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“The mysterious bright spots on Ceres, which have captivated both the Dawn science team and the public, reveal evidence of Ceres’ past subsurface ocean, and indicate that, far from being a dead world, Ceres is surprisingly active. Geological processes created these bright areas and may still be changing the face of Ceres today,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

A new analysis by an international team of astrophysicists concludes that the mysterious gamma-ray glow at the center of the Milky Way is most likely caused by pulsars – the incredibly dense, rapidly spinning cores of collapsed ancient stars that were up to 30 times more massive than the sun. The findings cast doubt on previous interpretations of the signal as a potential sign of dark matter – a form of matter that accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe but that so far has evaded detection....

A recent study using a rat model for Crohn’s disease has demonstrated promising results for the treatment of perianal fistulas (PAF), a common complication of the condition. Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Whiting School of Engineering collaborated to develop a biodegradable hydrogel composite loaded with stem cells. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Crohn’s disease, a subtype of inflammatory bowel disease, affects over three million adults in America....

Rehearsal will begin with launch teams assisting Crew-6 crewmates into their SpaceX spacesuits inside the Astronaut Crew Quarters at the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building – just as they will on launch day. Next, the crew will take the elevator down to the ground floor and exit the building’s double doors, where Tesla Model Xs will be waiting to drive them the short distance to Launch Complex 39A....

As the coronavirus pandemic slowed global commerce to a crawl in early 2020, emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) – which create ozone, a danger to human health and to climate – decreased 15% globally, with local reductions as high as 50%, according to a study led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. As a result of the lower NOx emissions, by June 2020, global ozone levels had dropped to a level that policymakers thought would take at least 15 years to reach by conventional means, such as regulations....

One of the first steps in the data’s journey from deep space to a scientist’s laptop is the Science Processing Operations Center, called SPOC, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the design of which is based on the Kepler mission’s Science Operations Center, called the SOC, also at Ames. The SOC has been chugging along for more than a decade, spitting out tens of thousands of possible planet signals from the Kepler space telescope, NASA’s groundbreaking planet-finding mission that’s revolutionized our view of the heavens as a place chock-full of other worlds where life could exist....

On July 8, 2018, NASA’s PMC Turbo mission launched a giant balloon to study PMCs at a height of 50 miles above the surface. For five days, the balloon floated through the stratosphere from its launch at Esrange, Sweden, across the Arctic to Western Nunavut, Canada. During its flight, cameras aboard the balloon captured 6 million high-resolution images filling up 120 terabytes of data storage — most of which included a variety of PMC displays, revealing the processes leading to turbulence....

“Our lab has developed a new technique for understanding neuropsychiatric symptoms based on focal brain lesions and a wiring diagram of the human brain,” said senior author Michael Fox, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the associate director of the Deep Brain Stimulation Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). “We’ve successfully applied this technique to hallucinations, delusions, involuntary movements, and coma — and in perhaps its most interesting application to date, we applied it to criminality....

Harvard Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Kang-Kuen Ni and colleagues have combined two atoms for the first time into what researchers call a dipolar molecule. The work is described in a new paper published in Science. Researchers say the discovery holds great promise for the future of quantum computing, as the dipolar molecule constitutes a new type of qubit, the smallest unit of quantum information, which could lead to more-efficient devices....

One of the more promising roads to energy independence leads away from crude oil and into the forests and fields. For years, scientists have been seeking efficient means to convert non-food based biomass into fuels and chemical feedstocks, reducing fossil-fuel dependence and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To that end, Los Alamos scientists and collaborators from The University of Guelph in Canada published an article in the scientific journal Nature Chemistry in late April that could offer a big step on the path to renewable energy....

Scientists established the new species, Thesea dalioi, by comparing its physical traits, such as branch thickness and the bright red colony color, with the only other species in the genus in the eastern Pacific, T. variabilis. T. dalioi is named for Ray Dalio, a supporter of marine exploration. Its name is intended to recognize Dalio’s valuable contributions to marine research and public outreach. Hannibal Bank, part of the Coiba National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a coastal seamount and a biodiversity hot spot that has only been explored recently....

With data collected from the mighty W. M. Keck Observatory, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown — known as the Pluto killer for discovering a Kuiper-belt object that led to the demotion of Pluto from planetary status — and Kevin Hand from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have found the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa’s frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface....

Several years ago, in hopes of overcoming that issue, a new type of stent made from biodegradable polymers was introduced. Stent designers hoped that these devices would eventually be absorbed by the blood vessel walls, removing the risk of long-term implantation. At first, these stents appeared to be working well in patients, but after a few years these patients experienced more heart attacks than patients with metal stents, and the polymer stents were taken off the market....

As the sun skims through the galaxy, it emits charged particles in a stream of plasma called the solar wind. The solar wind, in turn, creates a bubble known called the heliosphere that extends far beyond the planets of the solar system. For decades, scientists have visualized the heliosphere as shaped like a comet, with a very long tail extending some 464 billion miles, which is thousands of times as far as the distance from Earth to the sun....

Research has shown that it is fairly easy to take advantage of our fallible memory. Simply changing a word in a question can contort what people recall. The techniques used to implant false memories in psychological experiments are precisely the same ones used by repression therapists to recover supposedly buried traumas. Quickly incepted false memories are something that is possible. Researchers showed that slideshows with narration, as well as the manipulation of certain key slides in the narration sequence, allowed them to manipulate the participants’ memories....

“The search for life is a major focus of planetary exploration, but there hasn’t been direct life detection instrumentation on a mission since the 70s, during the Viking missions to Mars,” explains Dr. Jacqueline Goordial, one of the study’s authors. “We wanted to show a proof-of-concept that microbial life can be directly detected and identified using very portable, low-weight, and low-energy tools.” At present, most instruments on astrobiology missions look for habitable conditions, small organic molecules, and other “biosignatures” that generally could not be formed without life....

For one thing, once you pick up the pen, you then have to shift it in your hand to get it in the writing position. “You move the pen from an initial grasp to something more stable, but to do that, you’re gripping it with certain surfaces of the fingers and sliding it against other surfaces of the fingers,” said Adam Spiers, a former associate research scientist in Aaron Dollar’s lab....

Who is at risk? Research from Rutgers, published in The Journal of Dietary Supplements, provides the first solid clue: two genetic variants that predict some of the risk. “Learning to predict who will suffer liver damage is potentially important because there’s growing evidence that high-dose green tea extract may have significant health benefits for those who can safely take it,” said Hamed Samavat, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of nutrition sciences at the Rutgers School of Health Professions....

‘Entanglement’ describes a very particular type of quantum state which is not attributed to a single particle alone, but which is shared between two different particles. It irrevocably links their subsequent fates together – no matter how far apart they are – which famously led Albert Einstein to call the phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Entanglement has become a cornerstone of new technologies based on effects at the quantum level and its distribution over long distances is a central goal in quantum communication....

The study, published today in Nature Physics, stems from the work of an international team of scientists and focuses on a liquid-like state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. Physicists believe that this matter filled the entire universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang when the universe was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms. CU Boulder Professor Jamie Nagle and colleagues at Vanderbilt University collaborated on the experiment known as PHENIX and used a massive collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to recreate that plasma....