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An analysis[1] has suggested that 1.5 million crabs already inhabit Palmer Deep, an ocean-floor valley. Native organisms have few ways of defending themselves against an invasive species like this. There are no local hard-shell-crushing predators in Antarctica. Rising crab populations and other effects of the warming water could change a sea-floor ecosystem that is like no other on Earth. Scientists are continuing to document these effects and another research group has discovered more crabs on another part of Antarctica’s continental shelf....

C/2012 S1 (ISON) might also develop a spectacular tail. There’s also the possibility that it could break up when it gets closer to the Sun. Russian astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok will continue examining it for the next 15 months. Astronomers will try to figure out the exact nature of this comet. It will pass Earth in late December 2013 and will pass less than 0.012 AU (1.8 million km) from the surface of Sol....

“The changes we measured in the Great Bend Prairie Aquifer appear to be large relative to changes observed in a national study by the U.S. Geological Survey,” said Matthew Kirk, Kansas State University associate professor of geology and the study’s principal investigator. The Great Bend Prairie Aquifer, a part of High Plains Aquifer, was the focus of a 40-year comparison study of rural water wells recently published in the Hydrogeology Journal....

In March, as her friends and neighbors were scrambling to pack up and leave campus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Geeticka Chauhan found her world upended in yet another way. Just weeks earlier, she had been elected council president of MIT’s largest graduate residence, Sidney-Pacific. Suddenly the fourth-year PhD student was plunged into rounds of emergency meetings with MIT administrators. From her apartment in Sidney-Pacific, where she has stayed put due to travel restrictions in her home country of India, Chauhan is still learning the ropes of her new position....

When it comes to ancient Roman imperial architecture, most people usually have a mental image of white marble statues, columns, or slabs. While it is true that many buildings and squares at that time were decorated with marble, it was frequently not white but colored marble that was employed, such as the green-veined Cipollino Verde, which was extracted on the Greek island of Euboea. Because marble was very expensive, it was often placed in thin slabs as a cladding over other, cheaper stones....

Lollapalooza ran through Sunday, August 1, in Chicago’s Grant Park. Heading into Lollapalooza weekend in Chicago, concertgoers were anxiously awaiting their favorite artists while infectious disease experts were bracing themselves for a spike in COVID-19 infections they anticipate will hit the week after next, said infectious disease experts Dr. Tina Tan and Dr. Robert Murphy. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” said Tan, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a pediatrician at the Ann & Robert H....

In most years, Peyto has lost far more mass than it gained, according to data published by the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Experts say Peyto lost about 70 percent of its mass during the past 50 years. The extent of the change is visible in satellite imagery acquired by the Landsat program. The natural-color images above show the glacier in 1999 and 2021. As the glacier has thinned and narrowed, the terminus has retreated by about 1 kilometer (0....

The risk was even higher among the elderly who were low-income, female, or Black. The study will be published December 26, 2017 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “This the most comprehensive study of short-term exposure to pollution and mortality to date,” said Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics, co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and senior author of the study. “We found that the mortality rate increases almost linearly as air pollution increases....

Tiny carbon dots have, for the first time, been applied to intracellular imaging and tracking of drug delivery involving various optical and vibrational spectroscopic-based techniques such as fluorescence, Raman, and hyperspectral imaging. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated, for the first time, that photo luminescent carbon nanoparticles can exhibit reversible switching of their optical properties in cancer cells. “One of the major advantages of these agents are their strong intrinsic optical sensitivity without the need for any additional dye/fluorophore and with no photo-bleaching issues associated with it,” explained Dipanjan Pan, an assistant professor of bioengineering and the leader of the study....

This graphic shows an exotic object in our galaxy called SGR 0418+5729 (SGR 0418 for short). As described in our press release (below), SGR 0418 is a magnetar, a type of neutron star that has a relatively slow spin rate and generates occasional large blasts of X-rays. The only plausible source for the energy emitted in these outbursts is the magnetic energy stored in the star. Most magnetars have extremely high magnetic fields on their surface that are ten to a thousand times stronger than for the average neutron star....

