The mosaic comprises two images taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on September 14, 2014, from a distance of about 19 miles (30 kilometers). The image scale is 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) per pixel. The red ellipse is centered on the landing site and is approximately 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter. Site J is located on the smaller of the comet’s two lobes. On November 12, the Rosetta spacecraft will release Philae at 4:03 a....

At a time when modern humans were beginning to leave Africa and the Neanderthals were living on our planet, Scholz’s star – named after the German astronomer who discovered it – approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system. This discovery was made public in 2015 by a team of astronomers led by Professor Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester (USA)....

This increase in alcohol use, which was recently reported in JAMA Health Forum, suggests that states considering recreational cannabis legalization should also consider targeted public health messaging and policy interventions to mitigate problem drinking. “Recreational cannabis laws have made cannabis legally accessible to nearly half of U.S. adults, but it has been unclear how this affects the use of other substances, such as alcohol,” said senior author Coleman Drake, Ph....

The corkscrew shape visible here is created by a phenomenon known as precession; as they move outwards through space, these two jets are slowly tumbling around an axis in a similar way to the motion of a gyroscope or a spinning top slowing down, the orientation of their rotational axes changing as they do so. The scale of this corkscrew is enormous, at 5000 times the size of the Solar System....

But the CSF has another critical, if less known, function: it also provides immune protection to the brain. Yet, this function hasn’t been well studied. A Northwestern Medicine study of CSF published on December 13 in the journal Cell, has discovered its role in cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer’s disease. This discovery provides a new clue to the process of neurodegeneration, said study lead author David Gate, PhD, assistant professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology....

Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, California, will pay $415 million for deCODE Genetics, based in Reykjavik. When genomics failed to produce the promise of new drug targets in the 2000s, many investors, including large drug firms, shed their stakes in companies that dealt with disease-related data and shifted to companies that worked with actual compounds in clinical trials. deCODE Genetics has no active clinical trials, but it has a lot of data....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Global Change Biology. The researchers believe that it has fueled almost 80% of the largest fires in the American West over the last decade. The scientists are looking at a wide range of solutions for solving this problem, including using a fungus to attack the grass seed. The seeds were originally transported to the USA in soils on board ships. The weedy grass continued its journey west in the 1800s with settlers and cattle ranchers....

Autism results from abnormal cell communication. Testing a new theory, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have used a newly discovered function of an old drug to restore cell communications in a mouse model of autism, reversing symptoms of the devastating disorder. The findings are published in the March 13, 2013 issue of the journal PLOS ONE. “Our (cell danger) theory suggests that autism happens because cells get stuck in a defensive metabolic mode and fail to talk to each other normally, which can interfere with brain development and function,” said Robert Naviaux, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and co-director of the Mitochondrial and Metabolic Disease Center at UC San Diego....

Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to make detailed observations of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the star known as HD 107146, detecting an unexpected increase in the concentration of millimeter-size dust grains in the disk’s outer reaches. This surprising increase, which begins remarkably far — about 13 billion kilometers — from the host star, may be the result of Pluto-size planetesimals stirring up the region, causing smaller objects to collide and blast themselves apart....

Ordinary matter, or “baryons,” make up all physical objects in existence, from stars to the cores of black holes. But until now, astrophysicists had only been able to locate about two-thirds of the matter that theorists predict was created by the Big Bang. In the new research, an international team pinned down the missing third, finding it in the space between galaxies. That lost matter exists as filaments of oxygen gas at temperatures of around 1 million degrees Celsius, said CU Boulder’s Michael Shull, a co-author of the study....

The gas and dust in giant molecular clouds gradually come together under the influence of gravity to form stars. Precisely how this occurs, however, is incompletely understood. The mass of a star, for example, is by far the most important factor constraining its future evolution, but astronomers do not clearly understand what determines the exact mass of a newly forming star. One aspect of this problem is simply knowing how many stars of each size there are, that is, knowing the distribution of stellar masses in a large cluster of stars....

The spectacle of these subatomic showers is legendary. Green, red, and purple waltz across the night sky, blending into one another for a fantastic show widely considered one of the great wonders of the world. Among a variety of auroras, pulsating auroral patches appearing at dawn are common but the physical mechanisms driving this auroral pulsation had so far not been verified through observation. Pulsating aurora, the origin of the blinking patches of light, is now directly observed by the ERG spacecraft....

Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object – either a brown dwarf or a giant planet – that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit on a gas cloud, will soon happen at the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The discovery in galaxy NGC 4845, 47 million light-years away, was made by ESA’s Integral space observatory, with follow-up observations from ESA’s XMM-Newton, NASA’s Swift and Japan’s MAXI X-ray monitor on the International Space Station....

Black holes exist in different sizes. Stellar black holes, which are around the mass of our Sun, may form when very large stars explode as supernovae at the end of their lives. The star’s core collapses as the outer layers are blown away, leaving a small but extremely dense ball. Supermassive black holes, many millions of times the mass of our Sun, are of more mysterious origin, and are found at the center of galaxies....

Australia’s Department of Agriculture announced that it is in the final stages of developing a new breed of pineapple that is sweet and juicy, but has the added taste of coconut, making it suitable for piña colada cocktails. The AusFestival pineapple will allow mixologists to create better piña colada drinks for everyone. While it won’t revolutionize mixology, it will definitely add something different. The agency’s research station in Queensland has been working on this breed of pineapple for more than a decade....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Marion Cousineau, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Montreal in Quebec, and her colleagues evaluated the preference of consonance over dissonance by comparing the responses of a control group of people with normal hearing to those of people with amusia, which is an inability to distinguish between different musical tones. Consonant chords are made up of notes that seem harmonized whereas dissonant chords are combinations that sound jarring....

A big question on people’s minds these days: how long does immunity to SARS-CoV-2 last following infection? Now a research team from La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), The University of Liverpool and the University of Southampton has uncovered an interesting clue. Their new study suggests that people with severe COVID-19 cases may be left with more of the protective “memory” T cells needed to fight reinfection. “The data from this study suggest people with severe COVID-19 cases may have stronger long-term immunity,” says study co-leader LJI Professor Pandurangan Vijayanand, M....

Computer models play a crucial role in investigating the brain’s process of making and retaining memories and other intricate information. However, constructing such models is a delicate task. The intricate interplay of electrical and biochemical signals, as well as the web of connections between neurons and other cell types, creates the infrastructure for memories to be formed. Despite this, encoding the complex biology of the brain into a computer model for further study has proven to be a difficult task due to the limited understanding of the underlying biology of the brain....

As an animal develops from an embryo, its cells take diverse paths, eventually forming different body parts—muscles, bones, heart. In order for each cell to know what to do during development, it follows a genetic blueprint, which consists of complex webs of interacting genes called gene regulatory networks. Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have spent the last decade or so detailing how these gene networks control development in sea-urchin embryos....

A team of researchers at Yale is expanding our understanding of how bacteria continue to evolve and adapt at the molecular level. By making a single change to a complex strand of RNA – the molecules essential for coding, decoding, regulation, and expression of genes – the scholars changed the way the strand folded up, completely switching the environmental signal it recognized. “We know that bacteria use tiny “riboswitches” to bind important small molecules and respond quickly to their environment....