are only inherited from mothers. Replacing defective mitochondria in eggs from mothers who have a high risk of passing on such diseases could help spare the children....

Thousands of planets have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler, which was launched in 2009 and retired by NASA in 2018 when it exhausted its fuel supply, observed hundreds of thousands of stars and identified planets outside of our solar system—exoplanets—by documenting transit events. Transit events occur when a planet’s orbit passes between its star and the telescope, blocking some of the star’s light so that it appears to dim....

A team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona has observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth — the most distant quasar discovered to date. Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its current age, the quasar hosts a supermassive black hole equivalent to the combined mass of 1.6 billion suns. In addition to being the most distant — and by extension, earliest — quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of super-heated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light....

The information is the first report from an ongoing international initiative by the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19) to track outcomes within this vulnerable population. The CCC19 registry was built and is maintained as an electronic REDCap database housed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “People with cancer face a great deal of uncertainty in the era of COVID-19, including whether the balance of risks and benefits in the treatment of cancer has shifted in some fundamental way,” said Jeremy Warner, MD, MS, associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, the study’s corresponding author....

Since its discovery in 2017, an air of mystery has surrounded the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, an elongated, cigar-shaped body named ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”). How was it formed, and where did it come from? A new study published April 13 in Nature Astronomy offers a first comprehensive answer to these questions. First author Yun Zhang at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and coauthor Douglas N....

PhD student discovers that solar radiation could be a more important source of lunar iron nanoparticles than previously thought. Tiny iron nanoparticles unlike any found naturally on Earth are nearly everywhere on the Moon—and scientists are trying to understand why. A new study led by Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate Christian J. Tai Udovicic, in collaboration with associate professor Christopher Edwards, both of NAU’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, uncovered important clues to help understand the surprisingly active lunar surface....

In a recent study published in Current Biology, scientists from the University of Tsukuba identified a protein in comb jellies that are crucial for the development and movement of their comb plates, the comb-like bodily structures that give these animals their name. Comb jellies, also known as ctenophores, can be found from the ocean’s surface to its depths. These hungry marine predators are distinguished by eight rippling bands of bright, iridescent color running along their sides....

A new study has mounted perhaps the most intricate, detailed look ever at the diversity in structure and form of bees, offering new insights in a long-standing debate over how complex social behaviors arose in certain branches of bees’ evolutionary tree. Published today (May 26, 2021) in Insect Systematics and Diversity, the report is built on an analysis of nearly 300 morphological traits in bees, how those traits vary across numerous species, and what the variations suggest about the evolutionary relations between bee species....

The experiments were performed in the Robert and Ruth Magid Electron Beam Quantum Dynamics Laboratory headed by Professor Ido Kaminer, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Solid State Institute. Single-layer materials, alternatively known as 2D materials, are in themselves novel materials, solids consisting of a single layer of atoms. Graphene, the first 2D material discovered, was isolated for the first time in 2004, an achievement that garnered the 2010 Nobel Prize....

Yale University scientists have developed a new mechanism for attacking cancerous tumors that intensifies the body’s immune response while simultaneously weakening the tumor’s ability to resist it. “We believe this is a paradigm-changing immunotherapeutic method for cancer therapy,” said Tarek M. Fahmy, a bioengineer at Yale and the project’s principal investigator. “In essence, it’s a one-two punch strategy that seems to work well for melanoma and may work even better with other cancers....

Studying and understanding protein behavior is about to take a major step forward. Scientists from the Berkley Lab have figured out how to grow light-emitting nanocrystals small enough not to disrupt cell activity but bright enough to be imaged one at a time, resulting in nanoparticle probes that may lead to a better understanding of diseases. Imagine tracking a deer through a forest by clipping a radio transmitter to its ear and monitoring the deer’s location remotely....

A technology known as ex vivo normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) has emerged in recent years as a means of keeping a donor organ “alive” outside the body before implantation. The process involves pumping warm, oxygenated red blood cells through an organ removed from a deceased donor. This helps repair damage to the organ and gives doctors time to assess the quality of the organ. It has also helped increase the number of organs suitable for transplant....

Nicole Mann is a NASA astronaut who was selected as a member of the Artemis Team, a group of astronauts chosen to participate in NASA’s Artemis program which aims to return humans to the moon by 2024. Prior to becoming an astronaut, Mann served as a Marine Corps officer and a test pilot. She has extensive experience in high-performance aircraft, including supersonic jets, and has participated in various military operations....

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is one step closer to having its own name after 155 students across the U.S. were chosen as semifinalists in the “Name the Rover” essay contest. Just one will be selected to win the grand prize — the exciting honor of naming the rover and an invitation to see the spacecraft launch in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The currently unnamed rover is a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds (1,000 kilograms)....

Kennedy Space Center is currently in a HURCON (Hurricane Condition) III status, which includes securing facilities, property, and equipment at the center, as well as briefing and deploying the “ride-out” team. As part of NASA’s hurricane preparedness protocol, a “ride-out” team includes a set of personnel who will remain in a safe location at Kennedy throughout the storm to monitor center-wide conditions, including the flight hardware for the Artemis I mission....

Below is the list of cosmic objects that Webb targeted for these first observations, which will be released in NASA’s live broadcast beginning at 10:30 a.m. EDT (7:30 a.m. PDT) Tuesday, July 12. Each image will simultaneously be made available on social media as well as on the agency’s website. Webb is a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). These targets listed below represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations....

“This is the final chapter of an amazing mission, but it’s also a new beginning,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Cassini’s discovery of ocean worlds at Titan and Enceladus changed everything, shaking our views to the core about surprising places to search for potential life beyond Earth.” Telemetry received during the plunge indicates that, as expected, Cassini entered Saturn’s atmosphere with its thrusters firing to maintain stability, as it sent back a unique final set of science observations....

Cassini passed 295 miles (474 kilometers) above Dione’s surface at 11:33 a.m. PDT (2:33 p.m. EDT) on August 17. This was the fifth close encounter with Dione during Cassini’s long tour at Saturn. The mission’s closest-ever flyby of Dione was in December 2011, at a distance of 60 miles (100 kilometers). The full set of images released today is available at: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/keywords/flyby “I am moved, as I know everyone else is, looking at these exquisite images of Dione’s surface and crescent, and knowing that they are the last we will see of this far-off world for a very long time to come,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado....

Imagine ponds dotting the floor of Gale Crater, the 100-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) ancient basin that Curiosity is exploring. Streams might have laced the crater’s walls, running toward its base. Watch history in fast forward, and you’d see these waterways overflow and then dry up, a cycle that probably repeated itself numerous times over millions of years. That is the landscape described by Curiosity scientists in a Nature Geoscience paper published today, October 7, 2019....