Messier 85 is intriguing — its properties lie somewhere between those of a lenticular and an elliptical galaxy, and it appears to be interacting with two of its neighbors: the beautiful spiral NGC 4394, located out of frame to the upper left, and the small elliptical MCG 3-32-38, located out of frame to the center bottom. The galaxy contains some 400 billion stars, most of which are very old. However, the central region hosts a population of relatively young stars of just a few billion years in age; these stars are thought to have formed in a late burst of star formation, likely triggered as Messier 85 merged with another galaxy over four billion years ago....

Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent of the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of its mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star’s evolution. The unique observation yields insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs. Until now, previous white dwarf mass measurements have been gleaned from observing white dwarfs in binary star systems....

Even NASA’s powerful Hubble Space Telescope can benefit from some assistance, as evidenced in its latest discovery: a record-breaking star so distant that a combination of the telescope’s sophisticated instrumentation and nature’s natural magnifying glass was needed to spot it. The star, nicknamed Earendel by astronomers, emitted its light within the universe’s first billion years. It’s a significant leap beyond Hubble’s previous distance record, in 2018, when it detected a star at around 4 billion years after the big bang....

Nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a riot of colors, visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is ablaze with star-forming regions....

We perceive metals as shiny when we encounter metals in our day-to-day lives. That’s because common metallic materials are reflective at visible light wavelengths and will therefore bounce back the light that strikes them. Although metals are well suited to conducting electricity and heat, they aren’t typically thought of as a means to conduct light. However, scientists are increasingly finding examples that challenge expectations about how things should behave in the burgeoning field of quantum materials....

When many people think of watermelon, they likely think of Citrullus lanatus, the cultivated watermelon with sweet, juicy red fruit enjoyed around the world as a dessert. Indeed, watermelon is one of the world’s most popular fruits, second only to tomato – which many consider a vegetable. But there are six other wild species of watermelon, all of which have pale, hard, and bitter fruits. Researchers have now taken a comprehensive look at the genomes of all seven species, creating a resource that could help plant breeders find wild watermelon genes that provide resistance to pests, diseases, drought, and other hardships, and further improve fruit quality....

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a new synthetic approach to controlling cellular biochemical processes. Rather than creating particles or structures that directly interact with cellular machinery through traditional “lock and key” mechanisms, cells are directed to build compartments that physically stop — or encourage — biomolecular functions. The researchers demonstrate that their approach can affect two cellular processes, one responsible for spreading genetic instructions amongst bacteria and the other for modulating protein circuits in mammalian cells....

Cocaine is one of the most commonly used (and abused) plant-derived drugs in the world, but we have almost no modern information on how plants produce this complex alkaloid. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have just discovered a key reaction in cocaine formation in the coca plant from South America, and identified the responsible enzyme. This enzyme was shown to belong to the aldo-keto-reductase protein family revealing some exciting new insights into the evolution of cocaine biosynthesis....

This study reviewed the prevalence and outcomes of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. Researchers reviewed medical records of 435* patients in the Yale Cardiovascular COVID Registry, who were adults, ages 18 and older (mean age 68.2 years; >50% were male) hospitalized between March and June 2020 in the Yale New Haven Health System. *Please note: This news release includes updated data compared to the abstract....

What laid the groundwork for this unparalleled record of exploration? This 90-minute documentary describes the challenges of JPL’s first attempts to send spacecraft to the Red Planet. For much of human history, Mars was no more than a tiny reddish dot in the sky. But in 1965 the first spacecraft ever to visit Mars, JPL’s Mariner 4, began to change our understanding of the planet with its grainy black-and-white images of Mars....

This color-enhanced image was taken at 7:13 p.m. PDT on September 6, 2018 (10:13 p.m. EDT) as the spacecraft performed its 15th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 55,600 miles (89,500 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, above a southern latitude of approximately 75 degrees. Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: http://missionjuno....

This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in the northern territory. This view is unique to Juno and demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and experience the true nature of our three-dimensional universe. Juno took the images used to produce this color-enhanced image on April 1 between 3:04 a.m. PDT (6:04 a.m. EDT) and 3:36 a....

In terms of atmospheric composition, some of what the probe measured met expectations. But there were also some surprises, one of the most baffling being that the region Galileo entered was drier than astrophysicists had anticipated. Jupiter’s 79 moons are mostly made of ice, so it had been assumed that the planet’s atmosphere would contain a considerable amount of water. If so, the 750-pound (340-kg) probe didn’t find it that day....

Learn more: Galileo Provides New Insights About Ganymede’s Environment

The large Hawaiian shield volcano has a caldera at the summit. Unlike more catastrophic formations, the ones at Kilauea were likely formed by the passive subsidence of the floor of the volcano, starting about 1,500 years ago. This has left a depression of about 3 km by 5 km. While it’s common for basaltic shield volcanoes to have more slowly formed calderas, which are caused by the draining of basalt from summit magma chambers, letting ground surfaces slump into the void, the Kilauea caldera is different....

The ability of UV light to efficiently kill viruses and bacteria through photocatalytic reactions is another important application. However, only a small portion of sunlight falls within the UV range, leaving much of the spectrum unused for this purpose. Photon upconversion (UC) could be the key to solving this problem. It is the process of converting long-wavelength, low-energy photons (such as those present in visible light) to short-wavelength, high-energy photons (such as those present in UV light) via a process called “triplet-triplet annihilation” (TTA)....

Most countries are not fulfilling their international legal obligations during COVID-19 and other public health emergencies, reveals new research by a consortium of 13 leading global health law scholars, hosted by the Global Strategy Lab (GSL) at York University. In 2019, members of the Global Health Law Consortium analyzed key aspects of the International Health Regulations (IHR) to authoritatively interpret what countries are legally allowed to do to each other during future public health crises like Ebola and SARS....

Yellow bands striped his back, and uncommonly white skin peeked out from speckles on his head and tail. “It’s this really striking coloration pattern,” says Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A California reptile shop began breeding Mr. Frosty in 2016 and produced a colony of lemon-yellow lizards. The color variety was known as Lemon Frost — with their bold bands and snazzy spots, the rare animals could fetch upwards of $2,000....

Lingering symptoms range from mild to debilitating and last for weeks to months after recovery. As COVID-19 hospitalizations once again soar in a fourth surge more than 18 months after the pandemic started, some patients continue to experience symptoms long after recovering from COVID, according to a Houston Methodist study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports. Lead author Sonia Villapol, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Center for Neuroregeneration at Houston Methodist, and her collaborators detected more than 50 long-term effects of COVID-19 among the 47,910 patients included in the analysis....

A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion years ago. Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background – a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilized fingerprint of the Big Bang – Cramer has produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound....