For NASA and its dozens of missions, data pour in every day like rushing rivers. Spacecraft monitor everything from our home planet to faraway galaxies, beaming back images and information to Earth. All those digital records need to be stored, indexed and processed so that spacecraft engineers, scientists and people across the globe can use the data to understand Earth and the universe beyond. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, mission planners and software engineers are coming up with new strategies for managing the ever-increasing flow of such large and complex data streams, referred to in the information technology community as “big data....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, exploring the universe near and far. The science instruments have returned to full operation, following recovery from a computer anomaly that suspended the telescope’s observations for more than a month. Science observations restarted the afternoon of Saturday, July 17. The telescope’s targets this past weekend included the unusual galaxies shown in the images below. “I’m thrilled to see that Hubble has its eye back on the universe, once again capturing the kind of images that have intrigued and inspired us for decades,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson....

This striking cosmic whirl is the center of galaxy NGC 524, as seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy is located in the constellation of Pisces, some 90 million light-years from Earth. NGC 524 is a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies are believed to be an intermediate state in galactic evolution — they are neither elliptical nor spiral. Spirals are middle-aged galaxies with vast, pin wheeling arms that contain millions of stars....

The research assessed “fecundability,” or the monthly likelihood of becoming pregnant, among couples seeking to conceive without the use of fertility treatments. A measure of the socioeconomic resources of a neighborhood, the “area deprivation index” score was used by researchers to compare neighborhoods. They discovered that even within a relatively affluent, highly educated study population, those residing in more deprived areas had lower fecundability rates than those living in neighborhoods with more opportunities....

Tropical Storm Elsa continues its march up the eastern coast of the United States. On July 8, 2021, National Weather Service forecasters warned of heavy rain, flash flooding, and gusty winds from the Carolinas to the Maine coast and Canadian Maritimes through the weekend. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-20 satellite acquired this image of Tropical Storm Elsa around 3 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 8, 2021....

Snakeheads eat native species of fish, frogs, and crayfish, destroying the food web in some habitats. They can survive on land for up to 20 hours if conditions are moist. In a new study published on October 21, 2019, in the peer-reviewed journal Integrative Organismal Biology, Wake Forest researcher Noah Bressman reported for the first time the water conditions that could drive snakeheads onto land. Wake Forest researcher Noah Bressman observed the fish moving in a way no other amphibious fish do: It makes near-simultaneous rowing movements with its pectoral fins while wriggling its axial fin back and forth....

A University of Houston chemist is exploring the link between copper protein molecules in brain cells and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. “Scientists have studied Alzheimer’s disease for 100 years and still no one knows the cause,” said assistant professor of chemistry Tai-Yen Chen, who will use his $1.9 million award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to advance his theory that the balance of copper protein within a single cell may be a culprit....

For years, glaciologists have been tracking a number of cracks in the Brunt Ice Shelf, which borders the Coats Land coast in the Weddell Sea sector of Antarctica. The lengthening of two main cracks in the ice shelf, separated only by a few kilometers, has been closely monitored by satellite imagery. Chasm 1, the large crack running northwards from the southernmost part of Brunt, has been set in place for more than 25 years, while the Halloween crack was first spotted on October 31, 2016....

The world is currently in a race to develop large-scale quantum computers that could vastly outperform classical computers in certain areas. However, these efforts have been hindered by a number of factors, including in particular the problem of decoherence, or noise generated in the qubits. This problem becomes more serious with the number of qubits, hampering scaling up. In order to achieve a large-scale computer that could be used for useful applications, it is believed that a two-qubit gate fidelity of at least 99 percent to implement the surface code for error correction is required....

New West Health-Gallup survey finds new president faces a frustrated public reeling from pandemic, economic disruption and high healthcare costs. In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden vowed that “help is on the way” to a nation grappling with a pandemic that has already claimed over 420,000 lives and counting. However, despite the promise of a better future, a new survey from West Health and Gallup finds Americans remain largely skeptical that issues as varied as managing the COVID-19 crisis, lowering healthcare costs, improving the economy, fixing immigration and addressing climate change, will improve anytime soon....

An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has broken off from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, according to researchers at the University of Delaware and the Canadian Ice Service. The Petermann Glacier is one of the two largest glaciers left in Greenland connecting the great Greenland ice sheet with the ocean via a floating ice shelf. Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering in UD’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, reports the calving on July 16, 2012, in his “Icy Seas” blog....

A team of mathematicians from RUDN University added new symbolic integration functionality to the Sage computerized algebra system. The team implemented ideas and methods suggested by the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass in the 1870s. The results were published in the Journal of Symbolic Computation. The first computer program capable of calculating integrals of elementary functions was developed in the late 1950s. By creating it, the developers confirmed that a computer could not only perform simple calculations but was also able to deal with tasks that required a certain degree of ‘thinking....

Scientists can now explore in a laboratory dish how the human brain develops by creating organoids — distinct, three-dimensional regions of the brain. In research published in Cell Stem Cell, Yale scientists coaxed early stage stem cells to create and fuse two types of organoids from different brain regions to show how the developing brain maintains proper balance of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. A failure to maintain this balance has been implicated in a host of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia....

NASA’s most advanced planetary rover is on a precise course for an early August landing beside a Martian mountain to begin two years of unprecedented scientific detective work. However, getting the Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars will not be easy. “The Curiosity landing is the hardest NASA mission ever attempted in the history of robotic planetary exploration,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters in Washington....

The human gut is home to thousands of species of bacteria, and some of those bacteria have the potential to treat a variety of gastrointestinal diseases. Some species may help to combat colon cancer, while others could help treat or prevent infections such as C. difficile. One of the obstacles to developing these “living biotherapeutics” is that many of the species that could be beneficial are harmed by oxygen, making it difficult to manufacture, store, and deliver them....

The research described in this article has been published on a preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed by scientific or medical experts. In hopes of developing a possible treatment for COVID-19, a team of MIT chemists has designed a drug candidate that they believe may block coronaviruses’ ability to enter human cells. The potential drug is a short protein fragment, or peptide, that mimics a protein found on the surface of human cells....

Since the fastidious Roomba vacuum, autonomous robots have come a long way. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, warehouse packing, patient screening, last-mile food delivery, hospital cleaning, restaurant service, meal prep, and building security. Each of these robotic systems is a product of an ad hoc design process specific to that particular system. This means that in designing an autonomous robot, engineers must run countless trial-and-error simulations, often informed by intuition....

Vets across the country began reporting cases of acute onset prolific vomiting in 2019/20. The Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNet) at the University of Liverpool asked vets for help in collecting data, with 1,258 case questionnaires from vets and owners plus 95 clinical samples from 71 animals. Based on this data, a team from the universities of Liverpool, Lancaster, Manchester and Bristol identified the outbreak as most likely to be a variant of canine enteric coronavirus (CeCoV)....

Blocked blood vessels in the brains of stroke patients prevent oxygen-rich blood from getting to cells, causing severe damage. Plants and some microbes produce oxygen through photosynthesis. What if there was a way to make photosynthesis happen in the brains of patients? Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have done just that in cells and in mice, using blue-green algae and special nanoparticles, in a proof-of-concept demonstration. Strokes result in the deaths of 5 million people worldwide every year, according to the World Health Organization....

Recently, NASA leaders viewed footage of an underwater dive off the East coast of Florida, and they confirm it depicts an artifact from the space shuttle Challenger. A TV documentary crew seeking the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft discovered the artifact. Their divers noticed a large humanmade object covered partially by sand on the seafloor. The proximity to the Florida Space Coast, along with the item’s modern construction and presence of 8-inch square tiles, led the documentary team to contact NASA....