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The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected three NASA-nominated science teams to participate in their planned Euclid mission, including one team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA is a partner in the Euclid mission, a space telescope designed to probe the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. Euclid is currently scheduled to launch in 2020. JPL will provide 16 advanced infrared detectors and four spare detectors for one of two instruments planned for the mission....

Japanese scientists have been able to coax mouse stem cells into becoming viable eggs that were able to produce healthy offspring. This will provide a powerful tool to study the basic elements of mammalian development and infertility. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science. Scientists have been trying to make sex cells from embryonic stem cells and pluripotent cells for years. Stem-cell scientists have derived many types of cells from stem-cell precursors, but have struggled with sex cells, which have more complex developmental programs because of the way that they divide....

One month since increasing their commanding frequency, engineers have yet to hear from NASA’s Opportunity rover. NASA hasn’t set any deadlines for the mission but will be briefed later this month on the progress and prospects for the recovery campaign being carried out at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL engineers are employing a combination of listening and commanding methods in case Opportunity is still operational. It’s possible that a layer of dust deposited on the rover’s solar panels by the recent global dust storm is blocking sunlight that could recharge its batteries....

New research to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2022, Lisbon, April 23-26) suggests that many of the symptoms connected to post-COVID syndrome (PCC, also known as long COVID) could be linked to the effect of the virus on the vagus nerve – one of the most important multi-functional nerves in the body. The study is by Dr. Gemma Lladós and Dr....

The dark faces of the moons resemble the primitive asteroids of the outer solar system, suggesting the moons might be asteroids caught long ago in Mars’ gravitational pull. But the shapes and angles of the moons’ orbits do not fit this capture scenario. A fresh look at 20-year-old data from the Mars Global Surveyor mission lends support to the idea the moons of Mars formed after a large impact on the planet threw a lot of rock into orbit, according to a new study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, a publication of the American Geophysical Union....

On January 22, 2023, the British Antarctic Survey reported that a new iceberg had broken from Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf. In the days following the long-awaited break, satellites have captured several new images of the behemoth berg as it drifts south. Two days after the iceberg first broke off, NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a wide view of the region, which analysts at the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC) used to confirm the break....

Hadley Sikes, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT, has been working for years with her team on the technology they’re adapting to create a COVID-19 test with rapid results. Moving beyond lab prototypes and into manufacturing the diagnostics on a large scale, however, is new territory. 3M is collaborating with the Sikes Lab to jointly develop the test, including establishing novel processes for scaling it. They will determine whether the test renders highly accurate results within 10 minutes, and if it is feasible to mass manufacture....

Researchers at Yale, collaborating with those at Boston University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, examined brain samples from tissue banks of monkeys that had reached extreme age, and observed neurofibrillary tangles forming in the same types of neurons as seen in humans. The pathological changes were first evident in the entorhinal cortex, the gateway needed to form new memories, and later appeared in the prefrontal cortex, a newly evolved brain region associated with higher cognition and abstract reasoning....

The research into hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) was led by Dr. Jonathan Read from Lancaster University with colleagues from other UK universities including the Universities of Liverpool, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Imperial College London, and was recently published in The Lancet. The researchers examined records of COVID-19 patients in UK hospitals enrolled in the International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infections Consortium (ISARIC) Clinical Characterisation Protocol UK (CCP-UK) study, who became ill before 1st August 2020....

“We examined the ALMA Science Archive thoroughly and collected all the data that contain radio signals from carbon ions in galaxies in the early Universe, only one billion years after the Big Bang,” says Seiji Fujimoto, the lead author of the research paper who is an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen, and a former Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. “By combining all the data, we achieved unprecedented sensitivity....

Rapid global warming poses a severe and immediate threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused in part by atmospheric methane, which is 30 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Microbes produce half of this methane and as temperatures continue to rise, microbial growth is accelerated, leading to a higher production of greenhouse gases than can be absorbed by plants. This weakens the Earth’s ability to act as a carbon sink and contributes to a rise in global temperatures....

The primary mission of ECOSTRESS, an instrument that measures thermal infrared energy emitted from the land surface, is to provide insight into plants’ health by taking their temperature. To keep cool, plants “sweat” by releasing water vapor through their pores, a process called evapotranspiration. After multiple orbits, ECOSTRESS is able to measure how much plants transpire and track their response to climate change. The image also reveals how certain parts of the forest were more resilient, seeming to protect themselves from burning....

Engineers hope to characterize the alignment between the star trackers and the Orion inertial measurement units by exposing different areas of the spacecraft to the Sun and activating the star trackers in different thermal states. Both of these are part of the guidance, navigation, and control system. Star trackers are navigation tools that measure the positions of stars to help the spacecraft determine its orientation. The inertial measurement units contain three devices, called gyros, used to measure spacecraft body rotation rates, and three accelerometers used to measure spacecraft accelerations....

The series of testing supports production of new RS-25 engines by lead SLS engine contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne. The new engines will help power future Artemis missions to the Moon beginning with Artemis V as NASA explores the universe for the benefit of all. The single-engine hot fire on the Fred Haise Test Stand followed a confidence test in 2022, which tested whether all was ready to proceed with the certification series....

Around five years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reported that TXS 0128+554 (TXS 0128 for short) is a faint source of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. Scientists have since taken a closer look using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. “After the Fermi announcement, we zoomed in a million times closer on the galaxy using the VLBA’s radio antennas and charted its shape over time,” said Matthew Lister, a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana....

It’s not merely a scientific curiosity either: A more complete understanding of magnetic reconnection could enable insights into nuclear fusion and provide better predictions of particle storms from the Sun that can affect Earth-orbiting technology. Now, scientists with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS, think they’ve figured it out. The researchers have developed a theory that explains how the most explosive type of magnetic reconnection – called fast reconnection – occurs and why it happens at a consistent speed....

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured a new image of Jupiter this past week. During Earth-Trojan asteroid search operations, the PolyCam imager aboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter (center) and three of its moons, Callisto (left), Io, and Ganymede. The image, which shows the bands of Jupiter, was taken at 3:34 a.m. EST, on February 12, when the spacecraft was 76 million miles (122 million kilometers) from Earth and 418 million miles (673 million kilometers) from Jupiter....

An oblong asteroid, more than three times as long as it is wide, safely flew past Earth on February 3 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers, or a little under five times the distance between the Moon and Earth). While there was no risk of the asteroid – called 2011 AG5 – impacting our planet, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California closely tracked the object, making invaluable observations to help determine its size, rotation, surface details, and, most notably, shape....

By definition, dwarf galaxies contain stars with a total mass less than 3 billion Suns — or about 20 times less than the Milky Way. Astronomers have long suspected that dwarf galaxies merge, particularly in the relatively early Universe, in order to grow into the larger galaxies seen today. However, current technology cannot observe the first generation of dwarf galaxy mergers because they are extraordinarily faint at their great distances....

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infection, is of zoonotic origin—it jumped from a non-human animal to humans. Previous research has shown that Chinese Horseshoe bats are a host of numerous SARS-like viruses and tolerate these viruses without extreme symptoms. Identifying other animals that have adapted tolerance mechanisms to coronaviruses is important for awareness of potential viral reservoirs that can spread new pathogens to humans. In the new research, King and Singh performed an evolutionary analysis, across mammalian species, of the ACE2 receptors, used by SARS viruses to gain entry into mammalian cells....