In January, local authorities arrested a 36-year-old man named Aditya Singh after he had spent three months living at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. It wasn’t until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up....

A new study investigates how an extinct, carnivorous marsupial relative with canines so large they extended across the top of its skull could hunt effectively despite having wide-set eyes, like a cow or a horse. The skulls of carnivores typically have forward-facing eye sockets, or orbits, which helps enable stereoscopic (3D) vision, a useful adaptation for judging the position of prey before pouncing. Scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and the Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología, y Ciencias Ambientales in Mendoza, Argentina, studied whether the “marsupial sabertooth” Thylacosmilus atrox could see in 3D at all....

A team of scientists from six European countries reported today they have finalized a thirty years long investigation of a hypergiant star that crossed the Yellow Evolutionary Void. In that period the star’s surface temperature quickly rose from five to eight thousand degrees. With this discovery a crucial ‘missing link’ in the evolution of hypergiant stars has been found. The hypergiants are the most luminous stars currently known in the Universe....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers. The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull)....

Arp-Madore 417-391 is one such galactic collision. It is located approximately 670 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side. Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture this scene — the instrument is optimized to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient Universe....

Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space; they swarm together, gathered up by the unyielding hand of gravity, to form groups and clusters. The Milky Way is a member of the Local Group, which is part of the Virgo Cluster, which in turn is part of the 100,000-galaxy-strong Laniakea Supercluster. The galaxy cluster seen in this image is known as SDSS J0333+0651. Clusters such as this can help astronomers understand the distant — and therefore early — Universe....

When globular clusters form, they tend to be somewhat denser towards the center. The more massive the cluster, the denser the center is likely to be. With a mass with almost a million times that of the Sun, Messier 62 is one of the densest of them all. With so many stars at the center, interactions and mergers occur regularly. Huge stars form and run out of fuel quickly, exploding violently and their remains collapse to form white dwarfs, neutron stars, and even black holes!...

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study. Expected to launch in 2018, the JWST is designed to see in infrared wavelengths, which is exceedingly useful for observing distant objects....

This newly released Hubble image shows Arp 230, which also known as IC 51. Arp 230 is a galaxy of an uncommon or peculiar shape, and is therefore part of the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies produced by Halton Arp. Its irregular shape is thought to be the result of a violent collision with another galaxy sometime in the past. The collision could also be held responsible for the formation of the galaxy’s polar ring....

Discovered in March 1786 and located in the constellation of Virgo, NGC 4700 is classified as a barred spiral galaxy and is about 50 million light-years away from us. The galaxy NGC 4700 bears the signs of the vigorous birth of many new stars in this image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The many bright, pinkish clouds in NGC 4700 are known as H II regions, where intense ultraviolet light from hot young stars is causing nearby hydrogen gas to glow....

FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are regions of gas that are sufficiently dense that they photoevaporate less easily than the less compact gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionized and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation — typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet light. EGGs were only identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the Pillars of Creation (see image below), which were captured by Hubble in iconic images released in 1995....

At a media briefing on December 9, 2019. at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, scientists released new time series of images of Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica using data from satellites including the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat missions. One series of images tells illustrates the dramatic changes of Alaska’s glaciers and could warn of future retreat of the Hubbard Glacier. Over Greenland, different satellite records show a speed-up of glacial retreat starting in 2000, as well as meltwater ponds spreading to higher elevations in the last decade, which could potentially speed up ice flow....

Scientists find the overall risk to be 1 in 1,000 if no protective measures are taken, and the risk falls lower, to 1 in 3,333 or less, with proper use of personal protective equipment or if scientists test negative for COVID-19 before beginning research. The research specifically looked at the potential transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which is the type of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, from people to bats. Scientists did not examine potential transmission from bats to people....

The research, published in Nature Geoscience, also showed wide regional variation, with parts of Scandinavia, the USA, Canada, and Russia having a particularly high frequency of these disturbances. Mapping the causes of tree death is important because it helps scientists understand how the world’s carbon stocks – stored in forests – are affected by these disturbances and the frequency with which they occur. Researchers in the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (BIFoR) at the University of Birmingham studied satellite-based observations of forest lost between 2000 and 2014, and assessed the typical time interval between large disturbance events across the world’s forests....

The study was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Quantum information science is concerned with the manipulation of the quantum version of information bits (called qubits). When people talk about materials for quantum information processing, they usually think of those manufactured using the most cutting-edge technologies and operating at very cold temperatures (below a few Kelvin), not the “warm and messy” materials synthesized in solution by chemists. Recent years have witnessed the discovery of isolated defects in solid-state materials (such as NV centers) that have made possible room-temperature spin-qubit manipulation, but scaled-up production of these “point defects” will eventually become a challenge....

With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light. This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer – the corona. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes....

People suffering from COVID-19 could have several different SARS-CoV-2 variants hidden away from the immune system in different parts of the body, finds new research published in the journal Nature Communications by an international team of scientists. The study’s authors say that this may make complete clearance of the virus from the body of an infected person, by their own antibodies, or by therapeutic antibody treatments, much more difficult. COVID-19 continues to sweep the globe causing hospitalizations and deaths, damaging communities and economies worldwide....

The possibility may exist through research conducted at Penn State University, released today (November 18, 2019) in Nature Sustainability. “Our team has developed a robust bio-inspired, liquid, sludge- and bacteria-repellent coating that can essentially make a toilet self-cleaning,” said Tak-Sing Wong, Wormley Early Career Professor of Engineering and associate professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering. In the Wong Laboratory for Nature Inspired Engineering, housed within the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Research Institute, researchers have developed a method that dramatically reduces the amount of water needed to flush a conventional toilet, which usually requires 6 liters....

Standard approaches for robotic navigation involve mapping an area ahead of time, then using algorithms to guide a robot toward a specific goal or GPS coordinate on the map. While this approach might make sense for exploring specific environments, such as the layout of a particular building or planned obstacle course, it can become unwieldy in the context of last-mile delivery. Imagine, for instance, having to map in advance every single neighborhood within a robot’s delivery zone, including the configuration of each house within that neighborhood along with the specific coordinates of each house’s front door....

In clusters of galaxies, there is a fraction of stars that wander off into intergalactic space because they are pulled out by huge tidal forces generated between the galaxies in the cluster. The light emitted by these stars is called the intracluster light (ICL) and is extremely faint. Its brightness is less than 1% of the brightness of the darkest sky we can observe from Earth. This is one reason why images taken from space are very valuable for analyzing it....