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This major decision was made after a series of independent reviews of the status of the spacecraft, instruments, schedule, and budget. The milestone, known as Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D), represents the official transition from the mission’s development stage to delivery of components, testing, assembly, and integration leading to launch. During this part of the mission’s life cycle, known as Phase D, the spacecraft bus (the structure that will carry the science instruments) is completed, the instruments are integrated into the spacecraft and tested, and the spacecraft is shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for integration with the launch vehicle....

The North North Temperate Belt is one of Jupiter’s many colorful, swirling cloud bands. Scientists have wondered for decades how deep these bands extend. Gravity measurements collected by Juno during its close flybys of the planet have now provided an answer. Juno discovered that these bands of flowing atmosphere actually penetrate deep into the planet, to a depth of about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers). NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:11 p....

Auroras flare up when energetic particles plunge into a planet’s atmosphere, bombarding gases and making them glow. While electrons generally cause this natural phenomenon, sometimes protons can elicit the same response, although it’s more rare. Now, the MAVEN team has learned that protons were doing on Mars the same thing as electrons usually do on Earth—create aurora. This is especially true when the Sun ejects a particularly strong pulse of protons, which are hydrogen atoms stripped of their lone electrons by intense heat....

Our galaxy is teeming with a wild variety of planets. In addition to our solar system’s eight near-and-dear planets, there are more than 800 so-called exoplanets known to circle stars beyond our sun. One of the first “species” of exoplanets to be discovered is the hot Jupiters, also known as roasters. These are gas giants like Jupiters, but they orbit closely to their stars, blistering under the heat. Thanks to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, researchers are beginning to dissect this exotic class of planets, revealing raging winds and other aspects of their turbulent nature....

On April 23, NASA’s Swift satellite detected the strongest, hottest, and longest-lasting sequence of stellar flares ever seen from a nearby red dwarf star. The initial blast from this record-setting series of explosions was as much as 10,000 times more powerful than the largest solar flare ever recorded. “We used to think major flaring episodes from red dwarfs lasted no more than a day, but Swift detected at least seven powerful eruptions over a period of about two weeks,” said Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who gave a presentation on the “superflare” at the August meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division....

As part of camera commissioning, the science team snapped a two-second test exposure using one of the four TESS cameras. The image, centered on the southern constellation Centaurus, reveals more than 200,000 stars. The edge of the Coalsack Nebula is in the right upper corner and the bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left edge. TESS is expected to cover more than 400 times as much sky as shown in this image with its four cameras during its initial two-year search for exoplanets....

A nasal antiviral created by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons blocked transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in ferrets, suggesting the nasal spray also may prevent infection in people exposed to the new coronavirus. The compound in the spray—a lipopeptide developed by Anne Moscona, MD, and Matteo Porotto, PhD, professors in the Department of Pediatrics and directors of the Center for Host-Pathogen Interaction—is designed to prevent the new coronavirus from entering host cells....

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) planned NEOMIR mission will be located between Earth and the Sun and will act as an early warning system for asteroids 20 meters and larger that cannot be seen from the ground. Predicting Chelyabinsk No one saw the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 15, 2013, coming. Just after sunrise on a calm and sunny winter’s day, a 20-meter (66-foot) asteroid struck the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains in Russia, at a speed of more than 18 km/s (40,000 miles per hour)....

The researchers recently published their findings in the journal Human Brain Mapping. The research, led by Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology, bioengineering, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and first author Evan Anderson, a researcher for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. working at the Air Force Research Laboratory, employed the technique of “connectome-based predictive modeling” to evaluate five theories on how the brain leads to intelligence. “To understand the remarkable cognitive abilities that underlie intelligence, neuroscientists look to their biological foundations in the brain,” Barbey said....

Senior author Mriganka Sur said he was excited but not surprised that his team discovered a simple, fundamental rule at the core of such a complex system as the brain, where 100 billion neurons each have thousands of ever-changing synapses. He likens it to how a massive school of fish can suddenly change direction, en masse, so long as the lead fish turns and every other fish obeys the simple rule of following the fish right in front of it....

