The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope celebrates the holiday season with a striking image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. The intricate structure of the stellar eruption looks like a giant and brightly colored ribbon in space. Planetary nebulae represent a final brief stage in the life of a star like the Sun. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the star expels a large portion of its outer regions, which then heats up and glows brightly, showing intricate structures that scientists are still trying to fully understand....

In experiments with mice, UCLA researchers have shown they can harness the power of iNKT cells to attack tumor cells and treat cancer. The new method, described in the journal Cell Stem Cell, suppressed the growth of multiple types of human tumors that had been transplanted into the animals. “What’s really exciting is that we can give this treatment just once and it increases the number of iNKT cells to levels that can fight cancer for the lifetime of the animal,” said Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the study’s senior author....

The ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator (CERN, Geneva) has been recording the collisions of two proton beams or a proton beam with a beam of lead nuclei traveling in opposite directions for years. The Cracow-based researchers took a closer look at the latest data concerning high energy collisions reaching five teraelectron volts (i.e. thousands of billions of eV). Special attention was paid to those cases in which the jets running from the collision point moved in a forward direction, i....

Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s first look at this ice giant is giving us a long-awaited glimpse of those crisp rings and teasing out details of its mysterious storms. New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades With its first image of Neptune, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is showcasing its impressive capabilities closer to home. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras also reveal details of the ice giant in a whole new light....

The volcano had been erupting for around six months prior to the collapse, which saw more than two-thirds of its height slide into the sea as the island halved in area. The event triggered a devastating tsunami, which inundated the coastlines of Java and Sumatra and led to the deaths of more than 400 people. A team led by the University of Birmingham examined volcanic material from nearby islands for clues to determine whether the powerful, explosive eruption observed after the collapse had itself triggered the landslide and tsunami....

With services overburdened, healthcare professionals are having to decide who should receive treatment. But is it wrong to prioritize younger patients with COVID-19? Two experts debate the issue in The BMJ this week. There are three reasons why age should not be used to decide who should and who should not receive potentially life-saving treatment, argues Dave Archard, Emeritus Professor at Queen’s University in Belfast. The first is that a simple “younger than” criterion is clearly unsatisfactory....

Even with nuclear-thermal or nuclear-electric propulsion (NTP/NEP), a one-way transit could take 100 days to reach Mars. However, a team of researchers from Montreal’s McGill University assessed the potential of a laser-thermal propulsion system. According to their study, a spacecraft that relies on a novel propulsion system – where lasers are used to heat hydrogen fuel – could reduce transit times to Mars to just 45 days! The research was led by Emmanuel Duplay, a McGill graduate and current MSc Aerospace Engineering student at TU Delft....

Virtual conference presents progress and pitfalls in understanding the best way to lose excess weight. Many of us are eating differently during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some are taking the stay-at-home lifestyle as an opportunity to work on weight loss goals. Get the latest research findings on fad diets, losing weight and healthful eating at NUTRITION 2020 LIVE ONLINE, a virtual conference featuring leading nutrition experts from around the world....

Research from APC Microbiome Ireland (APC) at University College Cork (UCC) published on August 9, 2021, in the leading international scientific journal Nature Aging introduces a novel approach to reverse aspects of aging-related deterioration in the brain and cognitive function via the microbes in the gut. As our population ages, one of the key global challenges is to develop strategies to maintain healthy brain function. This ground-breaking research opens up potentially new therapeutic avenues in the form of microbial-based interventions to slow down brain aging and associated cognitive problems....

Humans depend on fossil fuels as their primary energy source, especially in transportation. However, fossil fuels are both unsustainable and unsafe, serving as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and leading to adverse respiratory effects and devastation due to global warming. A team of researchers at the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University has demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion. They describe the engine in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing....

With the introduction of DALL-E, the internet had a collective feel-good moment. This artificial intelligence-based image generator is inspired by artist Salvador Dali and the lovable robot WALL-E and uses natural language to produce whatever mysterious and beautiful image your heart desires. Seeing typed-out inputs such as “smiling gopher holding an ice cream cone” instantly spring to life is a vivid AI-generated image clearly resonated with the world. It is not a small task to get said smiling gopher and attributes to pop up on your screen....

Mount Michael, an active stratovolcano in the South Sandwich Islands, is viewed more often by penguins than by people. It is located on Saunders Island, about 1,600 kilometers (1,000) miles from Antarctica and 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) from South America, and there are no permanent human residents nearby. For satellites looking down from space, the mountain is usually obscured by clouds. Still, the nearly 1,000-meter-tall volcano frequently finds a way to put on a show....

This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows one possible place where sand grains are being produced on Mars today. Discovered in images from the Context Camera, this region exhibits dark material that is being eroded from dark layers in the bedrock of a semicircular depression near the boundary of the Southern highlands and the Northern lowlands. Downslope lineations support the notion that these dark sediments are derived locally, and did not accumulate here by coincidence because of the winds....

Salt cakes could have been easily transported in canoes along the coast and up rivers in southern Belize, writes LSU archaeologist Heather McKillop in a new paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. She discovered in 2004 the first remnants of ancient Maya salt kitchen buildings made of pole and thatch that had been submerged and preserved in a saltwater lagoon in a mangrove forest in Belize. Since then, she and her team of LSU graduate and undergraduate students and colleagues have mapped 70 sites that comprise an extensive network of rooms and buildings of the Paynes Creek Salt Works....

Star formation in a galaxy is thought to be triggered by the accretion of gas from the intergalactic medium (gas accretion via mergers between galaxies is thought to play a relatively minor role in the total number of stars produced). In galaxies that are actively making stars, there is a tight relationship between their mass in stars and their rate of forming new stars, and this relationship approximately holds not only locally but even back when the universe was billions of years younger....

As the time when NASA will begin sending humans back to the Moon draws closer, crewed trips to Mars are an enticing next step. But future space explorers will need new tools when traveling to such distant destinations. The Deep Space Atomic Clock mission is testing a new navigation technology that could be used by both human and robotic explorers making their way around the Red Planet and other deep space destinations....

With the benefit of the knowledge acquired, conducting flights on Mars has in most ways become easier than it was at the outset. But in one important way it is actually getting more difficult every day: I’m talking about the atmospheric density, which was already extremely low and is now dropping further due to seasonal variations on Mars. When we designed and tested Ingenuity on Earth, we expected Ingenuity’s five-flight mission to be completed within the first few months after Perseverance’s landing in February 2021....

“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live....

NASA’s InSight Mars lander has detected the largest quake ever observed on another planet: an estimated magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022, the 1,222nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This adds to the catalog of more than 1,313 quakes InSight has detected since landing on Mars in November 2018. The biggest quake previously recordedwas an estimated magnitude 4.2 detected on August 25, 2021. InSight was sent to Mars with a highly sensitive seismometer, provided by France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), to study the Red Planet’s deep interior....

Earth has now received the first picture NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured as it performed a close flyby of Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa. The image was taken on Thursday, September 29, at 2:36 a.m. PDT (5:36 a.m. EDT), at a distance of about 219 miles (352 kilometers) during the solar-powered spacecraft’s closest approach. It reveals surface features in a region called Annwn Regio near the moon’s equator. This is only the third close pass of Europa in history below 310 miles (500 kilometers) altitude....