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With an incredibly rich and intricately detailed view of a spiral galaxy, this image also exposes a huge number of distant stars and galaxies around it. That’s because it’s made from a combined 15 hours worth of NASA/ESA Hubble time focused on NGC 7038 and collecting light. So much data indicates that this is a valuable target, and indeed, NGC 7038 has been particularly helpful to astronomers measuring distances at vast cosmic scales....

Studies have shown that this globular cluster, named NGC 6139, is home to an aging population of stars. Most globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way are estimated to be over 10 billion years old; as a result, they contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, formed very early in the galaxy’s history. However, their role in galactic evolution is still a matter of study. This cluster is seen roughly in the direction of the center of the Milky Way, in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion)....

Gravitational lensing is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The mass contained within a galaxy is so immense that it can actually wrap and bend the very fabric of its surroundings (known as spacetime), forcing the light to travel along curved paths. As a result, the image of a more distant galaxy appears distorted and amplified to an observer, as the light from it has been bent around the intervening galaxy....

When we look into the distant cosmos, the great majority of the objects we see are galaxies: immense gatherings of stars, planets, gas, dust, and dark matter, showing up in all kind of shapes. This Hubble picture registers several, but the galaxy cataloged as 2MASX J05210136-2521450 stands out at a glance due to its interesting shape. This object is an ultraluminous infrared galaxy that emits a tremendous amount of light at infrared wavelengths....

The Toba super-eruption was one of the largest volcanic events over the last two million years, about 5,000 times larger than Mount St. Helen’s eruption in the 1980s. The eruption occurred 74,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, and was argued to have ushered in a “volcanic winter” lasting six to ten years, leading to a 1,000-year-long cooling of the Earth’s surface. Theories purported that the volcanic eruption would have led to major catastrophes, including the decimation of hominin populations and mammal populations in Asia, and the near extinction of our own species....

A brief recap: The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding? As Hubble and other telescopes seek to answer this question, they have run into an intriguing difference between what scientists predict and what they observe. Hubble measurements suggest a faster expansion rate in the modern universe than expected, based on how the universe appeared more than 13 billion years ago....

Now, a group of scientists has discovered a previously unknown pathway that regulates whether a plant uses its resources for growth or stress tolerance. This discovery could enable the stress response to be controlled under agricultural conditions, increasing crop yields. The researchers, from Nagoya University in Japan, published the findings on October 13 in the journal Science. A research team investigated the role of hormones and their receptors in the plant stress response....

Reducing dangerous swelling in traumatic brain injury: Injected nanoparticles reduce swelling and secondary brain damage in preclinical research. ‘We believe this may provide the first real treatment for people with traumatic brain injury’Brain swelling after injury causes severe secondary damage, even deathTraumatic brain injuries affect more than 2.5 million people in the U.S. each yearCould be first-line treatment for professional and young athletes After a traumatic brain injury, the most harmful damage is caused by secondary swelling of the brain compressed inside the skull....

The intensity of brain activity during the day, notwithstanding how long we’ve been awake, appears to increase our need for sleep, according to a new UCL study in zebrafish. The research, published in Neuron, found a gene that responds to brain activity in order to coordinate the need for sleep. It helps shed new light on how sleep is regulated in the brain. “There are two systems regulating sleep: the circadian and homeostatic systems....

The biological technique of ‘optogenetics’ uses light to control cells within living tissues that have been genetically modified to be light-sensitive. However, there is limited control of processes like this, as the light can activate several genes at once, and deeply penetrating light is often needed to reach the genes in living tissues. Now, researchers from NUS have developed a method to give more control to this process, by using specially designed nanoparticles and nanoclusters (dubbed ‘superballs’)....

Although dark matter is considered the backbone to the structure of the universe, scientists know very little about its nature, as the particles have so far evaded detection. Now scientists at MIT, Princeton University, and Cambridge University have found that the early universe, and the very first galaxies, would have looked very different depending on the nature of dark matter. For the first time, the team has simulated what early galaxy formation would have looked like if dark matter were “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm....

The results of the scientists’ experiments will be published online on July 30, 2018, in the Journal of Cell Biology. “Understanding how cancer cells are contained could eventually help us develop ways to predict a person’s individualized risk of metastasis,” says Andrew Ewald, Ph.D., professor of cell biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Most breast tumors begin in the cells that line the interior of breast milk ducts....

Climate models predict Arctic summers will soon be ice-free – perhaps as early as 2030 – meaning less than 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of summer sea ice will blanket the Arctic Ocean. Arctic warming has already created an environment which leads to younger sea ice. Most ice covering the Arctic is only one to four years old, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. As thin, young ice melts in future summers, only a 2,000-kilometer (1,240-mile) arc of ice will remain, stretching from the western Canadian Arctic Archipelago to Greenland’s northern coast....

Lightning strikes — perhaps a quintillion of them, occurring over a billion years — may have provided sparks of life for the early Earth. A new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Leeds contends that over time, these bolts from the blue unlocked the phosphorus necessary for the creation of biomolecules that would be the basis of life on the planet. “This work helps us understand how life may have formed on Earth and how it could still be forming on other, Earth-like planets,” said lead author Benjamin Hess, a graduate student in Yale’s Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences....

The study—a systematic literature review and meta-analysis of 11 major studies involving a total of 5.8 million people—represents the most comprehensive effort to date to examine cardiovascular complications from long COVID. Estimates of the number of people affected by long COVID vary substantially, but recent surveys suggest about 1 in 7 people in the U.S. have experienced long COVID. Researchers found consistent evidence that individuals with long COVID were significantly more likely than those who never had COVID-19 to experience symptoms associated with heart problems such as chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, and fatigue, and more likely to show markers of heart disease or elevated cardiovascular risk in medical imaging and diagnostic tests....

It was a little over two years ago that the Large Hadron Collider kicked off its search for the Higgs boson. But the hunt for the Higgs really began decades ago with the realization of a puzzle to be solved, one that involved more than just the Higgs. An intriguing asymmetry The quest started with symmetry, the aesthetically pleasing notion that something can be flipped and still look the same....

Nova outbursts are apparently a source for cosmic rays. The MAGIC telescopes have observed the nova RS Ophiuchi shining brightly in gamma rays at extremely high energy. The Gamma rays emanate from protons that are accelerated to very high energies in the shock front following the explosion. This suggests that novae are also a source of the ubiquitous cosmic radiation in the universe which consists mainly of protons rich in energy, which race through space at almost the speed of light....

Researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have demonstrated for the first time that quantum bits (qubits) can directly transfer between quantum computer microchips and demonstrated this with record-breaking speed and accuracy. This breakthrough resolves a major challenge in building quantum computers large and powerful enough to tackle complex problems that are of critical importance to society. Today, quantum computers operate on the 100-qubit scale. Experts anticipate millions of qubits are required to solve important problems that are out of reach of today’s most powerful supercomputers....

As a chemical engineer, Hadley Sikes loves studying complex systems such as networks of chemical reactions. But in her work designing practical devices for diagnostics and other applications, she embraces simplicity. Sikes, an associate professor who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, devotes much of her lab’s effort to devising inexpensive, highly sensitive tests for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and cancer. Making these tests easy to use is key to their success, she says....

Marion Nachon, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M, and colleagues have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. The team examined Mars’ geological terrains from Gale Crater, an immense 95-mile-wide (150-km-wide) rocky basin that is being explored with the NASA Curiosity rover since 2012 as part of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission. The results show that the lake that was present in Gale Crater over 3 billion years ago underwent a drying episode, potentially linked to the global drying of Mars....