As Earth moves around the sun, it travels surrounded by a giant bubble created by its own magnetic fields, called the magnetosphere. As the magnetosphere plows through space, it sets up a standing bow wave or bow shock, much like that in front of a moving ship. Just in front of this bow wave lies a complex, turbulent system called the foreshock. Conditions in the foreshock change in response to solar particles streaming in from the sun, moving magnetic fields and a host of waves, some fast, some slow, sweeping through the region....

The Phoenix lander itself, plus its back shell and parachute, are still visible in the image taken December 21, 2017, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But an animated-blink comparison with an image from about two months after the May 25, 2008 landing shows that patches of ground that had been darkened by the removal of dust during landing events have become coated with dust again....

Neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) have used laser beams to “switch on” neurons in mice, providing new insight into the hidden workings of memory and showing how memories underpin the brain’s inner GPS system. The study, published in the journal Cell, explains how researchers harnessed an ‘all-optical’ approach using twin lasers to simultaneously read and write the activity of ‘place cells’ (a type of neuron) in mice, as they navigated a virtual reality environment....

The merger, dubbed GW170817, took place 130 million light-years away and was detected in August by the gravitational waves it created. Astronomers then followed it up with conventional telescopes. The collision’s glowing wreckage generated radio waves, detected by international teams including an Australian one led by Associate Professor Tara Murphy. Astronomers from the University of Sydney, Caltech, CSIRO, and institutions around the world have monitored the merger site for months with three radio telescopes – the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array, the Karl G....

Although true “cyborgs” — part human, part robotic beings — are science fiction, researchers are taking steps toward integrating electronics with the body. Such devices could monitor for tumor development or stand in for damaged tissues. But connecting electronics directly to human tissues in the body is a huge challenge. Now, a team is reporting new coatings for components that could help them more easily fit into this environment. The researchers will present their results today (Agusut 17, 2020) at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo....

In this movie, each of the individual images required about five minutes of data collection by the Goldstone radar. At the time of the observations on June 1st, asteroid 1998 QE2 was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth. The resolution is about 125 feet (38 meters) per pixel. Scientists working with NASA’s 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, have released a new and improved movie clip of near-Earth asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon....

A new study questions the ongoing hypothesis that the blunt force behind a traumatic brain injury causes nerve damage, or axonal injury. A team of researchers, including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory professor Partha Mitra, found greater signs of blood vessel damage than nerve damage after performing post-mortem scans on an injured brain. The findings could influence the treatment and development of new drugs for TBI. “Nerve damage following traumatic brain injuries has been a majority point of view, and therapy, as well as drug development, has been targeted towards that,” Mitra said....

Quantum network Conversion between signals in the microwave and optical domains is of great interest, particularly for connecting future superconducting quantum computers into a global quantum network. Many leading efforts in quantum technologies, including superconducting qubits and quantum dots, share quantum information through photons in the microwave regime. While this allows for an impressive degree of quantum control, it also limits the distance the information can realistically travel before being lost to a mere few centimeters....

The new findings are reported today (November 22, 2019) in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meysam Heydari Gharahcheshmeh, professors Karen Gleason and Jing Kong, and three others. “The goal is to find a material that is electrically conductive as well as transparent,” Gleason explains, which would be “useful in a range of applications, including touch screens and solar cells.” The material most widely used today for such purposes is known as ITO, for indium titanium oxide, but that material is quite brittle and can crack after a period of use, she says....

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first glimpse of Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager’s historic footage of Triton has been “restored” and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon. The map, produced by Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make a movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989....

The results of the FOCUS4-C trial, which was funded by Cancer Research UK, the EME Program – an MRC/NIHR partnership – and AstraZeneca, were presented at the European Society of Medical Oncology and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The trial looked at whether a drug called adavosertib, taken in the form of a daily pill, could delay tumor regrowth among patients with an aggressive sub-type of inoperable bowel cancer who have limited treatment options....

Using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), researchers have found more than 300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system, including more than 100 new discoveries. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, the study also describes a new approach for finding similar types of objects and could aid future searches for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered planets. The work was led by graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and professors Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako....

Any observed benefit likely results from other lifestyle factors common among light to moderate drinkers, say researchers. In an observational analysis of UK Biobank participants, light to moderate drinkers had the lowest heart disease risk, followed by people who abstained from drinking. But, light to moderate drinkers tended to have healthier lifestyles than abstainers, which likely accounted for better heart health.Genetic evidence in this same population suggested that all levels of alcohol intake are associated with increased cardiovascular risk....

The inner core is Earth’s deepest layer. It is a ball of solid iron just larger than Pluto which is surrounded by a liquid outer core. The inner core is a relatively recent addition to our planet and establishing when it was formed is a topic of vigorous scientific debate with estimates ranging from 0.5 billion to 2 billion years ago. In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the University’s School of Environmental Sciences analyzed magnetic records from ancient igneous rocks and found that there was a sharp increase in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field between 1 and 1....

Testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid-turnaround COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks—even if those tests are significantly less sensitive than gold-standard clinical tests, according to a new study published today by CU Boulder and Harvard University researchers. Such a strategy could lead to “personalized stay-at-home orders” without shutting down restaurants, bars, retail stores and schools, the authors said. “Our big picture finding is that, when it comes to public health, it’s better to have a less sensitive test with results today than a more sensitive one with results tomorrow,” said lead author Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder....

Researchers recommend clinical trials for CBD to prevent COVID-19 based on promising animal data. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Chicago has found evidence that cannabidiol, or CBD, a product of the cannabis plant, can inhibit infection by the COVID-19 virus in human cells and in mice. The study, published on January 20, 2022, in Science Advances, found CBD showed a significant negative association with positive COVID tests in a national sample of medical records of patients taking the FDA-approved drug for treating epilepsy....

Poking up just behind Curiosity’s mast is Mount Sharp, photobombing the robot’s selfie. When Curiosity landed on Mars five years ago, the team’s intention was to study lower Mount Sharp, where the rover will remain for all of its time on Mars. The mountain’s base provides access to layers formed over millions of years. These layers formed in the presence of water — likely due to a lake or lakes where sediments accumulated, which formed these layers inside Gale Crater....

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide now exceeds 270 million with an overall mortality rate of approximately 2%. COVID-19 vaccines are effective and critical tools for bringing the pandemic under control. However, vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing illness. Breakthrough infections are defined as the detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ribonucleic acid (RNA) or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person 14 days or more after receiving all recommended doses of COVID-19 vaccines....

The findings, published in Science, suggest promising new approaches for treating chronic autoimmune conditions, including systemic lupus and autoimmune liver disease, the researchers said. Gut bacteria have been linked to a range of diseases, including autoimmune conditions characterized by immune system attacks of healthy tissue. To shed light on this link, a Yale research team focused on Enterococcus gallinarum, a bacterium they discovered is able to spontaneously “translocate” outside of the gut to lymph nodes, the liver, and the spleen....

Cryptocurrencies, such as the popular Bitcoin, are networks built on the blockchain, a financial ledger formatted in a sequence of individual blocks, each containing transaction data. These networks are decentralized, meaning there are no banks or organizations to manage funds and balances, so users join forces to store and verify the transactions. But decentralization leads to a scalability problem. To join a cryptocurrency, new users must download and store all transaction data from hundreds of thousands of individual blocks....