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The region is far west of the hemisphere NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft viewed during close approach last summer. The upper image – in black and white – sports several dozen “haloed” craters. The largest crater, at bottom-right, measures about 30 miles (50 kilometers) across. The craters’ bright walls and rims stand out from their dark floors and surrounding terrain, creating the halo effect. In the lower image, composition data from New Horizons’ Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) indicate a connection between the bright halos and distribution of methane ice, shown in false color as purple....

The inspiration for this paste? Barnacles. Barnacles are those sea animals that adhere to rocks, the bottom of ships and large fish with the aim of staying in place despite wet conditions and variable surfaces. They’re successful because they exude a type of oil matrix that cleans the surface and repels moisture. Then they follow up with a protein that cross-links them with the molecules of the surface. That two-step process is what happens when the sealing paste is applied to organs or tissues....

NASA | Moon Phases 2015, Northern Hemisphere This visualization shows the Moon’s phase and libration at hourly intervals throughout 2015, as viewed from the northern hemisphere. Each frame represents one hour. In addition, this visualization shows the Moon’s orbit position, sub-Earth and subsolar points, distance from the Earth at true scale, and labels of craters near the terminator. To learn more about this visualization, or to see what the Moon will look like at any hour in 2015, visit http://svs....

In Italy, pasta is serious business, with reportedly more than 300 specific forms known by some 1,300 names. They even have a 55-year-old ‘pasta law’ that governs its production and manufacture. However, that doesn’t mean the beloved food staple is shut off from innovation. Now, Italian researchers have cooked up a new process for extending the shelf life of fresh pasta by 30 days. This was accomplished by using a novel packaging process that also involves applying bioprotective probiotic cultures to the dough....

The SSMS is Europe’s response to the call for affordable and timely launches for small satellites. Until now these customers have relied on spare capacity riding ‘piggyback’ alongside a primary satellite but spaces are limited and finding a match with mission requirements is difficult. “This flight heralds a new era in rideshare opportunities for small satellites and shows our commitment to extending Europe’s access to space capabilities to serve European institutions, strengthen our space industry and grow our economy,” commented Renato Lafranconi, Vega Exploitation Programme Manager at ESA....

Because climate measurements seldom go back more than 150 years, we depend on climate models to predict the future, however, these models cannot be fully tested. Understanding the Earth’s historical climate history over a longer duration provides us with a valuable opportunity to put climate models on longer periods and minimize uncertainty in climate predictions. Changes in the average surface temperature of the Earth throughout the present interglacial Epoch, the Holocene (about the last 12,000 years), have been extensively debated in this context during the previous decades....

Researchers from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, have unveiled a new approach to analyzing the genetic codes — or the blueprint — of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The findings will help researchers better understand how strains of the virus evolve and help identify new clusters of the virus. Analyzing global data on the published genome sequences of this novel coronavirus will help fast track our understanding of this complex disease....

The clinical trial is the second iteration of the NIH Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT-2), a study protocol to evaluate therapeutics for people hospitalized with COVID-19. Remdesivir is a broad-spectrum antiviral treatment developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc. Baricitinib was discovered by Incyte and licensed to Eli Lilly and Company, and marketed under the brand name Olumiant. It is approved in more than 70 countries as a treatment for adults with moderately-to-severely active rheumatoid arthritis....

In a study published in the journal Science, the researchers show that chromosome level engineering is possible in mammals. They successfully created a laboratory house mouse with a novel and sustainable karyotype, offering crucial insight into how chromosome rearrangements may influence evolution. “The laboratory house mouse has maintained a standard 40-chromosome karyotype — or the full picture of an organism’s chromosomes — after more than 100 years of artificial breeding,” said co-first author Li Zhikun, researcher in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Zoology and the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology....

A new review, led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), offers a solution to capture these unused materials: mini-refineries located near waste sources that process biomass using electrochemical reduction reactions powered by renewable energy. In the paper, which was recently published in Chemical Reviews, the researchers gather information from over 100 years of chemistry on theory, materials, and reactor design needed for mini-refineries to be efficient parts of industrial biomass processing....

