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NASA spoke with Matteo Correnti from the Italian Space Agency; Alessandro Savino from the University of California, Berkeley; Roger Cohen from Rutgers University; and Andy Dolphin from Raytheon Technologies to find out more about Webb’s observations of M92 and how the team is using the data to help other astronomers. (Last November, Kristen McQuinn talked with us about her work on the dwarf galaxy WLM, which is also part of this program....

All around the world, girls and women suffer from the stigma of menstruation. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Nepal, where the ancient Hindu tradition of Chhaupadi is routine. The practice involves women sleeping in specially built chhau huts during their menstrual cycle, in order to keep “impurity” out of the home. Every year, women die in these huts from exposure, animal bites, or smoke inhalation after building a fire to stay warm....

Total lunar eclipses occur approximately once every 1.5 years on average, according to Alphonse Sterling, an astrophysicist from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. While the Moon has been providing generous eclipse viewing opportunities this year, viewers should take advantage of November’s eclipse because the next total lunar eclipse will not occur until 2025. A total lunar eclipse occurs when Earth casts a complete shadow – called an umbra – over the Moon....

If you were looking for the signatures of life on another world, you would want to take something small and portable with you. That’s the philosophy behind the “Chemical Laptop” being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California: a miniaturized laboratory that analyzes samples for materials associated with life. “If this instrument were to be sent to space, it would be the most sensitive device of its kind to leave Earth, and the first to be able to look for both amino acids and fatty acids,” said Jessica Creamer, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at JPL....

But for a handful of nights in 2021, UMD Physics Professor Howard Milchberg and his colleagues transformed the hallway into a laboratory: The shiny surfaces of the doors and a water fountain were covered to avoid potentially blinding reflections; connecting hallways were blocked off with signs, caution tape, and special laser-absorbing black curtains; and scientific equipment and cables inhabited normally open walking space. As members of the team went about their work, a snapping sound warned of the dangerously powerful path the laser blazed down the hall....

COVID-19 pneumonia spreads like multiple wildfires, leaving destroyed lung tissue in its wake. ‘This effort truly represents a “moonshot” in COVID-19 research’Scientists identify target to treat COVID pneumonia and reduce severityClinical trials with new experimental drug to begin early in 2021Goal is to develop treatments that make COVID-19 no worse than a common coldFirst comparison between immune mechanisms driving COVID-19 pneumonia with other pneumonias Bacteria or viruses like influenza that cause pneumonia can spread across large regions of the lung within hours....

Analysis of data from 16 groups of COVID-19 patients suggest ‘silent’ carriers may exacerbate efforts to stop spread of the disease. An extraordinary percentage of people infected by the virus behind the ongoing deadly COVID-19 pandemic—up to 45 percent—are people who never show symptoms of the disease, according to the results of a Scripps Research analysis of public datasets on asymptomatic infections. The findings, recently published in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that asymptomatic infections may have played a significant role in the early and ongoing spread of COVID-19 and highlight the need for expansive testing and contact tracing to mitigate the pandemic....

Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun. The belated comet has also been observed by optical and radar observatories around the world, providing even more data, including our first close-up views of its surface. Asteroid 2015 TB145 will safely fly by our planet at just under 1....

First detailed description of variation and change in the style of 21,739 tweets posted between 2009 and 2018 on the Donald Trump Twitter account.Four general patterns of linguistic variation were identified in Trump’s tweets: conversational, campaigning, engaging, and advisory styles.Results are evidence that there was a clear and ultimately effective communication strategy employed by Trump and his team during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Donald Trump used Twitter effectively to promote his campaign, communicate policy goals, and attack opponents as part of a systematic campaign ahead of the 2016 US Presidential elections — a new study reveals....

