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The scene, captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the Mars Express orbiter, features the flanks of a vast volcanic plateau named Thaumasia Planum. The highest features visible here are a whopping 4500 m taller than the lowest, as seen most clearly in the associated topographical map. Many thought to have changed very little since they formed nearly four billion years ago, giving an exciting glimpse into Mars’ earliest days....

There’s a wobbly new biochemical structure in Burckhard Seelig’s lab at the University of Minnesota that may resemble what enzymes looked like billions of years ago, when life on earth began to evolve – long before they became ingredients for new and improved products, from detergents to foods and fuels. Seelig created the fledgling enzyme by using directed evolution in the laboratory. Working with colleague Gianluigi Veglia, graduate student Fa-An Chao, and other team members, he subsequently determined its structure, which made its debut on December 9 as an advance online publication in Nature Chemical Biology....

Hubble reveals that at least three of the exoplanets (d, e, and f) do not seem to contain puffy, hydrogen-rich atmospheres similar to gaseous planets such as Neptune. Additional observations are needed to determine the hydrogen content of the fourth planet’s (g) atmosphere. Hydrogen is a greenhouse gas, which smothers a planet orbiting close to its star, making it hot and inhospitable to life. The results, instead, favor more compact atmospheres like those of Earth, Venus, and Mars....

The 2018 eruption of Kīlauea Volcano in Hawai’i provided scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to identify new factors that could help forecast the hazard potential of future eruptions. The properties of the magma inside a volcano affect how an eruption will play out. In particular, the viscosity of this molten rock is a major factor in influencing how hazardous an eruption could be for nearby communities. Very viscous magmas are linked with more powerful explosions because they can block gas from escaping through vents, allowing pressure to build up inside the volcano’s plumbing system....

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects — supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. With the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole, the first time such a close grouping has been seen within the first billion years of the Universe....

Providence, Rhode Island (Brown University) — A newly discovered dwarf galaxy orbiting our own Milky Way has offered up a surprise — it appears to be radiating gamma rays, according to an analysis by physicists at Carnegie Mellon, Brown, and Cambridge universities. The exact source of this high-energy light is uncertain at this point, but it just might be a signal of dark matter lurking at the galaxy’s center. “Something in the direction of this dwarf galaxy is emitting gamma rays,” said Alex Geringer-Sameth, a postdoctoral research associate in CMU’s Department of Physics and the paper’s lead author....

Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) are the most northerly species of nonhuman primates in the world, and have adapted to extremely cold winters. Researchers believed that those living in the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Nagano maintain their normal body temperature due to having thicker and longer fur during winter. These primates are also the only group of monkeys known to take hot spring baths, a behavior that was first observed in 1963 when a young female was seen in an outdoor hot spring belonging to a nearby hotel one snowy day....

Individuals who make concrete plans to meet their goals may engage in more physical activity, including visits to the gym, compared to those who don’t plan quite so far ahead, research shows. These research findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that self-reported levels of a trait called ‘planfulness’ may translate into real-world differences in behavior. Some people seem to be able to more consistently meet their goals than others, but it remains unclear if personality traits that have been found to promote goal achievement in the lab similarly encourage individuals to achieve long-term goals in their day-to-day lives, says lead researcher Rita M....

Standardizing fee-for-service payments and structuring negotiations between insurers and providers could make U.S. health care more affordable, Rutgers study says. Structuring negotiations between insurers and providers, standardizing fee-for-service payments and negotiating prices can lower the United States’ health care spending by slowing the rate at which healthcare prices increase, according to a Rutgers study. The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, examined how other high-income countries that use a fee-for-service model regulate health care costs....

The study, led by Sagi Shapira, Ph.D., assistant professor of systems biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, was published today in the journal Cell. Limited Understanding of How Viruses Work At the molecular level, viruses invade cells and manipulate them to replicate, survive, and cause disease. Since they depend on human cells for their life cycle, one-way viruses co-opt cellular machinery is through protein-protein interactions within their cell host....

This moon candidate, which is 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation, orbits a gas-giant planet that, in turn, orbits a star called Kepler-1625. Researchers caution that the moon hypothesis is tentative and must be confirmed by follow-up Hubble observations. “This intriguing finding shows how NASA’s missions work together to uncover incredible mysteries in our cosmos,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters, Washington....

The planet, Gliese 3470 b (also known as GJ 3470 b), maybe a cross between Earth and Neptune, with a large rocky core buried under a deep crushing hydrogen and helium atmosphere. Weighing in at 12.6 Earth masses, the planet is more massive than Earth but less massive than Neptune (which is more than 17 Earth masses). Many similar worlds have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler space observatory, whose mission ended in 2018....

“We know that the majority of massive stars are in binary pairs,” said Stuart Ryder from the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Sydney, Australia, and lead author of the study. “Many of these binary pairs will interact and transfer gas from one star to the other when their orbits bring them close together.” The companion to the supernova’s progenitor star was no innocent bystander to the explosion. It siphoned off almost all of the hydrogen from the doomed star’s stellar envelope, the region that transports energy from the star’s core to its atmosphere....

They may be little, but they pack a big star-forming punch. New observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show small galaxies, also known as dwarf galaxies, are responsible for forming a large proportion of the universe’s stars. Studying this early epoch of the universe’s history is critical to fully understanding how these stars formed and how galaxies grew and evolved 3.5 to 6 billion years after the beginning of the universe....

A main sequence star, like our Sun, is the term applied to a star during the longest period of its life, when it burns fuel steadily. Our Sun’s fuel will run out in approximately 6 billion years, and it will then move on to the next stage of its life when it will turn into a red giant. Astronomers studying NGC 2203, which contains stars that are roughly twice as massive as our Sun, found that their rotation might be a factor as to why some of the stars stay longer than usual in this main-sequence phase of their life....

The constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear) is home to Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. Messier 101 is one of the biggest and brightest spiral galaxies in the night sky. Like the Milky Way, Messier 101 is not alone, with smaller dwarf galaxies in its neighborhood. NGC 5477, one of these dwarf galaxies in the Messier 101 group, is the subject of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope....

The orange-pink glow is created as hydrogen gas reacts to the intense light streaming outwards from nearby newborn stars; these bright patches can be seen here amid dark, tangled streams of cosmic dust. Astronomers look for these telltale signs of star formation when they study galaxies throughout the cosmos, as star formation rates, locations, and histories offer critical clues as to how these colossal collections of gas and dust have evolved over time....

Dogs’ Highly Evolved Noses Can Rapidly Detect the SARS-CoV-2 Virus According to UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus Tommy Dickey and his collaborator, BioScent researcher Heather Junqueira, they can. And with a review paper published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine they have added to a small but growing consensus that trained medical scent dogs can effectively be used for screening individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus. This follows a comprehensive survey of research devoted to the use of trained scent dogs for detecting COVID....

For centuries, explorers have tested the icy waters of the Arctic, looking for sea routes through the cluster of islands north of mainland Canada. Such a route, known as the Northwest Passage, can dramatically shorten the journey between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The decline of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has made this passage increasingly viable. But as this image shows, it’s still not always smooth sailing. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image on August 22, 2021....

The shelf’s disintegration in March 2022 has reshaped a landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable. It is relatively common for ice shelves in Antarctica to spawn icebergs. It is less common for an ice shelf to completely disintegrate. In March 2022, an ice shelf in East Antarctica did both. The collapse has reshaped a part of the Antarctic landscape where coastal glacial ice was once thought to be stable....