A simple mechanism could underlie the growth and self-replication of protocells—putative ancestors of modern living cells—suggests a study publishing today (September 3, 2021) in Biophysical Journal. Protocells are vesicles bounded by a membrane bilayer and are potentially similar to the first unicellular common ancestor (FUCA). On the basis of relatively simple mathematical principles, the proposed model suggests that the main force driving protocell growth and reproduction is the temperature difference that occurs between the inside and outside of the cylindrical protocell as a result of inner chemical activity....

Mono Lake, located in the Eastern Sierras of California, is three times as salty as the ocean and has an alkaline pH of 10. Before this study, only two other species (other than bacteria and algae) were known to live in the lake—brine shrimp and diving flies. In this new work, the team discovered eight more species, all belonging to a class of microscopic worms called nematodes, thriving in and around Mono Lake....

West Lafayette, Indiana — A mission to a Martian moon could return with alien life, according to experts at Purdue University, but don’t expect the invasion scenario presented by summer blockbusters like “Men in Black 3” or “Prometheus.” “We are talking little green microbes, not little green men,” said Jay Melosh, a distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences and physics and aerospace engineering at Purdue. “A sample from the moon Phobos, which is much easier to reach than the Red Planet itself, would almost surely contain Martian material blasted off from large asteroid impacts....

The study is uncharted scientific territory because the spread of nanoplastics through the air is still largely unexplored. The result of Brunner’s research is the most accurate record of air pollution by nanoplastics ever made. To count the plastic particles, Brunner and his colleagues have developed a chemical method that determines the contamination of the samples with a mass spectrometer. Extreme conditions The scientists studied a small area at an altitude of 3106 meters at the top of the mountain “Hoher Sonnenblick” in the “Hohe Tauern” National Park in Austria....

Light changes matter in ways that shape our world. Photons trigger changes in proteins in the eye to enable vision; sunlight splits water into hydrogen and oxygen and creates chemicals through photosynthesis; light causes electrons to flow in the semiconductors that make up solar cells; and new devices for consumers, industry, and medicine operate with photons instead of electrons. But directly measuring how light manipulates matter on the atomic scale has never been possible, until now....

Scientists have been able to demonstrate for the first time that large numbers of quantum bits, or qubits, can be tuned to interact with each other while maintaining coherence for an unprecedentedly long time, in a programmable, solid-state superconducting processor. This breakthrough was made by researchers from Arizona State University and Zhejiang University in China, along with two theorists from the United Kingdom. Previously, this was only possible in Rydberg atom systems....

“Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and acute myocardial infarction or heart attack, is a major contributor,” said lead study author Safi U. Khan, M.D., M.S., a cardiology fellow at the DeBakey Heart and Vascular Institute at Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston. “The cardiovascular risks among adults younger than age 65 has become increasingly complex during the last two decades. Our study focused explicitly on premature deaths due to a heart attack to identify demographic and regional differences, which may help to inform targeted interventions....

Described in the March 25 issue of Nature, the NIST-led work is the first to compare three clocks based on different atoms, and the first to link the most advanced atomic clocks in different locations over the air. These atomic clock comparisons place the scientific community one step closer to meeting the guidelines for redefinition of the second. “These comparisons are really defining the state of the art for both fiber-based and free-space measurements — they are all close to 10 times more accurate than any clock comparisons using different atoms performed so far,” NIST physicist David Hume said....

What is the coldest place on Earth? It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night. Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U....

Determining the existence of the disease is crucial to planning for any outbreaks since Mexico is the fifth-largest producer of broccoli in the world and the primary supplier to the eastern United States and Canada. The detection method was developed by Legnara Padrón during COVID-19, which made the authors wonder what may transpire if plants were to get infected by a pandemic in the future. Working with cruciferous crop growers in Mexico, the approach comprised taking soil samples from three different types of fields: those that were actively producing cruciferous crops, those that had ceased producing cruciferous crops for up to a year, and those that had stopped....