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On Earth right now, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day, humans produce emails, photos, tweets, and other digital files that add up to another 2.5 million gigabytes of data. Much of this data is stored in enormous facilities known as exabyte data centers (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes), which can be the size of several football fields and cost around $1 billion to build and maintain....

Unlike ordinary cells, cancer cells devote most of their energy to reproducing themselves. To do this, they must trigger alternative metabolic pathways that produce new cellular building blocks, such as DNA, carbohydrates and lipids. Chemical compounds that disrupt an enzyme critical to this metabolic diversion prevent tumors from forming in mice, according to an MIT-led study appearing online in Nature Chemical Biology on August 26. Matthew Vander Heiden, senior author of the paper, and others have previously shown that cancer cells use a specific form of this enzyme, known as pyruvate kinase, which allows them to focus their energy on building new cells....

The oil industry, pharmaceutical companies, and bioreactor manufacturers all face one common enemy: bubbles. Bubbles can form during the manufacturing or transport of various liquids, and their formation and rupture can cause significant issues in product quality. Inspired by these issues and the puzzling physics behind bubbles, an international scientific collaboration was born. Stanford University chemical engineer Gerald Fuller along with his PhD students Aadithya Kannan and Vinny Chandran Suja, as well as visiting PhD student Daniele Tammaro from the University of Naples, teamed up to study how different kinds of bubbles pop....

Early-life high-sugar diets have been linked to impaired brain function, but what about low-calorie sugar substitutes? According to recent research, they could have a negative impact on the developing gut and brain. The News Researchers from the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences report that adolescents who consumed the low-calorie sweeteners saccharin, ACE-K, and stevia showed long-term memory impairments in a study that was recently published in the journal JCI Insight....

There are a lot of things that pose a threat to our planet – climate change, natural disasters, and solar flares, for example. But one threat in particular often captures public imagination, finding itself popularised in books and films and regularly generating alarming headlines: asteroids. In our solar system there are millions of space rocks known as asteroids. Ranging in size from a few meters to hundreds of kilometers, these objects are mostly left over from the formation of our planets 4....

The output of solar energy systems is highly dependent on cloud cover. While weather forecasting can be used to predict the amount of sunlight reaching ground-based solar collectors, cloud cover is often characterized in simple terms, such as cloudy, partly cloudy, or clear. This does not provide accurate information for estimating the amount of sunlight available for solar power plants. In this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, from AIP Publishing, a new method is reported for estimating cloud optical properties using data from recently launched satellites....

Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach offers advice for dealing with loneliness and COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped social life in the United States, forcing many to suspend activities that were once considered routine. As cities move in and out of various stages of reopening and closure, people continue to navigate restrictions on when and where they can see their friends and family. And until there is a coronavirus vaccine, they must also grapple with the probability of recurring outbreaks....

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting people’s mental health. But what helps and hinders people in getting through a lockdown? A new study led by researchers at the University of Basel addressed this question using data from 78 countries across the world. The results hint at the pivots and hinges on which the individual’s psyche rests in the pandemic. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, little was known about the impact of population-wide governmental lockdowns....

Ultraviolet Light Adds Missing Piece to Cosmic Puzzle Astronomers have just assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history, based on a broad spectrum of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based telescopes. In particular, Hubble’s ultraviolet vision opens a new window on the evolving universe, tracking the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period, about 3 billion years after the big bang....

The observations of Neptune carried out in September and November 2018 show the first evidence of a huge storm brewing, with the discovery of a new northern Great Dark Spot (visible here to the upper left of the planet’s disc, partially overlapping a large patch of white). This new dark storm is of a similar size and shape to the storm discovered in 1989 by the Voyager 2 space probe....

NGC 1706 is known to belong to something known as a galaxy group, which is just as the name suggests — a group of up to 50 galaxies which are gravitationally bound and hence relatively close to each other. Around half of the galaxies we know of in the universe belong to some kind of group, making them incredibly common cosmic structures. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to the Local Group, which also contains the Andromeda galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, and the Triangulum galaxy....

NGC 1032 is located about a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus (The Sea Monster). Although beautiful, this image perhaps does not do justice to the galaxy’s true aesthetic appeal: NGC 1032 is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, but from Earth, the galaxy’s vast disc of gas, dust and stars is seen nearly edge-on. A handful of other galaxies can be seen lurking in the background, scattered around the narrow stripe of NGC 1032....

NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have spotted what might be one of the most distant galaxies known, harkening back to a time when our universe was only about 650 million years old (our universe is 13.8 billion years old). The galaxy, known as Abell2744 Y1, is about 30 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy and is producing about 10 times more stars, as is typical for galaxies in our young universe....

This new Hubble image shows galaxy NGC 7090, which is located about thirty million light-years from the Sun in the southern constellation of Indus. This image portrays a beautiful view of the galaxy NGC 7090, as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy is viewed edge-on from the Earth, meaning we cannot easily see the spiral arms, which are full of young, hot stars. However, a side-on view shows the galaxy’s disc and the bulging central core, where typically a large group of cool old stars are packed in a compact, spheroidal region....

Like lifting a giant veil, the near-infrared vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovers a dazzling new view deep inside the Tarantula Nebula. Hubble reveals a glittering treasure trove of more than 800,000 stars and protostars embedded inside the nebula. These observations were obtained as part of the Hubble Tarantula Treasury Program. When complete, the program will produce a large catalog of stellar properties, which will allow astronomers to study a wide range of important topics related to star formation....

There were a couple of other stunning photographs released by NASA of Hurricane Ian from the ISS: Above is another photograph of Hurricane Ian captured by a crew member onboard the International Space Station. When the picture was taken, on September 26, the ISS was orbiting more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth’s surface. At the time, Hurricane Ian was just south of Cuba and the space station was located over the Caribbean Sea east of Belize....

RCW 120 is a nebula that was first discovered in 1960 and is an H II emission nebula in the southern Milky Way, located 4,000 light-years from Earth. An H II region is a large, low-density cloud of partially ionized gas in which there has been recent star formation. RCW 120 is ionized by the O8V star CD-38 11636 and the B2 V star VDBH 84B. It is named after Alexander William Rodgers, Colin T....

Findings:In an early study, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers found that the immune cells of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, may play a role in damaging the neurons in the spinal cord. ALS is a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. Specifically, the team found that inflammation instigated by the immune system in ALS can trigger macrophages — cells responsible for gobbling up waste products in the brain and body — to also ingest healthy neurons....

The method produces spheres that have good capacity for carbon capture, and it works effectively at a large scale. Carbon spheres range in size from nanometers to micrometers. Over the past decade they have begun to play an important role in areas such as energy storage and conversion, catalysis, gas adsorption and storage, drug and enzyme delivery, and water treatment. They are also at the heart of carbon capture technology, which locks up carbon rather than emitting it into the atmosphere, thereby helping to tackle climate change....

But the surprises didn’t stop there. Longino originally thought the ants had been introduced to the area, possibly through the commercial potting soil, and would be some known species from elsewhere. But a close look in the lab revealed that it was a distinct new species, almost certainly native to the region, with similarities to related species in Arizona. Longino surmised that the ant, which likes warm, moist habitats, has been living underground in Utah’s typically dry climate....