About 200 years ago, the German physician Ernst Heinrich Weber made a seemingly innocuous observation that led to the birth of the discipline of Psychophysics — the science relating physical stimuli in the world and the sensations they evoke in the mind of a subject. Weber asked subjects to say which of two slightly different weights was heavier. From these experiments, he discovered that the probability that a subject will make the right choice only depends on the ratio between the weights....

Interaction between auditory and reward brain circuits underpins musical pleasure. Communication between the brain’s auditory and reward circuits is the reason why humans find music rewarding, according to new research published in JNeurosci. Despite no obvious biological benefits, humans love music. Neuroimaging studies highlight similarities between how the brain’s reward circuits process music and other rewards like food, money, and alcohol. Yet neuroimaging studies are correlational by nature. In a new study, Mas-Herrero et al....

Nature boasts many examples of self-cleaning surfaces, from lotus leaves to geckos’ feet. Water droplets striking these superhydrophobic — or extreme water-hating — surfaces ball up into droplets if the surface is level, or completely roll off if it’s tilted, at the same time removing dust particles and contaminants. Scientists have tried to introduce these self-cleaning properties to concrete by adding hydrophobic materials. However, surface coatings can scratch or wear off over time, and hydrophobic materials added to the bulk concrete before drying often weaken it....

Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output. But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined. A team of researchers at MIT has now come up with a way of greatly reducing that unpredictability, introducing a device that could ultimately allow such circuits to behave nearly as predictably as their electronic counterparts....

As skin cells age, they lose their ability to multiply and produce collagen, which is the main structural protein in the skin. Recently, scientists discovered that treating human skin cells in a dish with exosomes from stem cells boosted the amount of collagen and caused other youthful changes. Exosomes are membranous vesicles containing protein and RNA that cells release to communicate with each other. Ke Cheng and colleagues wondered if treating mouse skin with exosomes from human dermal fibroblasts could reduce wrinkles and restore youthful characteristics....

This image was taken in wavelengths of light that are absorbed by methane on Saturn. Dark areas are regions where light travels deeper into the atmosphere (passing through more methane) before reflecting and scattering off of clouds and then heading back out of the atmosphere. In such images, the deeper the light goes, the more of it gets absorbed by methane, and the darker that part of Saturn appears. The moon Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) hangs below the rings at right....

Protein key for learning, memory behaves differently in males than females. When it comes to developing drugs for mental illnesses, three confounding challenges exist: Men and women experience them differently, with things like depression and anxiety far more common in females.A drug that works for one person may not work for another, and side effects abound. New CU Boulder research, published in the journal eLIfe, sheds light on one reason those individual differences may exist....

This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s south pole and its swirling atmosphere was created by citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Juno acquired the image, looking directly at the Jovian south pole, on February 2, 2017, at 6:06 a.m. PST (9:06 a.m. EST) from an altitude of about 63,400 miles (102,100 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops. Cyclones swirl around the south pole, and white oval storms can be seen near the limb − the apparent edge of the planet....

The finding builds on the work of senior co-authors Karen S. Anderson and William L. Jorgensen, who used computational and structure-based design methods to develop a class of compounds, that target a viral protein essential for HIV to replicate. The researchers refined this class of compounds to boost potency, lower toxicity, and improve drug-like properties in order to identify a promising preclinical drug candidate. In collaboration with Priti Kumar’s lab at Yale, the drug candidate was tested in mice with transplanted human blood cells and infected with HIV....

Topographic maps of Pluto are produced from digital analysis of New Horizons stereo images acquired during the July 14, 2015 flyby. Such maps are derived from digital stereo-image mapping tools that measure the parallax – or the difference in the apparent relative positions – of individual features on the surface obtained at different times. Parallax displacements of high and low features are then used to directly estimate feature heights. These topographic maps are works in progress and artifacts are still present in the current version....