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December 2022 and January 2023 brought winter weather whiplash to the central and eastern United States. In late December, many Americans reached for cold-weather gear as a blast of unusually cold Arctic air poured south and fueled a travel nightmare around Christmas. In Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, a “bomb cyclone” formed along the cold front bearing powerful winds and whiteout conditions. In certain parts of upstate New York and Canada, lake effect snow supercharged the storm, with more than 50 inches (125 centimeters) falling in Buffalo over a five-day period....

Our planet has been baking under the sun this summer as temperatures reached the hottest ever recorded and heat waves spread across the globe. While the climate continues to warm, scientists expect the frequency and intensity of heat waves to increase. However, a commonly overlooked aspect is the spatial size of heat waves, despite its important implications. For the first time, in a new study, scientists funded in part by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Climate Observations and Monitoring Program examined this aspect under two different scenarios....

Nature uses 20 canonical amino acids as building blocks to make proteins, combining their sequences to create complex molecules that perform biological functions. But what happens with the sequences not selected by nature? And what possibilities lie in constructing entirely new sequences to make novel, or de novo, proteins bearing little resemblance to anything in nature? That’s the terrain where Michael Hecht, professor of chemistry, works with his research group....

“Algae hold great potential as a source of renewable fuel due to their ability to produce refinery-compatible diesel and jet fuel precursors,” said Amanda Barry of Los Alamos’s Bioenergy and Biome Sciences group, lead author on the study, out today in the journal Algal Research. “Identifying algae strains that can use plant substrates, such as switchgrass and corn stover (the part of the plant left in a field after harvest) to grow faster and with more lipids suggests that waste plant material can be used to increase the productivity of algae during cultivation for biofuels or bioproducts....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science¹. The absolute temperature scale dates back to Lord Kelvin, who created it in the mid-1800s. It was designed in a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Later, physicists discovered that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to a theoretical state in which particles have no energy, and higher temperatures correspond to higher than average energies....

The atoms that make up ordinary matter fall down, so do antimatter atoms fall up? Do they experience gravity the same way as ordinary atoms, or is there such a thing as antigravity? These questions have long intrigued physicists, says Joel Fajans of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), because “in the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we’d have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works....

Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a “supercharged,” strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low. The findings, which defy expectations and theory, could help scientists deliberately induce the high levels of damage needed to study extreme states of matter or ward off damage in samples they’re trying to image....

To combat a pandemic, science needs to move quickly. With safe and effective vaccines now widely available and a handful of promising COVID-19 treatments coming soon, there’s no doubt that many aspects of biological research have been successfully accelerated in the past two years. Now, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Heidelberg University in Germany have cranked up the speed of imaging infected cells using soft X-ray tomography, a microscopic imaging technique that can generate incredibly detailed, three-dimensional scans....

For the first time, dark galaxies — an early phase of galaxy formation, predicted by theory but unobserved until now — may have been spotted. These objects are essentially gas-rich galaxies without stars. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, an international team thinks they have detected these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar. Dark galaxies are small, gas-rich galaxies in the early Universe that are very inefficient at forming stars....

Activity in the parietal cortex, an area of the brain involved in awareness of self and others as well as attention processing, seems to be a common element among individuals who have experienced a variety of spiritual experiences, according to a study published online on May 29 in the journal Cerebral Cortex. “Spiritual experiences are robust states that may have profound impacts on people’s lives,” said Marc Potenza, professor of psychiatry, of the Yale Child Study Center, and of neuroscience....

As planets age, they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age – a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot. Researchers from the University of Exeter and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon found that layers of gas, generated by physical instability deep within the giant planet, prevent heat from escaping and have resulted in Saturn failing to cool down at the expected rate....

Ichthyornis dispar holds a key position in the evolutionary trail that leads from dinosaurian species to today’s avians. It lived nearly 100 million years ago in North America, looked something like a toothy seabird, and drew the attention of such famous naturalists as Yale’s O.C. Marsh (who first named and described it) and Charles Darwin. Yet despite the existence of partial specimens of Ichthyornis dispar, there has been no significant new skull material beyond the fragmentary remains first found in the 1870s....

However, new research suggests that gratitude from a partner can also have benefits for couples, such as increased relationship satisfaction and commitment, as well as protection against the negative effects of poor communication and financial stress. Individuals who feel appreciated by their partners have better-functioning relationships that are more resilient to internal and external stressors, both in the moment when the appreciation is expressed and over the long term, said researcher Allen W....

They were rewarded with the first confirmed visual sighting of a jet of material that was still streaming out from merged star exactly 110 days after that initial cataclysmic merger event was first observed. Their observations confirm a key prediction about the aftermath of neutron star mergers. The binary neutron star merger GW170817 occurred 130 million light-years away in a galaxy named NGC 4993. It was detected in August 2017 by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Adv-LIGO), and by Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) observations, and then became the first ever neutron star merger to be observed and confirmed by visual astronomy....

Black widow spiders have earned a fearsome reputation for their venomous bite. But in parts of the southern United States these spiders have much to fear themselves—from spider relatives who really don’t like their company. In the past couple decades, researchers have noticed black widow spiders commonly being displaced by the brown widow, a fellow species in the same genus, Latrodectus. But new research suggests this isn’t a just simple case of one species winning the competition for food or habitat....

In a first-of-its-kind clinical report, retina specialists at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai (NYEE) have shown that severe vision loss from a self-prescribed high dose of over-the-counter niacin is linked to injury of a specific cell type in a patient’s eye. The experts report that discontinuing the vitamin led to the reversal of the condition and have published their findings in the fall issue of Journal of VitreoRetinal Diseases....

The cause of the mystery illness among US and Canadian diplomats in Havana is most likely to be emotional trauma and fear according to a leading sociologist and an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Concussion-like symptoms, including headaches, dizziness, nausea, and fatigue, were initially reported among dozens of US embassy staff between late 2016 and June 2018. They were described by the US State Department as ‘medically confirmed symptoms’ and government physicians suspected the involvement of a sonic device....

A simple electrocardiogram (ECG) can pinpoint hospitalized COVID-19 patients at high risk of death who might need intensive management. That’s the finding of a study presented at EHRA 2022, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Specifically, the research showed that a prolonged QT interval on the ECG was an independent risk factor for both myocardial injury and one-year mortality. “An ECG is an inexpensive, non-invasive, easily attainable and widely available test applied in nearly all hospitalized patients,” said lead author Dr....

The solar chromosphere is the region between the Sun’s surface and its hot, million-degree corona. Within this complex interface zone, only a few thousand kilometers deep, the density of the gas drops by a factor of about one million and the temperature increases from about five thousand to one million kelvin. Almost all of the mechanical energy that drives solar activity is converted into heat and radiation within this interface....

Measurements taken by the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are providing important new insights from some of the farthest reaches of space ever explored. In a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal on November 11, 2109, a team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) shows how the solar wind — the supersonic stream of charged particles blown out by the Sun — evolves at increasing distances from the Sun....