In the name of science, engineers will try to break a structural test article of the tank — on purpose. The liquid oxygen tank’s structure is identical to the tank that is part of the SLS core stage, which will provide power to help launch the Artemis missions to the Moon. The tank is enclosed in a cage-like structure that is part of the test stand. Hydraulic systems will apply millions of pounds of force to push, pull and bend the liquid oxygen tank test article to see just how much pressure the tank can take....

Tips on Dealing With the Stress of a Divisive Election The results of the presidential election will pack an emotional punch for those whose candidate didn’t win. Northwestern University mental health experts Dr. Aderonke Pederson, a psychiatrist, and Alexandra Solomon, a psychologist, offered some tips for coping with your strong emotions as the results come in. It is important to take time to process what you are feeling, they said....

A new ScienceCast video explains how “meteor smoke” seeds noctilucent clouds. Credit: [email protected] Anyone who’s ever seen a noctilucent cloud or “NLC” would agree: They look alien. The electric-blue ripples and pale tendrils of NLCs reaching across the night sky resemble something from another world. Researchers say that’s not far off. A key ingredient for the mysterious clouds comes from outer space. “We’ve detected bits of ‘meteor smoke’ embedded in noctilucent clouds,” reports James Russell of Hampton University, principal investigator of NASA’s AIM mission to study the phenomenon....

Abundant streaks of light have raced across the night sky this week during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. The light show happens every year in mid- to late-August when Earth’s orbit intersects with the trail of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. While the Perseids and other major showers (Geminids, Orionids, and Leonids) draw the most attention, meteors are visible any time of the year, albeit at a slower rate....

Bacteria found in the rumen, one of the compartments that make up the cow stomach, can break down plastics, representing an eco-friendly way to reduce litter. Plastic is notoriously hard to break down, but researchers in Austria have found that bacteria from a cow’s rumen — one of the four compartments of its stomach — can digest certain types of the ubiquitous material, representing a sustainable way to reduce plastic litter....

The microbiota in pregnant women’s gut change as their pregnancy advances, resembling more like those of people who might develop diabetes. These changes, while not damaging maternal health, correspond with increases in blood glucose and fat deposits thought to help the nourishment of the developing child. This is the first time that scientists have tracked the gut microbiome during pregnancy. The team was led by Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, published their findings in the journal Cell....

Materials scientist explores why some household cleaners could harm the protective coating on a smartphone screen. To help curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, public health experts have emphasized the importance of frequent hand washing, and the need for cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces. But what about our smartphones and other personal electronic devices that we touch throughout the day? Many smartphone manufacturers advise against using cleaning products or disinfectants to clean touchscreens, although some have updated their advice....

After three years of hard work, the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team took first place at the 2021 American Solar Challenge (ASC) on August 7 in the Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) category. During the five-day race, their solar car, Nimbus — designed and built entirely by students — beat eight other SOVs from schools across the country, traversing 1,109 miles and maintaining an average speed of 38.4 miles per hour....

One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world....

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is now on its seventh day into the Artemis I mission, a flight test around the Moon, paving the way for astronauts to fly on future missions. On November 22, at 12:02 a.m. CST, Orion completed the fifth outbound trajectory correction by firing the European service module’s auxiliary engines for 5.9 seconds. This changed Orion’s velocity by 3.2 feet per second (2.2 mph or 3.5 km/h). The R-4D-11 auxiliary engines are a variant of the flight-proven R-4D engine, which was originally developed for the Apollo program and was employed on every mission to the Moon....

Using advanced robotic tooling and an innovative process called friction stir welding, technicians complete the weld that joins the upper and lower cones of the LVSA into one structure. The next step in the manufacturing process is the installation of the pneumatically actuated frangible joint, which sits atop the LVSA and helps separate the core stage and LVSA from the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) during flight. In addition to connecting the 212-foot-tall core stage to the ICPS, the stage adapter protects avionics and electrical devices in the ICPS from extreme vibration and acoustic conditions during launch and ascent....

Analyzing data from NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm satellites, scientists found that in the hours after the eruption, hurricane-speed winds and unusual electric currents formed in the ionosphere – Earth’s electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of space. “The volcano created one of the largest disturbances in space we’ve seen in the modern era,” said Brian Harding, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on a new paper discussing the findings....

NASA’s flying saucer-shaped test vehicle is ready to take to the skies from the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, for its first engineering shakeout flight. The first launch opportunity for the test vehicle is June 3, when the launch window opens at 8:30 a.m. HST. The test will be carried live on NASA TV and streamed on the Web. The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will gather data about landing heavy payloads on Mars and other planetary surfaces....

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will travel with the Perseverance rover through 314 million miles (505 million kilometers) of interplanetary space to get to Mars. But for the team working on the first experimental flight test on another planet, engineering the final 5 inches (13 centimeters) of the journey has been among the most challenging of all. To safely navigate those 5 inches — the distance Ingenuity will travel from where it’s stowed on the rover to the surface of Mars — they came up with the ingenious Mars Helicopter Delivery System....

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft has spotted a never-before-seen comet – its first such discovery since coming out of hibernation late last year. “We are so pleased to have discovered this frozen visitor from the outermost reaches of our solar system,” said Amy Mainzer, the mission’s principal investigator from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This comet is a weirdo – it is in a retrograde orbit, meaning that it orbits the sun in the opposite sense from Earth and the other planets....

ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory celebrates twenty years of space-based science. After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is still going strong. Originally launched in 1995 to study the sun and its influence out to the very edges of the solar system, SOHO revolutionized this field of science, known as heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers. SOHO also found an unexpected role as the greatest comet hunter of all time—reaching 3,000 comet discoveries in September 2015....

NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now.” Suomi NPP is managed by NASA and NOAA.

In a newly published study, neurobiologists demonstrate the ability to create specific memories by directly altering brain cells in the cerebral cortex. Irvine, California — By studying how memories are made, UC Irvine neurobiologists created new, specific memories by direct manipulation of the brain, which could prove key to understanding and potentially resolving learning and memory disorders. Research led by senior author Norman M. Weinberger, a research professor of neurobiology & behavior at UC Irvine, and colleagues has shown that specific memories can be made by directly altering brain cells in the cerebral cortex, which produces the predicted specific memory....

The researchers showed that they could use this method, known as SHIELD, to trace the connections between neurons in a part of the brain that helps control movement and other neurons throughout the brain. “Using our technique, for the first time, we were able to map the connectivity of these neurons at single-cell resolution,” says Kwanghun Chung, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory....

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia satellite first noticed the supernova, known as SN 2016iet, on November 14, 2016. Three years of intensive follow-up observations with a variety of telescopes, including the Gemini North telescope and its Multi-Object Spectrograph on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, the CfA | Harvard & Smithsonian’s MMT Observatory located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, AZ, and the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, provided crucial perspectives on the object’s distance and composition....