The presence of a state prison in a county was associated with 11% more COVID-19 cases through July 1, 2020, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of the cases were likely due to the spread of COVID-19 within prisons. But researchers estimate that 95,000 cases and more than 3,300 deaths across the U.S. — the majority of the prison-associated cases — were due to spillover from prisons into surrounding communities....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other ichthyosaurs fed on fish and clams, this one however ate larger prey, including other ichthyosaurs. Thalattoarchon saurophagis lived 4 million years after the first appearance of marine reptiles in the fossil record, and lived just 8 million years after the great Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction, also known as the Great Dying, in which 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct....

Algorithm outperformed thoracic radiologists in detecting COVID-19 in new study. Algorithm was trained, tested on the largest COVID-era dataset (17,002 X-ray images)Algorithm analyzed X-ray images of lungs about 10 times faster, 1-6% more accurately than individual specialized radiologistsAlgorithm is now publicly available for other researchers to continue to train it with new dataSystem could also potentially flag patients for isolation and testing who are not otherwise under investigation for COVID-19“It would take seconds to screen a patient and determine if they need to be isolated,” researcher says...

Last week at AGU’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco, planetary scientists presented new insights into chemicals trapped in the Moon’s dark craters and the conditions necessary for them to collect there. The research could help scientists understand whether these chemicals could be a potential resource for future missions to the Moon, according to the researchers. The Earth tilts about its axis as it moves around the Sun. This means that any given moment, one of Earth’s poles is closer to the Sun than the other (this explains why Americans head to the beach, while Australians layer up)....

The unexpected discovery of diatoms, a type of algae, in ice cores pulled from the Quelccaya Summit Dome Glacier demonstrate that freshwater lakes or wetlands that currently exist at high elevations on or near the mountain were also there in earlier times. The abundant organisms would likely have been transported in air currents to the glacier, where they were deposited on its surface, dead or alive, and ultimately became frozen within the glacial ice and persisted there for hundreds of years....

If there ever was life on Mars – and that’s a huge “if” – conditions during the planet’s infancy most likely would have supported it, according to a new research study led by scientists from the University of Arizona. Today Mars is dry and extremely cold, with a tenuous atmosphere. It is therefore extremely unlikely to sustain any form of life at the surface. However, according to the study, 4 billion years ago, Earth’s smaller, red neighbor may have been much more hospitable....

From a geological perspective, the mountain itself is relatively benign. Located on the eastern side of Ross Island, it is a shield volcano that consists of numerous pyroclastic cones and lava domes. However, the volcano is now extinct—meaning that scientists consider it unlikely to erupt again. The last known eruption occurred in the Pleistocene, the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago. Additionally, the mountain’s youngest igneous rocks are almost 1 million years old....

Driving over speed bumps could help doctors diagnose whether patients are suffering from acute appendicitis. The scientists published their findings in the journal BMJ. The link between pain induced by speed bumps and appendicitis was already suspected, but this study is the first to produce evidence for this idea. Asking patients whether the pain worsened while driving over speed bumps on the way to the hospital could help doctors in their diagnosis....

With an artificial intelligence (AI) method developed by researchers at Aalto University and University of Helsinki, researchers can now link immune cells to their targets and for example uncouple which white blood cells recognize SARS-CoV-2. The developed tool has broad applications in understanding the function of immune system in infections, autoimmune disorders, and cancer. The human immune defense is based on the ability of white blood cells to accurately identify disease-causing pathogens and to initiate a defense reaction against them....

The discovery of a structurally ‘inside-out’ planetary nebula — the ionized material that surrounds a white dwarf — was just reported online in Nature Astronomy. This is also the eighth research paper produced by HKU LSR with its international collaborators in the Nature journals since 2017. The research team believes this inverted ionization structure of the nebula is resulted from the central star undergoing a ‘born-again’ event, ejecting material from its surface and creating a shock that excites the nebular material....

There are 565 exoplanets currently known that are as massive as Jupiter or bigger, about one third of the total known, confirmed exoplanet population. About one quarter of the massive population orbits very close to its star, with periods of less than ten days (the Earth takes about 365 days to orbit the Sun). Heated by the nearby star’s radiation, these giants are often called hot Jupiters. Despite the large and diverse population of known giant exoplanets, only two of them orbit older, evolved stars....