Boston, Massachusetts — 3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them. To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less than the width of a human hair....

When the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) opened its giant eye last week and began taking pictures of the ancient light from far-off galaxies, more than 120 members of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) eagerly awaited the first snapshots. Those images have now arrived. Though scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory lead the project, they count among their number the Santa Cruz-SLAC-Stanford Consortium, the official name for a small, tight-knit group of scientists who helped make the pictures happen....

“We found that while people generally know that fruits and vegetables are healthy, there may be a disconnect between what researchers and health care professionals consider to be a healthy and balanced diet compared to what the public thinks is a healthy and balanced diet,” said study author Jessica Cheng, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and in general internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston....

A collaboration of researchers from Sweden, Germany, and Spain has answered these questions using a single atom — a strontium ion trapped in an electric field. The measurement on the ion lasts only a millionth of a second. By producing a “film” consisting of pictures taken at different times of the measurement they showed that the change of the state happens gradually under the measurement influence. Atoms follow the laws of quantum mechanics which often contradict our normal expectations....

Animals, the most complex form of life on our planet, have only existed for the last few hundred million years, which accounts for less than one fifth of Earth’s history. Prior to that, the world’s oceans were inhabited solely by microorganisms such as bacteria and algae. Finding out exactly when animals first arose is a central, yet unresolved question in evolutionary research. In 2009 researchers discovered fossil fat molecules, presumably originating from sea sponges, in rocks 645 million years old....

MIT engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E. coli into a long-term storage device for memory. They envision that this stable, erasable, and easy-to-retrieve memory will be well-suited for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring. “You can store very long-term information,” says Timothy Lu, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering. “You could imagine having this system in a bacterium that lives in your gut, or environmental bacteria....

New research shows that organic molecules, on which life is based, can survive the impact from a meteorite. Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience, mineralogist Dr Kieran Howard and his team have discovered intact organic molecules inside debris from a meteorite impact. Dr Howard was a researcher at the Museum when he performed the analyses. This is the first evidence that any organic material, either inside a meteorite or already on Earth, can survive the impact of a meteorite striking the planet at high speed....

Harm prevention policies must take the long view, say experts. The evidence for the harmful effects of alcohol on brain health is compelling, but now experts have pin-pointed three key time periods in life when the effects of alcohol are likely to be at their greatest. Writing in The BMJ in December 2020, researchers in Australia and the UK say evidence suggests three periods of dynamic brain changes that may be particularly sensitive to the harmful effects of alcohol: gestation (from conception to birth), later adolescence (15-19 years), and older adulthood (over 65 years)....

In this image, captured on July 29, 2019, an unusually large quantity of sediment can be seen gushing from the Fraser River into the Strait of Georgia. The Fraser River is the longest river within British Columbia rising at Fraser Pass in the Rocky Mountains and flows for over 1300 km before emptying into the strait. The river’s annual discharge at its mouth is estimated to be around 3550 cubic meters per second, and is said to discharge around 20 million tonnes of sediment into the ocean....

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team* of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago. Their study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is the largest reconstruction of a network of human migration paths into a new landscape. It is also the first to apply rigorous computational analysis at the continental scale, testing 125 billion possible pathways....

The galaxy is the eponymous member of the NGC 3175 group, which has been called a nearby analog for the Local Group. The Local Group contains our very own home galaxy, the Milky Way, and around 50 others — a mix of spiral, irregular, and dwarf galaxies. The NGC 3175 group contains a couple of large spiral galaxies — the subject of this image, and NGC 3137 — and numerous lower-mass spiral and satellite galaxies....

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, has identified a specific genetic target that could help explain the tremendous variation in how sick those infected with COVID-19 become. The study results, recently published in the journal mSphere, describe a molecule made from DNA — miR1307 — as a potential dimmer switch that may influence the severity of the disease; why some infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have mild or even no symptoms, while others become seriously ill or die....

In recent years, advancements in DNA sequencing have exposed a large amount of hidden diversity in reef-building corals: species that appear identical to one another but are genetically distinct. Typically ignored as they are invisible to the naked eye, a team of researchers at the California Academy of Sciences and The University of Queensland, along with over a dozen international collaborators, is taking a more holistic approach to understand these hidden species by investigating overlooked ecological differences that have wide-ranging implications for the vulnerability and resilience of reef-building corals....

Geophysicists from Yale University reveal that the combination of crustal plugs with weakening causes abrupt slab detachment in a few million years, which can account for observed precipitous changes in plate tectonic motion and rapid continental uplift. Yale-led research may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology — namely, why do tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of millions of years, sometimes move abruptly?...

If you live in the western part of North America, Alaska, and the Hawaiian islands, you might set your alarm early the morning of Wednesday, January 31 for a lunar trifecta: a pre-dawn “super blue blood moon.” “For the (continental) U.S., the viewing will be best in the West,” said Gordon Johnston, program executive and lunar blogger at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Set your alarm early and go out and take a look....

The year 2014 now ranks as the warmest on record since 1880, according to an analysis by NASA scientists. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists. The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York....

The Mediterranean diet consistently has been linked with an array of health benefits, including decreased risk of chronic disease and cancer. Until now, however, no studies had associated the diet with longer telomeres, one of the biomarkers of aging. In a study published Tuesday online in The BMJ, researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) found that greater adherence to the Mediterranean diet correlated with longer telomeres. Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that get shorter every time a cell divides....

When stars like the Sun grow advanced in age, they expand and glow red. These so-called red giants then begin to lose their outer layers of material into space. More than half of such a star’s mass can be shed in this manner, forming a shell of surrounding gas. At the same time, the star’s core shrinks and grows hotter, emitting ultraviolet light that causes the expelled gases to glow....

Messier 75 lies in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), around 67 000 light-years away from Earth. The majority of the cluster’s stars, about 400 000 in total, are found in its core; it is one of the most densely populated clusters ever found, with a phenomenal luminosity of some 180 000 times that of the Sun. No wonder it photographs so well! Discovered in 1780 by Pierre Méchain, Messier 75 was also observed by Charles Messier and added to his catalog later that year....

Hubble entered safe mode after one of the three gyroscopes (gyros) actively being used to point and steady the telescope failed. Safe mode puts the telescope into a stable configuration until ground control can correct the issue and return the mission to normal operation. Built with multiple redundancies, Hubble had six new gyros installed during Servicing Mission-4 in 2009. Hubble usually uses three gyros at a time for maximum efficiency, but can continue to make scientific observations with just one....