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400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth, researchers examined waves in complex plasma under microgravity conditions and found that the microparticles behaved in nonuniform ways in the presence of varying electrical fields. They report some of the first findings from the Plasma-Kristall 4 (PK-4) experiment in Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing. PK-4 is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian State Space Corporation “Roscosmos” to investigate complex plasmas....

Last spring, researchers published a study about the apparent presence of astonishing and dramatically high levels of three different elements in red giant stars, located less than three light years away from the big black hole at the center of our galaxy. Various possible explanations were presented, for example, that the high levels were a result of earlier stars being disrupted as they fall into the black hole, or a result of debris from the collisions of neutron stars....

“To test the hypothesis, you must map electron spins in a single chiral molecule. A big difficulty is that chiral molecules are so small that you cannot do so.” explains team leader Prof. Hiroshi Yamamoto. He adds “Instead, we took up an organic chiral superconductor as a giant chiral molecule.” Stabilizing electron spins requires that the electrons be correlated, or interfere with each other, over the entire system. In a superconducting state, the interference persists via prolonged coherence of electrons; many electrons collapse into a single quantum-mechanical wave and jointly keep the capability of interference over a long distance....

A research team from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has created a device known as a “dielectric nanocavity” that successfully concentrates light in a volume 12 times smaller than the diffraction limit. The finding is groundbreaking in optical research and was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. “Although computer calculations show that you can concentrate light at an infinitely small point, this only applies in theory. The actual results are limited by how small details can be made, for example, on a microchip,” says Marcus Albrechtsen, Ph....

In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASA’s Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object. This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are thought to be the missing link between planets and stars, with masses up to 80 times that of Jupiter....

Sometime this spring or summer, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a case ruling that will legally define whether federal protections should be extended to wetlands outside of navigable waters. The justices might consider reading a new Stanford-led study that finds, although wetlands remain threatened in many parts of the world – including the U.S., which accounts for more losses than any other country – global losses of wetlands have likely been overestimated....

New mutations that are absent in parents but appear in their offspring account for at least 10% of severe congenital heart disease, reveals a massive genomics study led by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine. The analysis of all the genes of more than 1800 individuals found hundreds of mutations that can cause congenital heart disease, the most common form of birth defect that afflicts nearly 1% of all newborns....

Some phenomena in quantum physics, such as the entanglement between two particles, are hard to reconcile with everyday experiences. If entangled, certain properties of the two particles are closely linked, even when very far apart. This strange behavior is why Albert Einstein described entanglement as a “spooky action at a distance.” Although it’s weird, it’s an important phenomenon. In fact, research on the entanglement between light particles (photons) was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics....

Plasmons arise when light interacts with metallic nanoparticles. The incident light sets off a collective oscillation, a unified forward and backward motion, of the electrons in the particles. It is this collective oscillation that is the plasmon. Metallic nanostructures and their ability to shape light on a scale of nanometers are studied by many research groups around the world for use in, for example, biosensors and energy conversion devices, and to reinforce other optical phenomena....

MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the cell’s DNA and passed on for dozens of generations. The circuits, described in the February 10 online edition of Nature Biotechnology, could be used as long-term environmental sensors, efficient controls for biomanufacturing, or to program stem cells to differentiate into other cell types. “Almost all of the previous work in synthetic biology that we’re aware of has either focused on logic components or on memory modules that just encode memory....

But this section of the electromagnetic spectrum has remained out of reach for most applications. That is because current sources of terahertz frequencies are bulky, inefficient, have limited tuning, or have to operate at low temperatures. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with MIT and the U.S. Army, have developed a compact, room temperature, widely tunable terahertz laser. The research was published today (November 15, 2019) in the journal Science....

In order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in the long term, it is crucial to understand why one SARS-CoV-2 variant prevails over another. An international study conducted by the Institute of Virology and Immunology and the University of Bern, in collaboration with the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut in Germany, has provided important answers by comparing the spread and transmission of different emerging variants in parallel. This approach is now applicable to the comparison of new variants, such as delta and omicron....

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) team has announced in a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal that they have doubled the sensitivity of the array, which was already the most sensitive radio telescope in the world dedicated to exploring this unique period in the history of the universe. While they have yet to actually detect radio emissions from the end of the cosmic dark ages, their results do provide clues to the composition of stars and galaxies in the early universe....

In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon under the Artemis program, with a goal to collect lunar rocks that could ultimately provide breathable oxygen on the Moon. Although the Moon does have an atmosphere, it’s very thin and composed mostly of hydrogen, neon, and argon. It’s not the sort of gaseous mixture that could sustain oxygen-dependent mammals such as humans....

Mario Damasso and colleagues present data suggesting that this candidate planet orbits Proxima Centauri every 5.2 years and maybe a “super-Earth,” with a mass higher than Earth’s, though much lower than that of the Solar System ice giants Uranus and Neptune. If its existence is confirmed, this planet may provide insights into how low-mass planets form around low-mass stars. It could also challenge models of how super-Earths are born; most are believed to form near the “snowline,” the minimum distance from a star at which water can turn to solid ice, but the candidate planet’s orbit lies far beyond this sweet spot....

The international collaboration used novel data analysis methods and the enormous computing power of the citizen science project [email protected] to track down the neutron star’s faint gamma-ray pulsations in data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope. Their results show that the pulsar is in orbit with a stellar companion about a sixth of the mass of our Sun. The pulsar is slowly but surely evaporating this star. The team also found that the companion’s orbit varies slightly and unpredictably over time....

Crumpled graphene could be used in a wide array of biosensing applications for rapid diagnosis, the researchers said. They published their results today (March 24, 2020) in the journal Nature Communications. “This sensor can detect ultra-low concentrations of molecules that are markers of disease, which is important for early diagnosis,” said study leader Rashid Bashir, a professor of bioengineering and the dean of the Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois....

Unlike our familiar planet Jupiter, so-called hot Jupiters circle astonishingly close to their host star — so close that it typically takes fewer than three days to complete an orbit. And one hemisphere of these planets always faces its host star, while the other faces permanently out into the dark. Not surprisingly, the “day” side of the planets gets vastly hotter than the night side, and the hottest point of all tends to be the spot closest to the star....

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center investigated the role of one cellular mechanism in improving physical fitness by exercise training and identified one anti-aging intervention that delayed the declines that occur with aging in the model organism. Together, the scientists’ findings open the door to new strategies for promoting muscle function during aging. “Exercise has been widely employed to improve quality of life and to protect against degenerative diseases, and in humans, a long-term exercise regimen reduces overall mortality,” said co-corresponding author T....

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the far reaches of our solar system that scientists feel is the final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space. Scientists refer to this new region as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our sun’s magnetic field lines are connected to interstellar magnetic field lines. This connection allows lower-energy charged particles that originate from inside our heliosphere — or the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself — to zoom out and allows higher-energy particles from outside to stream in....