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Peering into the thousands of frozen layers inside Greenland’s ice sheet is like looking back in time. Each layer provides a record of what Earth’s climate was like at the dawn of civilization, or during the last ice age, or during an ancient period of warmth similar to the one we experience today. Credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio This new map allows scientists to determine the age of large swaths of Greenland’s ice, extending ice core data for a better picture of the ice sheet’s history....

The cat’s veterinary experience includes their journey to the clinic, their interactions with team members, the social environment (other animals in the waiting and hospitalization areas), as well as the physical environment of the clinic. These aspects are all addressed in two ‘Cat Friendly Guidelines’[1,2] published jointly by the International Society of Feline Medicine (ISFM) and the American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP). They appear in a Cat Friendly Special Issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (JFMS) and are available, together with a suite of supporting information and resources, at bit....

A newly published study from MIT researchers details how the behavior of graphene can be drastically different when sheets of graphene are placed on substrates made of different materials, finding that graphene is strongly affected by the electrical fields of atoms in the material beneath it. When you look at a gift-wrapped present, the basic properties of the wrapping paper — say, its colors and texture — are not generally changed by the nature of the gift inside....

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10....

Metal is opaque, so the current techniques use metal oxides, most often indium tin oxide — a near-critical rare earth metal — as the conductive contact. Because supplies of this rare earth metal are limited, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have turned to ordered metal nanowire meshes that provide high transmissivity (due to the small diameters of the nanowires), high electrical connectivity (due to the many contact points in the mesh) and use more common elements....

The use of power-hungry air conditioning systems is projected to increase significantly as the world gets warmer, putting a strain on existing power grids and bypassing many locations with little or no reliable electric power. Now, an innovative system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers a way to use passive cooling to preserve food crops and supplement conventional air conditioners in buildings. It has no need for power and just a small need for water....

Researchers from the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, alongside collaborators from Biobot Analytics, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and MIT, have successfully developed an innovative, open-source molecular detection method that is able to detect and quantify the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) variant of SARS-CoV-2. The breakthrough paves the way for rapid, inexpensive surveillance of other SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater....

After two years of quiet, Kilauea, Hawaii’s youngest and most active volcano, is erupting again. In the early days of the volcano’s latest eruption, water that had pooled in the volcano’s summit crater (Halema‘uma‘u) since July 2019 was replaced by a lava lake. The water boiled off on December 20, 2020, after the new eruption opened three fissures on the walls of the crater and poured lava into the lake....

Research shows how humans can shield machine learning from manipulation. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are poised to supercharge productivity in the knowledge economy, transforming the future of work. But they’re far from perfect. And in other business contexts, there’s another potential source of bias. It comes when outside individuals stand to benefit from bias predictions, and work to strategically alter the inputs. In other words, they’re gaming the ML systems....

Inhibitory brain stimulation allows better memorization by reducing the power of beta-waves in the brain. Memories of past events and experiences are what define us as who we are, and yet the ability to form these episodic memories declines with age, certain dementias, and brain injury. However, a study publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology on September 28th by Mircea van der Plas and Simon Hanslmayr from the University of Glasgow and colleagues, shows that low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation—or rTMS—delivered over the left prefrontal cortex of the brain can improve memory performance by reducing the power of low frequency brain waves as memories form....

Orbiting a mere 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars, Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Mars’ gravity is drawing in Phobos, the larger of its two moons, by about 6.6 feet (2 meters) every hundred years. Scientists expect the moon to be pulled apart in 30 to 50 million years. “We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves,” said Terry Hurford of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

The striking feature in this image, acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 19, 2014, is a boulder-covered landslide along a canyon wall. Landslides occur when steep slopes fail, sending a mass of soil and rock to flow downhill, leaving behind a scarp at the top of the slope. The mass of material comes to rest when it reaches shallower slopes, forming a lobe of material that ends in a well-defined edge called a toe....

Most of the smoke originated from the August Complex fire, which was burning in Mendocino National Forest. By September 2, that fire had burned more than 261,000 acres (408 square miles/1,060 square kilometers) and was 20 percent contained. NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.

The new approach to wing construction could afford greater flexibility in the design and manufacturing of future aircraft. The new wing design was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and is described today in a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, co-authored by research engineer Nicholas Cramer at NASA Ames in California; MIT alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM ’07 PhD ’12, now at NASA Ames; Benjamin Jenett, a graduate student in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and eight others....

NASA’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), aboard the Aqua satellite, senses emitted infrared and microwave radiation from Earth. The information is used to map such atmospheric phenomena as temperature, humidity, and cloud amounts and heights. In the AIRS imagery of Dorian, captured during the afternoon (local time) of August 29, 2019, the large purple area indicates very cold clouds carried high into the atmosphere by deep thunderstorms. These clouds are also associated with heavy rainfall....

The Japanese company Murata has developed the world’s smallest millimeter-scale monolithic ceramic capacitor that measures 0.25 mm × 0.125 mm. The volume of this new capacitor is approximately 25% of the predominant monolithic capacitor presently used in smartphones. Monolithic ceramic capacitors are assembled into many different kinds of devices. The latest smartphones use 400 to 500 each. Volumetric efficiency is a key factor in the product design of mobile devices....

The sprawling 11,500-year-old stone Göbekli Tepe complex in southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, is the earliest known temple in human history and one of the most important discoveries of Neolithic research. Researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority have now used architectural analysis to discover that geometry informed the layout of Göbekli Tepe’s impressive round stone structures and enormous assembly of limestone pillars, which they say were initially planned as a single structure....

The team chose to restore the most heavily used Hubble instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, which represents more than a third of the spacecraft’s observing time. Engineers also began preparing changes to the instrument parameters, while testing the changes on ground simulators. These changes would allow the instruments to handle several missed synchronization messages while continuing to operate normally if they occur in the future. These changes will first be applied to another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to further protect its sensitive far-ultraviolet detector....

Over the last several months, key members of flight control teams working from NASA’s Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers and SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, simulated different phases of the upcoming mission while the Demo-2 astronaut crew practiced procedures from inside a realistic simulator of Crew Dragon. “The simulations were a great opportunity to practice procedures and to coordinate decision-making for the mission management team, especially with respect to weather,” said Michael Hess, manager of Operations Integration for CCP....

Weather forecasting models have gotten much better at predicting the future track of a hurricane or typhoon, but they haven’t improved at predicting its maximum wind speed, which scientists call intensity. That’s because these tropical giants are steered by outside forces, such as regional winds, but their intensity depends on forces within each storm. And while many satellites can see the external winds, they can’t see through a hurricane’s thick clouds and rain....