The study, published May 11 in the journal Science, reports a highly accurate way to measure the decay rate of neutrons. An author on the study, Chen-Yu Liu, is a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Physics. “This is a significant improvement compared to previous experiments,” said Liu, who is a leader on the UNCtau experiment, which uses neutrons from the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Ultracold Neutron source at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico....

Ethereum made a change that they called The Merge on September 15, 2022. This change altered the way that the data blocks that make up the backbone of the cryptocurrency are created. “Before The Merge, Ethereum was exactly the same as Bitcoin in the way it functioned, and the way it was using energy, because they were both running on an energy-intensive mechanism called proof of work,” says De Vries, a data science and economics researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands....

By conducting the largest survey ever of star-forming regions in X-rays, a team of researchers has helped outline the link between very powerful flares, or outbursts, from youthful stars, and the impact they could have on planets in orbit. “Our work tells us how the Sun may have behaved and affected the young Earth billions of years ago,” said Kostantin Getman of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania who led the study....

Automobile exhaust emitted by fossil-fuel-based vehicles, especially those operating on diesel, is known to be a major source of fine dust and greenhouse gases . Using biodiesel instead of diesel is an effective way of coping with climate change caused by greenhouse gases while reducing fine dust emission. However, the current method of producing biodiesel by chemically processing vegetable oil or waste cooking oil-such as palm or soybean oil-is limited because of the unreliable availability of raw materials....

Off the West Coast of the United States, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water. Researchers found that water off the coast of Washington is gradually warming at a depth of 500 meters, about a third of a mile down....

Researchers at University of California San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 1.4 million pelvic examinations and 1.6 million Pap tests performed on U.S. females 15 to 20 years old in a single year may have been medically unnecessary. The findings suggest that despite professional guidelines and recommendations against routine pelvic examinations and Pap tests in this age group, there’s a critical lag in clinical practice....

A team of theoretical physicists ran calculations that reveal surprising black hole quantum phenomena. The research was led by UQ and headed by PhD candidate Joshua Foo. “Black holes are an incredibly unique and fascinating feature of our universe,” Mr. Foo said. “They’re created when gravity squeezes a vast amount of matter incredibly densely into a tiny space, creating so much gravitational pull that even light cannot escape. “It’s a phenomenon that can be triggered by a dying star....

On July 30, a two-week window of opportunity opens for Perseverance — the newest Mars rover, forged in the spirit of human curiosity — to begin its journey toward the Red Planet with a launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Center on the eastern Florida coast. With MIT’s help, this latest NASA mission will build upon the legacy of its roving laboratory predecessors and dig deeper than ever before into questions about life on Mars....

But even two organisms with similar ribosomes may display significant structural differences in the RNA and protein components of their mitoribosomes. Specialized ribosomes within the mitochondria (the energy-producing entities within our cells), mitoribosomes help the mitochondria produce proteins that manufacture ATP, the energy currency of the cell. Scientists in the laboratory of Sebastian Klinge wondered how mitoribosomes evolved, how they assemble within the cell, and why their structures are so much less uniform across species....

And without that sense of smell, mosquitoes could not locate their dominant source of food: nectar from flowers. “Nectar is an important source of food for all mosquitoes,” said Jeffrey Riffell, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “For male mosquitoes, nectar is their only food source, and female mosquitoes feed on nectar for all but a few days of their lives.” Yet scientists know little about the scents that draw mosquitoes toward certain flowers, or repel them from others....

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered molecules present in mucus that have the ability to impede cholera infection by disrupting the genes responsible for the microbe switching into a harmful state. These molecules, referred to as glycans, play a significant role in mucins- the gel-forming compounds that constitute mucus. The team from MIT identified a specific glycan that can inhibit Vibrio cholerae from producing the toxin responsible for causing severe diarrhea, a common symptom of cholera....

In a study published online by the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, researchers looked at data from 3,604 patients with chronic kidney disease. They checked for an association between CKD outcomes (death and dialysis) and a pair of factors related to muscle mass. Muscle mass has been shown to be predictive of these outcomes in other disease states. For the first factor, creatinine excretion in urine, doctors did find an association....

A joint research team from POSTECH and UNIST has introduced mixed-FeCo-oxide-based surface-textured nanostructures (MTex) as highly efficient magneto-catalytic platform in the international journal Nano Letters. The team consisted of professors In Su Lee and Amit Kumar with Dr. Nitee Kumari of POSTECH’s Department of Chemistry and Professor Yoon-Kyung Cho and Dr. Sumit Kumar of UNIST’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. First, the researchers synthesized smooth surface nanocrystals in which various metal ions were wrapped in an organic polymer shell and heated them at a very high temperature....

The burn, which used the spacecraft’s main engine on the European-built service module, lasted 3 minutes, 27 seconds, and changed the velocity of the spacecraft by about 655 mph (961 feet per second). It was the final major engine maneuver of the flight test. On flight day 20, Orion prepares for its return powered flyby and closest approach to the Moon. This video was captured prior to the spacecraft’s 3-minute, 27-second, return powered flyby burn, committing Orion to a return to Earth and splashdown on December 11, 2022....

The false-color image above shows the progression of the rapid snow melt in the Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory. The image was acquired on July 26, 2018, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite (bands 6-5-4). In the image, short wavelength infrared (SWIR) bands are combined to better differentiate areas of water that are frozen (light blue) from those that contain significant meltwater (dark blue)....

The four-hour Checkpoint rehearsal took the spacecraft through the first two of the sampling sequence’s four maneuvers: the orbit departure burn and the Checkpoint burn. Checkpoint is so named because it is the location where the spacecraft autonomously checks its position and velocity before adjusting its trajectory down toward the location of the event’s third maneuver. This series of images, captured on April 14 during the first rehearsal of the OSIRIS-REx mission’s sample collection event, shows the SamCam instrument’s field of view as the spacecraft approaches and moves away from asteroid Bennu’s surface....

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky. Astronomers previously discovered three exoplanets in this system, called TOI 700 b, c, and d. Planet d also orbits in the habitable zone....

The message came from the Minor Planet Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the worldwide repository for such observations and initial determination of asteroid orbits. And although it was intended to alert only the very small astronomical community that hunts and tracks asteroids to call for more observations, the news spread quickly. Most media outlets did not know what to make of the announcement, and mistakenly highlighted the prospect that Earth was doomed....

This area lies just downhill from a geological contact zone the rover has been studying near “Marias Pass” on lower Mount Sharp. In fact, the Curiosity team decided to back up the rover 46 meters (151 feet) from the geological contact zone to investigate the high-silica target dubbed “Elk.” The decision was made after they analyzed data from two instruments, the laser-firing Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) and Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN), which show elevated amounts of silicon and hydrogen, respectively....

The stereo images can be used to measure the topography, which in turn constrains models for the strength of the mesa’s bedrock. Do look at the stereo anaglyph. This is a stereo pair with PSP_005701_1920. The original image scale is 31.5 centimeters (12.4 inches) per pixel (with 1 x 1 binning); objects on the order of 94 centimeters (37 inches) across are resolved. The map is projected here at a scale of 25 centimeters (9....