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The new process, called gel electrospinning, is described in a paper by MIT professor of chemical engineering Gregory Rutledge and postdoc Jay Park. The paper appears online and will be published in the February edition of the Journal of Materials Science. In materials science, Rutledge explains, “there are a lot of tradeoffs.” Typically researchers can enhance one characteristic of a material but will see a decline in a different characteristic....

MIT economist Pierre Azoulay outlines a roadmap for scientific success against the virus. For humans, the COVID-19 virus is a novel foe. And to combat a new pathogen, we need innovation: a new vaccine, new drugs, new tests, new clinical knowledge, and new data for epidemiology models. In response to the current crisis, many private companies and some governments have been trying to generate a vaccine and other medical advances in short order....

MIT has joined the consortium, which is led by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and NASA. MIT News spoke with Christopher Hill, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, who is serving on the new consortium’s steering committee, about how MIT’s computing power will aid in the fight against COVID-19. Q: How did MIT become a part of this consortium? A: IBM, which has longstanding computing relationships with both the government and MIT, approached the Institute late last week about joining....

The species, Salsola ryanii, is significantly larger than either of its parent plants, which can grow up to 6 feet tall. A new study from UC Riverside supports the theory that the new tumbleweed grows more vigorously because it is a hybrid with doubled pairs of its parents’ chromosomes. Findings from the study are detailed in a new paper published in the Oxford University-produced journal AoB Plants. “Salsola ryanii is a nasty species replacing other nasty species of tumbleweed in the U....

Spikes in handgun purchases in 2012 after Sandy Hook and the re-election of President Obama have been linked to a 4% increase in firearm injury in California, a UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) study has found. The UC Davis School of Medicine study, published August 25 in Injury Epidemiology, assessed the sharp rise in handgun purchasing across 499 California cities and estimated whether the additional handguns increased fatal and non-fatal injuries in these communities....

More than a third of the Antarctic’s ice shelf area could be at risk of collapsing into the sea if global temperatures reach 4°C above pre-industrial levels, new research has shown. The University of Reading led the most detailed ever study forecasting how vulnerable the vast floating platforms of ice surrounding Antarctica will become to dramatic collapse events caused by melting and runoff, as climate change forces temperatures to rise....

The majority of people who were likely infected with the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, didn’t know they had the virus. This is according to a new study from Cedars-Sinai investigators. The findings were published on August 17, 2022, in JAMA Network Open. “More than one in every two people who were infected with Omicron didn’t know they had it,” said Susan Cheng, MD, MPH. Cheng is director of the Institute for Research on Healthy Aging in the Department of Cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai and corresponding author of the study....

Physicists of the University of Vienna together with researchers from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna developed nano-machines that recreate principal activities of proteins. They present the first versatile and modular example of a fully artificial protein-mimetic model system, thanks to the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), a high-performance computing infrastructure. These “bionic proteins” could play an important role in innovating pharmaceutical research. The results have now been published in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters....

Cassada and Rubio installed an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) to augment power generation for the 3A power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure. They also disconnected a cable to ensure the 1B channel can be reactivated after it was shut down due to a power trip in its electrical system. The disconnection of the cable will isolate the affected portion of the array and restore the channel to 75% of its normal operating capacity....

Choose your player! NASA is holding a naming contest beginning Wednesday, June 16 for the manikin that will fly on an upcoming mission around the Moon. As NASA gears up for the Artemis I mission around the Moon that will pave the way to send the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface, we have an important task for you (yes, you!). Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft ahead of the first flight with crew on Artemis II....

Astronomical data from three new objects have been translated into sound as part of a data sonification project.The Chandra Deep Field, the Cat’s Eye planetary nebula, and the Whirlpool Galaxy are the latest objects to have their data turned into sounds.The data come from the Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as other NASA telescopes in space.Data sonification allows users to be able to hear information from cosmic objects as well as see it....

On June 15, NASA’s Swift caught the onset of a rare X-ray outburst from a stellar-mass black hole in the binary system V404 Cygni. Astronomers around the world are watching the event. In this system, a stream of gas from a star much like the sun flows toward a 10 solar mass black hole. Instead of spiraling toward the black hole, the gas accumulates in an accretion disk around it....

Layered deposits in Uzboi Vallis sometimes occur in alcoves along the valley and/or below where tributaries enter it. These deposits may record deposition into a large lake that once filled Uzboi Vallis when it was temporarily dammed at its northern end by the rim Holden Crater and before it was overtopped and breached allowing water to drain back out of the valley. Layered deposits similar to those here may remain preserved where they were protected from erosion during drainage of the lake....

Flight #15 is the start of our journey back to Wright Brothers Field. Taking place no earlier than Saturday, November 6 at 9:22 a.m. PT, or 12:03 LMST (local Mars time), the 254th sol (Martian day) of the Perseverance mission, Flight #15 will return Ingenuity back to the Raised Ridges region, imaged in Flight #10. In this flight the helicopter will traverse 1,332 feet (406 meters) during 130 seconds of flight, traveling at 11....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:31 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:31 a.m. EDT on May 24), as Juno performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, the spacecraft was about 4,900 miles (7,900 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the gas giant planet at a northern latitude of about 41 degrees. The view is oriented with south on Jupiter toward upper left and north toward lower right....

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter often takes images of Martian sand dunes to study the mobile soils. These images provide information about erosion and movement of surface material, about wind and weather patterns, even about the soil grains and grain sizes. However, looking past the dunes, these images also reveal the nature of the substrate beneath. Within the spaces between the dunes, a resistant and highly fractured surface is revealed....

Analyses of multiple rocks found at the bottom of Jezero Crater on Mars, where the Perseverance rover landed in 2020, has revealed significant interaction between the rocks and liquid water. Evidence consistent with the presence of organic compounds has also been discoved in those rocks. Organic compounds (chemical compounds with carbon–hydrogen bonds) can be created through nonbiological processes, so the mere existence of these compounds is not direct evidence of life....

One of the world’s most important shipping lanes—the Suez Canal—is reopening this week. But as satellite imagery shows, the traffic jammed up around the canal’s two ends is substantial and is likely to take some time to disperse. After a grounded container ship blocked traffic on the Suez Canal for six days, the key shipping route through Egypt reopened on March 29, 2021. Engineers were aided by a natural process—a high spring tide—in their efforts to dislodge the massive ship with tugboats, dredging equipment, and backhoes....

What’s Up for March? Mars and friends in the evening, and a brilliant pair of planets returns… In the first week or so of March, you’ll find Mars near the Pleiades star cluster high in the west in the few hours after sunset. NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on February 18th! And in addition to this latest surface explorer, orbiters from two other nations arrived in orbit around the Red Planet last month, making 2021 a truly international year of Mars exploration....

The Dragon launched on SpaceX’s 27th contracted commercial resupply mission for NASA at 8:30 p.m. EDT on March 14, from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After Dragon spends about one month attached to the space station, the spacecraft will return to Earth with cargo and research. The scientific experiments and technology demonstrations carried by the Dragon spacecraft examine how the heart changes in space, test a student-designed camera mount, compare surfaces that control biofilm formation, and more....