The apparent motion is due to the progression of the camera’s pointing during the 17-second span of the February 15, 2018, observation, not from the motion of the two moons. This was the second observation of Phobos by Mars Odyssey; the first was on September 29, 2017. Researchers have been using THEMIS to examine Mars since early 2002, but the maneuver turning the orbiter around to point the camera at Phobos was developed only recently....

Dark narrow streaks, called “recurring slope lineae,” emanate from the walls of Garni Crater on Mars, in this view constructed from observations by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The dark streaks here are up to few hundred yards, or meters, long. They are hypothesized to be formed by flow of briny liquid water on Mars. The image was produced by first creating a 3-D computer model (a digital terrain map) of the area based on stereo information from two HiRISE observations, and then draping an image over the land-shape model....

Mars is a long way from 221B Baker Street, but one of fiction’s best-known detectives will be represented on the Red Planet after NASA’s Perseverance rover touches down on February 18, 2021. SHERLOC, an instrument on the end of the rover’s robotic arm, will hunt for sand-grain-sized clues in Martian rocks while working in tandem with WATSON, a camera that will take close-up pictures of rock textures. Together, they will study rock surfaces, mapping out the presence of certain minerals and organic molecules, which are the carbon-based building blocks of life on Earth....

Scientists report that there are alarmingly high methane emissions from oil and gas fields, undermining the environmental benefits of natural gas, which is transforming the current US energy system. The scientists, who hold joint appointments with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado in Boulder, reported their findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month. Back in February 2012, a study[1] indicated that up to 4% of the methane produced at a field near Denver was escaping into the atmosphere....

Scientists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have discovered a new species that has the potential to sequester carbon naturally, even as oceans warm and become more acidic. The microbe, abundant around the world, photosynthesizes and releases a carbon-rich exopolymer that attracts and immobilizes other microbes. It then eats some of the entrapped prey before abandoning its exopolymer “mucosphere.” Having trapped other microbes, the exopolymer is made heavier and sinks, forming part of the ocean’s natural biological carbon pump....

The new peptide targets a protein called Mcl-1, which helps cancer cells avoid the cellular suicide that is usually induced by DNA damage. By blocking Mcl-1, the peptide can force cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death. “Some cancer cells are very dependent on Mcl-1, which is the last line of defense keeping the cell from dying. It’s a very attractive target,” says Amy Keating, an MIT professor of biology and one of the senior authors of the study....

A novel approach to testing for the presence of the virus that causes COVID-19 may lead to tests that are faster, less expensive, and potentially less prone to erroneous results than existing detection methods. Though the work, based on quantum effects, is still theoretical, these detectors could potentially be adapted to detect virtually any virus, the researchers say. The new approach is described in a paper published on December 16, 2021, in the journal Nano Letters, by Changhao Li, an MIT doctoral student; Paola Cappellaro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics; and Rouholla Soleyman and Mohammad Kohandel of the University of Waterloo....

The study examined several decades of published research and analysis on fluid flows. It found that, while most undergraduate textbooks and classroom instruction in heat transfer describe such flow as having two different zones separated by an abrupt transition, in fact there are three distinct zones. A lengthy transitional zone is just as significant as the first and final zones, the researchers say. The discrepancy has to do with the shift between two different ways that fluids can flow....

C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute awards $5.4 million to top researchers to steer how society responds to the pandemic. Artificial intelligence has the power to help put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only can techniques of machine learning and natural language processing be used to track and report COVID-19 infection rates, but other AI techniques can also be used to make smarter decisions about everything from when states should reopen to how vaccines are designed....

“Our lab previously proposed a technique for converting ethane into ethylene, and this new redox catalyst makes that technique more energy efficient and less expensive while reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” says Yunfei Gao, a postdoctoral scholar at NC State and lead author of a paper on the work. “Ethylene is an important feedstock for the plastics industry, among other uses, so this work could have a significant economic and environmental impact....