In its search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is once again preparing to collect the first of many rock core samples that could eventually be brought to Earth for further study. This week, a tool on the rover’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm will abrade the surface of a rock nicknamed “Rochette,” allowing scientists to look inside and determine whether they want to capture a sample with the rover’s coring bit....

This tilt could influence calculations of how much of Europa’s history is recorded in its frozen shell, how much heat is generated by tides in its ocean, and even how long the ocean has been liquid. “One of the mysteries of Europa is why the orientations of the long, straight cracks called lineaments have changed over time. It turns out that a small tilt, or obliquity, in the spin axis, sometime in the past, can explain a lot of what we see,” said Alyssa Rhoden, a postdoctoral fellow with Oak Ridge Associated Universities who is working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

Although batteries are everywhere in everyday life, many still suffer breakdowns and failures. The minor inconvenience of needing to charge them more often could even turn into costly repairs or buying a new device altogether. Batteries in larger electronics, like hoverboards or cars, can even catch fire. Now, with increasing emphasis on aviation sustainability, interest in using batteries to partially or fully power electric propulsion systems on aircraft of all sizes is growing each day....

To plan water management and disaster preparedness during the rest of the year, hydrologists and resource managers need to know how much water each winter’s snowpack holds. Currently, ground or airborne observations of that measurement – called snow-water equivalent, or SWE (pronounced “swee”) – are collected at only a very limited number of locations around the world. However, NASA hopes in the future to launch a global satellite mission to track this precious resource from space....

In 2001, the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics announced that after 10 years of work at a cost of some $400 million, they had completed a draft sequence of the human genome. Today, sequencing a human genome is something that a single researcher can do in a couple of weeks for less than $10,000. Since 2002, the rate at which genomes can be sequenced has been doubling every four months or so, whereas computing power doubles only every 18 months....

As the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have drawn attention as potential therapies for COVID-19 and are being widely used off-label, it’s now more important than ever to have a thorough assessment of the safety of these medications. A recent analysis published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology provides new insights. In the analysis of real-world data from the Food and Drug Administration Adverse Events Reporting System, a global database of post-marketing safety reports, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were associated with higher rates of various cardiovascular problems, including life-threatening heart rhythm events, heart failure, and damage to the heart muscle itself (termed cardiomyopathy)....

Spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way can have sprawling magnetic fields. There are various theories about their formation, but so far the process is not well understood. An international research team has now analysed the magnetic field of the Milky Way-like galaxy NGC 4217 in detail on the basis of radio astronomical observations and has discovered as yet unknown magnetic field structures. The data suggest that star formation and star explosions, so-called supernovae, are responsible for the visible structures....

A new material created by QUT scientists is very effective at removing particles smaller than 100 nanometers, which is in the range of a virusMaterial is easier to breathe through than high-quality face masks — important for people with existing respiratory issuesCan be quickly made in large quantities using simple equipment, it is biodegradable and made from waste plant materialThoroughly tested and compared with high-quality commercially available QUT process engineer Dr....

Conducted by researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the study will be published today (November 14) in the journal Nature Sustainability. Electrosynthesis of ammonia from NRR at ambient conditions has been widely regarded as a “green ammonia synthesis” technology to replace the traditional energy- and capital-intensive Haber-Bosch process. Scientists agree that the intriguing features of SACs may create a new catalytic paradigm....

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently began its long-awaited, historic encounter with Pluto. The spacecraft is entering the first of several approach phases that culminate July 14 with the first close-up flyby of the dwarf planet, 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. “NASA first mission to distant Pluto will also be humankind’s first close up view of this cold, unexplored world in our solar system,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington....

Astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have produced a spectacular image revealing new details of violent collisions involving at least four clusters of galaxies. Combined with an earlier image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the new observations show a complex region more than 5 billion light-years from Earth where the collisions are triggering a host of phenomena that scientists still are working to understand....

For the study, honey bees that were free from environmental influences were first bred in the laboratory. “We wanted to control every aspect of the bees’ lives — from their diet to their exposure to pathogens or pesticides,” says Dr. Yahya Al Naggar, the biologist who led the project at MLU and who now works at Tanta University in Egypt. All bees were given the same food, sugar syrup, for the first few days....

The identification of human migration driven by climate change, the spread of COVID-19, agricultural trends, and socioeconomic problems in neighboring regions depends on data — the more complex the model, the more data is required to understand such spatially distributed phenomena. However, reliable data is often expensive and difficult to obtain, or too sparse to allow for accurate predictions. Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor of mechanical and aerospace, biomedical, and civil and urban engineering and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, devised a novel solution based on network and information theory that makes “little data” act big through, the application of mathematical techniques normally used for time-series, to spatial processes....

The paper, published October 22 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, is based on the results of a NASA-derived atmospheric chemistry climate model that projected the impacts of HFC gases on the atmosphere by the year 2050. The ozone layer comprises a belt of ozone molecules located primarily in the lower stratosphere. It is responsible for absorbing most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation before it reaches Earth’s surface....

MIT researchers have now devised a way to super-charge this therapy so that it could be used as a weapon against nearly any type of cancer. The research team developed a vaccine that dramatically boosts the antitumor T cell population and allows the cells to vigorously invade solid tumors. In a study of mice, the researchers found that they could completely eliminate solid tumors in 60 percent of the animals that were given T-cell therapy along with the booster vaccination....

Some 40,000 tons of micrometeorites, less than a millimeter in diameter, bombard the earth every year. Analyzing the composition of this type of cosmic dust can potentially reveal many secrets about the evolution of our solar system. They land everywhere on the planet, but we can’t tell them apart from regular dust. Antarctic micrometeorites (AMMs) are special because this cleaner environment makes them easier to distinguish — but because Antarctica is such a remote and challenging place, AMM samples are very precious....

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy. “Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by stellarator coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion....

Like most vaccines, RNA vaccines have to be injected, which can be an obstacle for people who fear needles. Now, a team of MIT researchers has developed a way to deliver RNA in a capsule that can be swallowed, which they hope could help make people more receptive to them. In addition to making vaccines easier to tolerate, this approach could also be used to deliver other kinds of therapeutic RNA or DNA directly to the digestive tract, which could make it easier to treat gastrointestinal disorders such as ulcers....

What time do you make it? How about now? Time is constantly changing but it is not changing constantly. It sounds confusing, but since Einstein’s time, we’ve known that time progresses at different rates depending on where you are. This is mainly due to the effect of gravity, the stronger gravity is in your vicinity the slower time progresses relative to where gravity is weaker. To us this difference is imperceptible, but highly accurate atomic clocks can measure it....

During fieldwork at the Archean Maniitsoq structure in Greenland, an international team of scientists led by the University of Waterloo’s Chris Yakymchuk found the features of this region are inconsistent with an impact crater. In 2012, a different team identified it as the remnant of a three-billion-year-old meteorite crater. “Zircon crystals in the rock are like little time capsules,” said Yakymchuk, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences....