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While prior research in 2013 showed that bonefish descended approximately 164 feet to spawn, this new scientific finding reveals that bonefish descended to depths reaching 450 feet, and moved below 325 feet for two hours before spawning in a rush upward to 220 feet deep. Findings from the study, published in the journal Marine Biology, will be instrumental for conservation efforts for this economically and culturally important fish species. “We were stunned by this discovery because the bonefish moved out beyond the incredibly abrupt and steep shelf drop off into the Providence Channel in Abaco,” said Steven Lombardo, first author and a Ph....

“All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it’s the only one we have,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us. NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet. This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and all of humanity, demonstrating commitment from NASA’s exceptional team and partners from around the world....

Researchers at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, have contributed to a recently published Nature Communications paper that reports the cause behind a key quantum property of donut-like nanoparticles called “semiconductor quantum rings.” This property may find application in quantum information storage, communication, and computing in future technologies. In this project, the CNM researchers collaborated with colleagues from the University of Chicago, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the University of Ottawa, and the National Research Council in Canada....

More commonly known as a hangover, this unpleasant phenomenon has been dogging humanity since our ancestors first happened upon fermentation. Those nasty vertigo-inducing, cold sweat-promoting and vomit-producing sensations after a raucous night out are all part of your body’s attempt to protect itself from injury after you overindulge in alcoholic beverages. Your liver is working to break down the alcohol you consumed so your kidneys can clear it out ASAP....

When the right circumstances arise, spores that may have been dormant for years may eventually awaken and spring back to life within minutes. Spores awaken by rehydrating and restarting their metabolism and physiology. But up until this point, scientists were unsure whether spores could monitor their surroundings while still “in their sleep” without waking up. It was unknown, in particular, how spores respond with ambiguous environmental signals that do not indicate clearly favorable conditions....

Time-lapse video of a Shiveluch volcano eruption (Video: Michael Krawczynski) There isn’t much in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula in northeastern Russia just across the Bering Sea from Alaska, besides an impressive population of brown bears and the most explosive volcano in the world. Kamchatka’s Shiveluch volcano has had more than 40 violent eruptions over the last 10,000 years. The last gigantic blast occurred in 1964, creating a new crater and covering an area of nearly 100 square kilometers with pyroclastic flows....

A study involving scientists at the University of Arizona and the University of Queensland provides new insight into how the small brains of mantis shrimp — fierce predators with keen vision that are among the fastest strikers in the animal kingdom — are able to make sense of a breathtaking amount of visual input. The researchers examined the neuronal organization of mantis shrimp, which are among the top predatory animals of coral reefs and other shallow warm water environments....

That’s why physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory studying a well-known cuprate containing layers made of bismuth oxide, strontium oxide, calcium, and copper oxide (BSCCO) decided to focus on the less complicated “overdoped” side, doping the material so much so that superconductivity eventually disappears. As they reported in a paper published on January 29, 2020, in Nature Communications, this approach enabled them to identify that purely electronic interactions likely lead to HTS....

A New Map of the Moon NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science team released the highest resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever created. This new topographic map shows the surface shape and features over nearly the entire moon with a pixel scale close to 328 feet. Although the moon is Earth’s closest neighbor, knowledge of its morphology is still limited. Due to the limitations of previous missions, a global map of the moon’s topography at high resolution has not existed until now....

Hard hit areas included the northeastern side of Kauai, the windward slopes of the Ko‘olau Range on the island of O’ahu, the windward slopes of Haleakalā volcano on the island of Maui, and the southeast side of the Big Island of Hawai’i, according to National Weather Service meteorologists. This map shows the rainfall accumulation across the region from March 5 to 12, 2021. The data are remotely-sensed estimates that come from the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), a product of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission....

Snow is not as rare as you might think in the Hawaiian Islands. But it never stops being beautiful. On February 6, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired natural-color images of the “Big Island” of Hawai’i with abundant snow on its two tallest peaks. Nearly every year, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa (elevation above 13,600 feet/4200 meters) receive at least a dusting that lasts a few days....

Previous update: First Main Engine Cutoff The first main engine cutoff, or MECO-1, is confirmed for the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket’s Centaur upper stage. It will coast in this preliminary Earth orbit for the next hour before the second burn begins. The Atlas launched the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Space Test Program 3 (STP-3), which hosts NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) and the NASA-U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Ultraviolet Spectro-Coronagraph (UVSC) Pathfinder....

One way to make magnetic storage drives faster would be to use light to flip the polarity of tiny patches of material, called magnetic domains, back and forth – from 0 to 1 and back again, in computing terms. Now an experiment at a German X-ray laser facility has captured nanoscale, light-induced changes in a material made of layered cobalt and platinum. Researchers were surprised to find that bombardment with infrared laser light allowed speeding electrons to break through the walls separating one magnetic domain from the next, destroying the local magnetization in the process....

“Our previous work looked at various techniques that use ultrasound to eliminate blood clots using what are essentially forward-facing waves,” says Xiaoning Jiang, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. “Our new work uses vortex ultrasound, where the ultrasound waves have a helical wavefront. “In other words, the ultrasound is swirling as it moves forward,” says Jiang, who is the Dean F. Duncan Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University....

Rutgers researchers conducted an experiment in which they deactivated the gene that produces mucosal-associated invariant T cells (MAITs) in mice and compared the cognitive function of normal mice and mice deficient in MAIT cells. Initially, both groups performed identically, but as the mice aged, the genetically altered mice began to have difficulty forming new memories. Researchers then injected the genetically altered mice with MAITs, and their performance in learning and memory-intensive tasks such as swimming through a water maze returned to normal....

Turning adhesion on and off is what makes a glue smart. It’s one thing to do this in the open air and quite another under water. Inspired by nature, catechols are synthetic compounds that mimic the wet-but-still-sticky proteins secreted by mussels and offer promise for smart adhesives that work in water. The technology could help with underwater glue, wound dressings, prosthetic attachments or even making car parts and in other manufacturing....

Governments need to be careful about the messaging around compulsory mask wearing to ensure the policy is fully effective, say researchers. When officials in Bangladesh announced a legal requirement for masks to be worn outside the home, there was an associated rise in the number of journeys people made, not only to go to work but to visit shops, parks, transport hubs and recreation centers – and a drop in the amount of time people stayed at home....

Black holes can expel a thousand times more matter than they capture. The mechanism that governs both ejection and capture is the accretion disk, a vast mass of gas and dust spiraling around the black hole at extremely high speeds. The disk is hot and emits light as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Part of the orbiting matter is pulled toward the center and disappears behind the event horizon, the threshold beyond which neither matter nor light can escape....

Satellites orbiting Earth scrambled to capture images and data of the aftermath of the disaster. Almost a year later, you can now listen to a sonification (see below) of the largest eruption of the 21st Century, created using wind data from ESA’s Aeolus mission. The volcano had erupted sporadically since 2009, but activity ramped up in late December 2021 as a series of eruptions sent bursts of volcanic gases spewing from the vent....

The highest-resolution radar images of asteroid 2015 TB145’s safe flyby of Earth have been processed. NASA scientists used giant, Earth-based radio telescopes to bounce radar signals off the asteroid as it flew past Earth on October 31 at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) at about 1.3 lunar distances (300,000 miles, or 480,000 kilometers) from Earth. Asteroid 2015 TB145 is spherical in shape and approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter....