In a paper published in the February issue of Nature Scientific Reports, Villalobos collaborated with a team comprised mainly of Argentinian researchers and led by Agustin Sáez and Pedro Negri, co-founders of a start-up company called BeeFlow. Their series of field experiments examined the true “independence” of a new self-fertilizing almond variety called ‘Independence.’ A multi-million dollar business Eighty percent of the world’s almonds are produced in California. The crop requires the pollination services of two million colonies of honey bees during the flowering season, which growers rent from beekeepers....

There are millions of people who face the loss of their eyesight from degenerative eye diseases. The genetic disorder retinitis pigmentosa alone affects 1 in 4,000 people worldwide. Today, there is technology available to offer partial eyesight to people with that syndrome. The Argus II, the world’s first retinal prosthesis, reproduces some functions of a part of the eye essential to vision, to allow users to perceive movement and shapes....

The new method increased true bomb crater detection by more than 160 percent over standard methods. The model, combined with declassified U.S. military records, suggests that 44 to 50 percent of the bombs in the area studied may remain unexploded. As of now, attempts to find and safely remove unexploded bombs and landmines – called demining – have not been as effective as needed in Cambodia, said Erin Lin, assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University....

The arm needs to move several times in order to capture a full selfie. Because InSight’s dusty solar panels are producing less power, the team will soon put the lander’s robotic arm in its resting position (called the “retirement pose”) for the last time in May of 2022. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the InSight mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama....

“An essential part of the clinical imaging pipeline is image reconstruction, which transforms the raw data coming off the scanner into images for radiologists to evaluate,” says Bo Zhu, Ph.D., a research fellow in the MGH Martinos Center and first author of the Nature paper. “The conventional approach to image reconstruction uses a chain of handcrafted signal processing modules that require expert manual parameter tuning and often are unable to handle imperfections of the raw data, such as noise....

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out gravitational waves — ripples in space and time that can be detected with extremely sensitive instruments on Earth. Since black holes and black hole mergers are completely dark, these events are invisible to telescopes and other light-detecting instruments used by astronomers. However, theorists have come up with ideas about how a black hole merger could produce a light signal by causing nearby material to radiate....

This spectacular image — the second installment in ESO’s R Aquarii Week — shows intimate details of the dramatic stellar duo making up the binary star R Aquarii. Though most binary stars are bound in a graceful waltz by gravity, the relationship between the stars of R Aquarii is far less serene. Despite its diminutive size, the smaller of the two stars in this pair is steadily stripping material from its dying companion — a red giant....

An international team of astronomers pooled data from U.S. space agency NASA’s Kepler and the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space telescopes, as well as ground-based telescopes in the U.S. Alongside John Livingston, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, the team’s combined resources led to the confirmed existence of these 44 exoplanets and described various details about them. A portion of the findings yield some surprising characteristics: “For example, four of the planets orbit their host stars in less than 24 hours,” says Livingston....

About fifteen years ago, Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics (CfA) astronomers and others realized that in planetary systems with multiple planets, the periodic gravitational tug of one planet on another will alter their orbital parameters. Although the transit method cannot directly measure exoplanet masses, it can detect these orbital variations and these can be modeled to infer masses. Kepler has identified hundreds of exoplanet systems with transit-timing variations, and dozens have been successfully modeled....

Throughout our universe, tucked inside galaxies far, far away, giant black holes are pairing up and merging. As the massive bodies dance around each other in close embraces, they send out gravitational waves that ripple space and time themselves, even as the waves pass right through our planet Earth. Scientists know these waves, predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, exist but have yet to directly detect one. In the race to catch the waves, one strategy — called pulsar-timing arrays — has reached a milestone not through detecting any gravitational waves, but in revealing new information about the frequency and strength of black hole mergers....

Black holes are famous for their muscle: an intense gravitational pull known to gobble up entire stars and launch streams of matter into space at almost the speed of light. It turns out the reality may not live up to the hype. In a paper published today in the journal Science, University of Florida scientists have discovered these tears in the fabric of the universe have significantly weaker magnetic fields than previously thought....

The black hole is measured to be about 800 million times as massive as our sun — a Goliath by modern-day standards and a relative anomaly in the early universe. “This is the only object we have observed from this era,” says Robert Simcoe, the Francis L. Friedman Professor of Physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “It has an extremely high mass, and yet the universe is so young that this thing shouldn’t exist....

CfA astronomers Rafael Martinez-Galarz and Howard Smith and their two colleagues have developed a new statistical analysis technique to address the problem of confused SEDs in clustered environments. Using the highest spatial resolution images for each region, the team identifies the distinguishable stars (at least this many are in the cluster) and their emission at those wavelengths. They combine a Bayesian statistical approach with a large grid of modeled young stellar SEDs to determine the most probable continuation of each individual SED into the blended, longer-wavelength bands and thus lead to the determination of the most likely value of each star’s mass, age, and environmental parameters....

Something similar happens to sound waves when a source of sound moves relative to an observer. This effect is called the ‘Doppler effect’ after Christian Andreas Doppler, an Austrian mathematician who discovered that the frequency of sound waves changes if the source of sound and the observer are moving relative to each other. If the two are approaching, then the frequency heard by the observer is higher; if they move away from each other, the frequency heard is lower....

Dark matter makes up most of the mass of the Universe, yet it remains elusive. Depending on its properties, it can be densely concentrated at the centers of galaxies, or more smoothly distributed over larger scales. By comparing the distribution of dark matter in galaxies with detailed models, researchers can test or rule out different dark matter candidates. The tightest constraints on dark matter come from the very smallest galaxies in the Universe, “dwarf galaxies”....

In a new study of patients with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease that results in poor vision, Keck School of Medicine of USC researchers found that adapted augmented reality (AR) glasses can improve patients’ mobility by 50% and grasp performance by 70%. “Current wearable low vision technologies using virtual reality are limited and can be difficult to use or require patients to undergo extensive training,” said Mark Humayun, MD, PhD, director of the USC Dr....

The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was used in the research, which was recently published in Nature Partner Journals Aging. Drosophila melanogaster is a useful model organism because it shares cellular and developmental mechanisms with humans and other animals. A team led by Jaga Giebultowicz, a scientist at the OSU College of Science who specializes in biological clocks, studied the survival rate of flies maintained in darkness and then transferred to an environment of continual blue light from light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, at increasingly older ages....

At the solstice, the Sun’s path appears farthest north or south, depending on which half of the planet you are on. Seasons change on Earth because the planet is slightly tilted on its axis as it travels around the Sun. Earth’s axis may be imagined as an imaginary pole going right through the center of our planet from “top” to “bottom.” Earth spins around this pole, making one complete turn each day....

A frustrating flaw in a set of custom crystals for an instrument at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory inspired a solution for an important scientific challenge: how to accurately measure the colors of each individual pulse from a powerful X-ray laser. The ultra-thin silicon crystals were part of an effort to split X-ray laser pulses from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source so they could be shared by two separate experiments, said Yiping Feng, a staff scientist in the X-ray Science Research and Development Division at SLAC....

None of the current trials are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospitalizations, intensive care use, or deaths. Vaccines are being hailed as the solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the vaccine trials currently underway are not designed to tell us if they will save lives, reports Peter Doshi, Associate Editor at The BMJ today. Several COVID-19 vaccine trials are now in their most advanced (phase 3) stage, but what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”?...