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“At present, we are on track to have a fully successful mission with some bonus objectives that we’ve achieved along the way,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis I mission manager. “On entry day, we will realize our priority one objective, which is to demonstrate the vehicle at lunar re-entry conditions, as well as our priority three objective, which is to retrieve the spacecraft.” The mission management team met with the entry flight director and NASA recovery director as the planned splashdown of Orion Sunday, December 11 is now about 72 hours away....

A team comprising researchers from ORNL and Georgia Tech are using artificial intelligence methods designed to unearth relevant information from about 18 million available research documents. They looked for connections among 84 billion concepts and cross-referenced keywords associated with COVID-19 — such as high fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath — with existing medical solutions. “Our goal is to assist doctors’ and researchers’ ability to identify information about drug therapies that are already approved by the U....

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) shared this photograph on social media, taken from the International Space Station on August 15, 2015. Kelly wrote, “#Aurora trailing a colorful veil over Earth this morning. Good morning from @space_station! #YearInSpace” The dancing lights of the aurora provide spectacular views, but also capture the imagination of scientists who study incoming energy and particles from the sun. Aurora are one effect of such energetic particles, which can speed out from the sun both in a steady stream called the solar wind and due to giant eruptions known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs....

These discs are wildly different in size and shape — some contain bright rings, some dark rings, and some even resemble hamburgers. They also differ dramatically in appearance depending on their orientation in the sky — from circular face-on discs to narrow discs seen almost edge-on. SPHERE’s primary task is to discover and study giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars using direct imaging. But the instrument is also one of the best tools in existence to obtain images of the discs around young stars — regions where planets may be forming....

The GJ 9827 star actually hosts a trio of planets, discovered by NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler/K2 mission, and all three are slightly larger than Earth. This is the size that the Kepler mission determined to be most common in the galaxy with periods between a few and several hundred days. Intriguingly, no planets of this size exist in our Solar System. This makes scientists curious about the conditions under which they form and evolve....

To achieve this remarkable result, thousands of scientists around the world have worked feverishly using data from telescopes on the ground and in space. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have played a pivotal role. A series of eight papers led by CfA astronomers and their colleagues detail the complete story of the aftermath of this event and examine clues about its origin. “It’s hard to describe our sense of excitement and historical purpose over the past couple of months,” said the leader of the team, CfA’s Edo Berger....

Now, researchers have detected two such tones for the first time in the “ringdown” of a newly formed black hole. Previously, it was assumed that only a single tone could be measured and that additional tones, called overtones, would be too faint to be detected with today’s technologies. “Before, it was as if you were trying to match the sound of a chord from a guitar using only a single string,” says Matthew Giesler, a graduate student at Caltech and second author of a new study detailing the results in the September 12 issue of Physical Review Letters....

A type of virus that preys on bacteria could be harnessed to combat bacterial infections in patients whose immune systems have been weakened by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, according to an expert at the University of Birmingham and the Cancer Registry of Norway. Called bacteriophages, these viruses are harmless to humans and can be used to target and eliminate specific bacteria. They are of interest to scientists as a potential alternative to antibiotic treatments....

Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) through recombination and strong purifying selection. A combination of genetic shuffling and evolutionary selection of near-identical genetic sequences among specific bat and pangolin coronaviruses may have led to the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and its introduction into humans, a new study suggests. The results also showed that the virus’ entire receptor binding motif (RBM), a component that plays a key role in viral entry into host cells, was introduced through recombination with pangolin coronaviruses....

These amazing instruments will see every binary neutron star merger in the Universe, and most binary black holes out to redshifts beyond 10: hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of resolvable signals per year. Many of these signals will be extremely loud, with signal-to-noise ratios in the thousands, facilitating breakthroughs in fundamental physics and cosmology. And herein lies a challenge! How do we extract all the information from these signals? On the surface it seems like a straightforward task: just keep on running parameter estimation like we’re already doing!...

A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life. This water could be some of the oldest on the planet and may even contain life. Not just that, but the similarity between the rocks that trapped it and those on Mars raises the hope that comparable life-sustaining water could lie buried beneath the red planet’s surface....

Now, Caltech researchers have shown how cells organize the seemingly immense genome in a clever manner so that they can conveniently find and access important genes. Understanding the delicate three-dimensional organization of the genome is crucial, particularly because alterations in DNA structure have been linked to certain diseases such as cancer and early aging. Mapping and pinpointing alterations in nuclear structure may help in finding solutions to these diseases. The work was done in the laboratory of Mitchell Guttman, assistant professor of biology and Heritage Medical Research Institute investigator....

A team of neuroscientists from Harvard Medical School have discovered that changes in monocytes are a biomarker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, possibly finding a new target for developing treatments for people with ALS. Researchers have discovered that changes in monocytes (a type of white blood cell) are a biomarker for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. This finding could lead to a new treatment for the debilitating neurological disease, which affects approximately 30,000 Americans....

These days the core of the Milky Way galaxy is a pretty tame place…cosmically speaking. The galactic black hole at the center is a sleeping giant. Existing stars are peacefully circling. Although conditions are favorable, there doesn’t even seem to be much new star formation going on. But there is growing evidence that several million years ago the galactic center was the site of all manner of celestial fireworks. A pair of assistant professors – Kelly Holley-Bockelmann at Vanderbilt and Tamara Bogdanović at Georgia Institute of Technology – have come up with an explanation that fits these “forensic” clues....

Since the first observation of merging black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015, astronomers have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. Though they emit no light, black hole mergers are observed through their emission of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Physicists originally expected that black holes would have masses less than about 40 times that of the Sun, because merging black holes arise from massive stars, which can’t hold themselves together if they get too big....

Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies that contain between 100 million to a few billion stars. In contrast, the Milky Way has 200-400 billion stars. Dwarf galaxies are the most abundant galaxy type in the universe and often orbit larger galaxies. The team of three astronomers was surprised by the strength of the detected winds. “We expected we would need observations with much higher resolution and sensitivity, and we had planned on obtaining these as a follow-up to our initial observations,” said Gabriela Canalizo, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, who led the research team....

Theoretical findings in a study performed by researchers with FAPESP’s support and published in Scientific Reports could be exploited in the development of quantum computing. In a study published in Scientific Reports, a group of researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil describes an important theoretical finding that may contribute to the development of quantum computing and spintronics (spin electronics), an emerging technology that uses electron spin or angular momentum rather than electron charge to build faster, more efficient devices....

“We had several ‘aha’ moments, but then you have to roll up your sleeves and figure this out,” explains Alexander (Alex) Dunn, a postdoc at Caltech and the Olga Taussky and John Todd Instructor in Mathematics, who wrote the proof with his advisor, Professor of mathematics Maksym Radziwill, and posted it online in September 2021. The math problem has to do with Gauss sums, which are named after the 18th-century prolific mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss....

New research reveals even more potential for CNTs: as a coating, they can both repel and hold water in place, a useful property for applications like printing, spectroscopy, water transport, or harvesting surfaces. When water is dropped on a CNT forest, the CNTs repel the water, and it forms a sphere. However, when flipped over, the drop does not fall to the ground but rather clings to the surface. “In contrast to superhydrophobic surfaces where droplets roll off easily when tilted, CNTs forests are parahydrophobic, where the droplet is both repelled and attracted to the CNT surface,” explains Ziyu Zhou, lead author of the paper and graduate student in the LAMP Lab....