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NASA is inviting people around the world to submit their names online to be placed on a microchip aboard NASA’s historic Parker Solar Probe mission launching in the summer of 2018. The mission will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and your name will go along for the ride. “This probe will journey to a region humanity has never explored before,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington....

An ice cloud taking shape over Titan’s south pole is the latest sign that the change of seasons is setting off a cascade of radical changes in the atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon. Made from an unknown ice, this type of cloud has long hung over Titan’s north pole, where it is now fading, according to observations made by the composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “We associate this particular kind of ice cloud with winter weather on Titan, and this is the first time we have detected it anywhere but the north pole,” said the study’s lead author, Donald E....

COVID-19 could pass into people’s lungs from saliva with the virus moving directly from mouth to bloodstream — particularly if individuals are suffering from gum disease, according to new research. Evidence shows that blood vessels of the lungs, rather than airways, are affected initially in COVID-19 lung disease with high concentrations of the virus in saliva and periodontitis associated with increased risk of death. The researchers propose that dental plaque accumulation and periodontal inflammation further intensify the likelihood of the SARS-CoV-2 virus reaching the lungs and causing more severe cases of the infection....

Airflow patterns around two people conversing in typical situations, such as hair salons, medical exam rooms, and long-term care facilities. COVID-19 can spread from asymptomatic but infected people through small aerosol droplets in their exhaled breath. Most studies of the flow of exhaled air have focused on coughing or sneezing, which can send aerosols flying long distances. However, speaking while near one another is also risky since the virus can be ejected by merely talking....

According to a new model proposed by Eric Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Saturn and its satellites initially resembled the Jovian system, with four larger satellites similar to the Galilean moons. However, Saturn’s moons began to merge, eventually forming Titan. The model was presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada. The mid-sized satellites could have been formed from the debris left over by the formation of Titan, with subsequent mergers perhaps explaining Titan’s elongated orbit....

Look around you right now and there’s a good chance you will see silica (silicon dioxide, SiO2) in some form. A major component of many types of rocks on Earth, silica is used in industrial sand-and-gravel mixtures to make concrete for sidewalks, roads, and buildings. One form of silica, quartz, is a major component of sand found on beaches along the U.S. coasts. Silica is a key ingredient in glass, including plate glass for windows, as well as fiberglass....

“Like a swarm of birds flying together in the sky, the common velocities of stars in an association tell us that they are related,” Gagné explained. “This teaches us something about their age and their compositions,” Thanks to internal similarities between group members and external differences between different groups—particularly when it comes to member ages—astronomers can use stellar associations to glean information about the history of star formation in our corner of the Milky Way....

New measurements confirm, to the highest energies yet explored, that the laws of physics hold no matter where you are or how fast you’re moving. Observations of record-breaking gamma rays prove the robustness of Lorentz Invariance – a piece of Einstein’s theory of relativity that predicts the speed of light is constant everywhere in the universe. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov observatory in Puebla, Mexico detected the gamma rays coming from distant galactic sources....

As ice melts, the organic carbon found in permafrost is released once again after ages of confinement in the soil. It is making its way into Arctic and subarctic lakes and ponds, and modifying their composition. The portrait presented by an international team of researchers that includes Professor Isabelle Laurion of INRS shows the influence that thawing permafrost has on surface water biogeochemistry. Published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters, the results demonstrate that organic carbon from permafrost is making its way into the waters of these regions....

The climate of the last 1000 years reconstructed Over the past decade, researchers from the Alfred Wegner Institute and the Niels Bohr Institute have collaborated to update the existing ice cores with more recent data. To accomplish this, they have conducted several missions to remote locations on the Greenland ice sheet to drill new cores in areas where ice cores were previously collected about 30 years ago. This has been done in order to get ice and snow samples from the latest decades....

A recent study has quantified the impact that fleeting natural events, such as sunrises and sunsets, have on people for the first time. The researchers aimed to identify the effects of these events on individuals and understand their impact. Although there has been extensive research into the effects of nature on mental health, most studies have only evaluated these impacts under calm weather conditions and clear skies. However, surprisingly few studies have explored how people respond to variations in weather and the daily patterns of the sun, known as “ephemeral phenomena....

The relatively small rock exploded in the atmosphere at an altitude of 30 km, releasing about half a megaton of energy (equivalent to 35 Hiroshima-sized bombs). Two minutes later, the shockwave reached the ground damaging thousands of buildings, breaking windows, and injuring roughly 1500 people from flying shards of glass. Hidden in the glare of our Sun are an unknown number of asteroids, on paths we do not know, many of which could be heading for Earth, and we just don’t know it....

French health authorities have confirmed three cases of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) virus in France since January 24, 2020. The first confirmed cases in Europe are not unexpected given the developments of the last few days with several 2019-nCoV cases reported in countries outside of China. The fact that these cases were identified, proves that detection and confirmation of this novel virus is working in France, showing a high level of preparedness to prevent and control possible infections of 2019-nCoV....

How about if I lobbied the homeowner association in my high-rise condo to skip the 22nd floor, jumping from the 21st to 23rd? It’s highly unusual to fear 22 – so, yes, it would be appropriate to see me as a bit odd. But what if, in just my country alone, more than 40 million people shared the same baseless aversion? That’s how many Americans admit it would bother them to stay on one particular floor in high-rise hotels: the 13th....

Sharks’ non-bony skeletons were thought to be the template before bony internal skeletons evolved, but a new fossil discovery suggests otherwise. The discovery of a 410-million-year-old fish fossil with a bony skull suggests the lighter skeletons of sharks may have evolved from bony ancestors, rather than the other way around. Sharks have skeletons made cartilage, which is around half the density of bone. Cartilaginous skeletons are known to evolve before bony ones, but it was thought that sharks split from other animals on the evolutionary tree before this happened; keeping their cartilaginous skeletons while other fish, and eventually us, went on to evolve bone....

Alpha-gal syndrome is an allergy that causes your body to react to eating meat from mammals and products made from mammals. Symptoms usually start 2-6 hours after eating the mammalian meat or food. Clinicians should consider alpha-gal syndrome in patients with unexplained gastrointestinal symptoms of abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. This is particularly important with those who live or have lived in an alpha-gal–prevalent area (this includes the Southeast, mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and East Central U....

This mode is thus used for general spatial orientation. Once this process is finished, the eyes will focus on specific information for a longer period of time, and process it more deeply, based on the target and the level of interest. This is referred to as the “focus mode.” Up until now, these changes in gaze patterns have mainly been observed in response to changes in the environment or external stimuli....

Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must “feed” on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now a team of astronomers including Robert Gutermuth, a University of Massachusetts Amherst expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual “baby” star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins, that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in the journal Nature....

“To some degree when you do an operation it’s much like manufacturing something in a factory,” explains Orgill SM ’80, Ph.D. ’83, who serves as medical director at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Wound Care Center and as a professor at Harvard Medical School. “You want to have high-quality control and be able to do it as efficiently as you can. Those engineering principles of process control are very important in surgery....

While the images record the sometimes deadly march of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, they also show how the introduction of antibodies collected from humans who recovered from the virus can prevent or treat infection. However, the research also revealed that antibodies lacking the ability to recruit killer immune system cells are less effective at combating infection. The study, published online on August 18 in pre-proof form in the journal Immunity, was led by Priti Kumar, Pradeep Uchil, and Walther Mothes, all from Yale School of Medicine, as well as Andrés Finzi from Université de Montréal....