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An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has identified the weakened ribbon of H3+ emissions near the jovigraphic equator using the NSFCam instrument at the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility, the first evidence of a localized ionospheric interaction with Jupiter’s magnetic field. This movie shows a projection of the map of Jupiter’s ionosphere, allowing us to look at the ionosphere as the planet rotates as it would be seen from Earth....

Unexpected Aftermath of First-of-Its-Kind Test Intrigues Astronomers NASA carried out the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a first-of-its-kind experiment, on September 26, 2022. The pioneering experiment was designed to intentionally crash a spacecraft into a small asteroid in the world’s first-ever in-space test for planetary defense. According to NASA, the mission was successful in altering the orbit of Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet of Didymos. However, there is still much to learn about the system....

“Rapid intensification” of a tropical cyclone, according to the technical definition, is a storm with winds that increase by at least 35 miles (55 kilometers) per hour in a 24-hour period. In the Western Pacific, Super Typhoon Noru (locally called Karding) easily blew past that threshold. The storm’s winds massively accelerated from 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour on September 24 to 155 miles (250 kilometers) per hour the next day....

Why do certain materials emit electrons with a very specific energy? This has been a mystery for decades — scientists at TU Wien have found an answer. It is something quite common in physics: electrons leave a certain material, they fly away and then they are measured. Some materials emit electrons, when they are irradiated with light. These electrons are then called “photoelectrons.” In materials research, so-called “Auger electrons” also play an important role — they can be emitted by atoms if an electron is first removed from one of the inner electron shells....

The study, conducted in collaboration with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation-Brazilian Ministry of Health and international partners, is published in Science. The findings confirm why the epidemic of Zika-associated birth defects was so severe in Brazil. “The exceedingly high infection rate among pregnant women from impoverished communities such as our study site was surely the major reason why we had a large outbreak of microcephaly among infants at the end of 2015,” said Albert Ko, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health and one of the study’s lead authors....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Soft Matter. The process involved developing lasers based on chiral nematic liquid crystals (LCs), similar to the ones used in flat-panel HDTVs. They are part of a unique class of photonic materials that can be stimulated to produce laser emissions under the right conditions. If the helix-shaped structure of the LC molecules is properly aligned, it can act as an optically resonant cavity, which is an essential component of any laser....

A team of researchers led by Cindi Morshead, a professor in the Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, found that metformin, a widely prescribed drug to treat diabetes, promotes repair in adult female brains and is dependent on the sex hormone estradiol. Their findings are described in a study that was published in the September 11, 2019, issue of the journal Science Advances. The research builds on a previous study, in collaboration with Freda Miller’s group at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, which sought to find treatment for childhood brain injury....

The research group included Assistant Professor Hideru Togashi of Kobe University’s Graduate School of Medicine and Dr. Sayaka Katsunuma of Hyogo Prefectural Kobe Children’s Hospital. These research results were published online in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology on December 8, 2022. Main Points In the organ of Corti in the inner ear, there are two types of cells arranged in a checkerboard-like mosaic pattern; hair cells responsible for hearing and their support cells....

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will help resolve the disagreement by exploring the problem much more precisely than ever before. It will trace the expansion history of the universe, helping us see how the rate of expansion changed from some of the earliest stages of cosmic history to today. The mission will also use multiple techniques to help determine whether the discrepancy is a result of measurement errors or whether astronomers need to adjust the theory from which they derive the predictions....

Approximately one-fourth of ARDS patients have disease features that put them at increased risk of death within the first month of hospitalization. Approximately one in four patients hospitalized for the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) associated with severe COVID-19 infections may have a distinct phenotype (disease presentation) or biochemical profile associated with organ dysfunction, blood-clotting abnormalities and greater risk of death than patients with other, seemingly similar forms of the disease, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have found....

Is talent in a given field a uniquely human phenomenon? We do not know whether gifted bees or elephants exist, just to name a few species, but now there is evidence that talent in a specific field exists, in at least one non-human species: the dog. A new study, just published in Scientific Reports, found that, while the vast majority of dogs struggle to learn object labels (such as the names of their toys), when tested in strictly controlled conditions, a handful of gifted word learner dogs learn multiple toy names, apparently effortlessly....

What’s special about November’s lunar eclipse? The last total lunar eclipse for three years will occur during the early morning hours of November 8, 2022. After this, the next total lunar eclipse will not occur until March 14, 2025. However, we will continue to see partial and penumbral lunar eclipses during that time. A lunar eclipse occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon align so that the Moon passes into Earth’s shadow....

A study published on April 16, 2021, in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that wearing two face coverings can nearly double the effectiveness of filtering out SARS-CoV-2-sized particles, preventing them from reaching the wearer’s nose and mouth and causing COVID-19. The reason for the enhanced filtration isn’t so much adding layers of cloth, but eliminating any gaps or poor-fitting areas of a mask. “The medical procedure masks are designed to have very good filtration potential based on their material, but the way they fit our faces isn’t perfect,” said Emily Sickbert-Bennett, PhD, associate professor of infectious diseases at the UNC School of Medicine and lead author of the study....

“In this large, observational study, ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause,” said study author Professor Peter Kistler. He is an international leader in cardiac arrhythmia research from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia. “The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant, and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle....

Magnetic field information could provide earlier disaster warning to at-risk regions, potentially saving lives. A new study finds the magnetic field generated by a tsunami can be detected a few minutes earlier than changes in sea level and could improve warnings of these giant waves. As conductive seawater moves across the Earth’s magnetic field, tsunamis produce magnetic fields. Previously, researchers expected that the tsunami’s magnetic field would arrive before a rise in sea level, but they lacked the requisite simultaneous magnetic and sea level data to confirm the phenomena....

The study is published in the Journal of Nutrition. A significant next step in this research would be a human clinical trial, said study co-author Neil Shay, professor of food science in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences. In the study, 10-week-old male laboratory mice were fed either a low-fat or high-fat diet over a 10-week period. Groups of high-fat-fed mice were given watermelon supplements in the form of a powder made from a freeze-dried process....

Perhaps no other material is generating as much excitement in the electronics world as graphene, sheets of pure carbon just one atom thick through which electrons can race at nearly the speed of light – 100 times faster than they move through silicon. Superthin, superstrong, superflexible, and superfast as an electrical conductor, graphene has been touted as a potential wonder material for a host of electronic applications, starting with ultrafast transistors....

Safe and effective vaccines offer hope for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the possible emergence of vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants, as well as novel coronaviruses, make finding treatments that work against all coronaviruses as important as ever. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research have analyzed viral proteins across 27 coronavirus species and thousands of samples from COVID-19 patients, identifying highly conserved sequences that could make the best drug targets....

‘Our aim is the bottom-up construction of a synthetic cell that can sustain itself and that can grow and divide,’ explains University of Groningen Professor of Biochemistry Bert Poolman. He is part of a Dutch consortium that obtained a Gravitation grant in 2017 from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to realize this ambition. Different groups of scientists are producing different modules for the cell and Poolman’s group was tasked with energy production....

Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the “kombucha mother” used to ferment tea. Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants. They also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the material, creating “living materials” that could be used to purify water or to make “smart” packaging materials that can detect damage....