Studies of the Higgs particle – discovered at CERN in 2012 and responsible for giving mass to all particles – have suggested that the production of Higgs particles during the accelerating expansion of the very early universe (inflation) should have led to instability and collapse. Scientists have been trying to find out why this didn’t happen, leading to theories that there must be some new physics that will help explain the origins of the universe that has not yet been discovered....

Editor’s Note: Honest errors such as this are part of the scientific process, especially on the frontiers of discovery. To quote Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes, an intriguing source has been discovered in the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Previously thought to be part of the Milky Way’s neighbor galaxy, the new research shows this source is actually a very distant object 2....

Study published in E Clinical Medicine shows drug has no benefit, and researcher reflects on year of hydroxychloroquine madness. A year ago, infectious disease doctor Christine Johnston was leading a study on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of people with COVID-19. The trial launched at the end of March, when the disease was putting the world on pause and killing thousands. Hydroxychloroquine showed promise in studies done in test tubes rather than in animals or humans....

These quantum systems mimic natural processes and offer scientists the opportunity to create innovative and unique materials with potential applications in medicine, computer electronics, and other industries. Although full-scale quantum computers are still far in the future, researchers are currently conducting experiments with quantum simulators, which are specially designed to solve specific problems, such as efficiently simulating high-temperature superconductors and other quantum materials. These machines also have the potential to solve complex optimization problems, such as preventing collisions in autonomous vehicle routing....

Matthew Caplan, a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, and his colleagues from Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology, successfully ran the largest computer simulations ever conducted of neutron star crusts, becoming the first to describe how these break. “The strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom of the crust, is relevant to a large number of astrophysics problems, but isn’t well understood,” says Caplan. Neutron stars are born after supernovas, an implosion that compresses an object the size of the sun to about the size of Montreal, making them “a hundred trillion times denser than anything on earth....

While the pastel tones and fine texture of this image may bring to mind brush strokes on an artist’s canvas, they are in fact a visualization of data from ESA’s Planck satellite. The image portrays the interaction between interstellar dust in the Milky Way and the structure of our Galaxy’s magnetic field. Between 2009 and 2013, Planck scanned the sky to detect the most ancient light in the history of the Universe – the cosmic microwave background....

But any single month, season, or even year, is just a snapshot in time. The long view is more telling, and it is troubling. Forty years of satellite data show that 2020 was just the latest in a decades-long decline of Arctic sea ice. In a review of scientific literature, polar scientists Julienne Stroeve and Dirk Notz outlined some of these changes: In addition to shrinking ice cover, melting seasons are getting longer and sea ice is losing its longevity....

The social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitment as crucial drivers of segregation. Researchers at Linköping University and ESADE, Ramon Llull University now show that this view must be revised. In their Science Advances article, they call attention to a previously unidentified factor, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which shows that network-based recruitment can reduce rather than increase segregation levels. The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is an important source of socio-economic inequalities....

Eyespots Many fish, butterflies, moths, praying mantids, and beetles have paired circular markings on their bodies that look like eyes. Eyespots may divert a predator’s attention away from vital body parts of a target (a prey is much more likely to survive a bite to its tail than its head). Additionally, eyespots have the power to intimidate and stop predators in their tracks. One theory is that predators confuse eyespots with the eyes of their own predators....

The results of NASA’s DART planetary defense test … Astronauts return safely from the space station … And more new imagery from the Webb Space Telescope … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA! Data Confirms DART Impact Changed Asteroid’s Motion Data from the intentional impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft with asteroid Dimorphos confirm that … In fact, this first-ever planetary defense test altered Dimorphos’ orbit around a larger asteroid by 32 minutes, which far exceeded expectations....

When it calved, A-68 was about twice the size of Luxembourg, larger than Delaware, and one of the largest icebergs on record, changing the outline of the Antarctic Peninsula forever. Despite its size, however, it is remarkably thin, just a couple of hundred meters thick. Over the last three years, satellite missions such as Copernicus Sentinel-1 have been used to track the berg as it drifted in the Southern Ocean....

Every six seconds, for millions of years, comets have been colliding with one another near a star in the constellation Cetus called 49 CETI, which is visible to the naked eye. Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered hundreds of dusty disks around stars, but only two — 49 CETI is one — have been found that also have large amounts of gas orbiting them. Young stars, about a million years old, have a disk of both dust and gas orbiting them, but the gas tends to dissipate within a few million years and almost always within about 10 million years....

These telescopes were commissioned by the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a surveillance agency that needed the telescope to peer at Earth. The NRO bequeathed the telescopes to NASA because they were no longer needed. A science-definition team will embark to assess if these telescopes can be used in some fashion. They will announce their findings by April 2013 to the NASA administrator Charles Bolden. The initial idea is to outfit them to study dark energy, the phenomenon thought to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe....

During the visit to Ames, Secretary Kerry learned about ways the NFAC can support industry as they develop new wind turbine technologies and other climate-related innovations. The NASA Earth Exchange, a big-data collaborative project that uses the agency’s supercomputers at Ames, was also discussed, along with the center’s expertise in using aircraft – both crewed and uncrewed – to study and monitor the climate with Earth-observation instruments, many built at Ames or with Silicon Valley industry partners....

What has puzzled scientists is why water vapor appears to be missing from the toasty worlds’ atmospheres, when it is abundant in similar but slightly cooler planets. Observations of ultrahot Jupiters by NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, combined with computer simulations, have served as a springboard for a new theoretical study that may have solved this mystery. According to the new study, ultrahot Jupiters do in fact possess the ingredients for water (hydrogen and oxygen atoms)....

Sarah Nyquist got her first introduction to biology during high school, when she took an online MIT course taught by genomics pioneer Eric Lander. Initially unsure what to expect, she quickly discovered biology to be her favorite subject. She began experimenting with anything she could find, beginning with an old PCR machine and some dining hall vegetables. Nyquist entered college as a biology major but soon gravitated toward the more hands-on style of the coursework in her computer science classes....

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is the leading modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and premature death worldwide. And key to treating patients with conditions ranging from chest pain to stroke is understanding the intricacies of how the cells around arteries and other blood vessels work to control blood pressure. While the importance of metals like potassium and calcium in this process are known, a new discovery about a critical and underappreciated role of another metal — zinc — offers a potential new pathway for therapies to treat hypertension....

How biological communities are maintained is a big question in ecology. While current studies suggest community stability can be influenced by species diversity and interactions, these ideas have almost never been tested in natural ecosystems. “Previous research focused on issues such as the birth-death process, like when a predator eats prey, and inside a somewhat controlled environment,” explains lead author Masayuki Ushio. “Even then, it is challenging to measure the rapidly changing interactions of multiple species in nature....

Researchers working at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used powerful X-rays to help decipher how certain natural antibiotics defy a longstanding set of chemical rules – a mechanism that has baffled organic chemists for decades. Their result, reported in the journal Nature, details how five carbon atoms and one oxygen atom in the structure of lasalocid, a natural antibiotic produced by bacteria in soil, can link into a six-membered ring through an energetically unfavorable chemical reaction....

University of Tokyo researchers have announced a new approach for electrical cooling without the need for moving parts. By applying a bias voltage to quantum wells made of the semiconductor aluminum gallium arsenide, electrons can be made to shed some of their heat in a process called “evaporative cooling.” Devices based on this principle may be added to electronic circuit boards using conventional semiconductor fabrication methods to help smartphones and laptops avoid performance issues caused by high temperatures....