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Shadows on Earth can be mysterious and foreboding, but when they occur in space, they can convey information we otherwise could not know. In a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, nearly 1,300 light-years away, a young star’s game of shadow play is revealing secrets of its unseen planet-forming disk. The near-infrared vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the shadow cast by the fledgling star’s brilliant light being blocked by this disk....

NGC 5253 is one of the nearest of the known Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxies, and is located at a distance of about 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus. The most characteristic signature of these galaxies is that they harbor very active star-formation regions. This is in spite of their low dust content and comparative lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which are usually the basic ingredients for star formation....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been at the cutting edge of research into what happens to stars like our sun at the ends of their lives. One stage that stars pass through as they run out of nuclear fuel is called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage. This Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief but dramatic phase in a star’s life....

However, it is said that selection loses interest in our physical well-being by the time fertility declines. Our cells are more susceptible to dangerous mutations after menopause. This often means that mortality occurs quickly after fertility stops in the overwhelming majority of animals. This places humans (as well as certain whale species) in an exclusive club: creatures who live on long after their reproductive careers are over. How can we endure living in selection’s shadow for decades?...

For nearly 30 years, researchers have used satellite images of Earth at night to study human activity, and it is well established that these images – commonly referred to as nighttime radiance or nighttime lights – can help map issues such as economic growth, poverty, and inequality, particularly in areas where data is scarce.Unlit locations at night in underdeveloped nations often imply low development, whereas brilliantly lighted areas suggest highly developed places, such as capital cities with rich infrastructure....

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Captures Rarely-Seen Prelude to Supernova The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star – among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly-detectable stars known – was one of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022. Webb shows the star, WR 124, in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Massive stars race through their lifecycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers....

Mount Sinai researchers have found an important clue to a rare but serious aftereffect of COVID-19 in children, known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children or MIS-C. The researchers reported that RNA sequencing of blood samples from the Mount Sinai COVID-19 Biobank led to the discovery that specific infection-fighting cells of the immune system are downregulated in children with MIS-C, and that this is associated with a sustained inflammatory response, a hallmark of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19....

Telemetry from Flight Six shows that the first 150-meter leg of the flight went off without a hitch. But toward the end of that leg, something happened: Ingenuity began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern. This behavior persisted throughout the rest of the flight. Prior to landing safely, onboard sensors indicated the rotorcraft encountered roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption....

Without urgent action superbugs will kill 22,000 Australians a year by 2040A comprehensive national database is needed to capture infection rates and arrest the spreadSome AMR deaths may have been erroneously attributed to COVID-19 Superbugs threaten to be the next great health crisis of our time, claiming many more lives than COVID-19, and a comprehensive national infection database is urgently needed to arrest the spread, Monash University researchers say. On the eve of World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week (November 18-24), Monash infectious diseases experts said a register that systemically captures all patient-level data, would spotlight the growing superbug emergency and put it firmly on the public health agenda....

Phosphorus, present in our DNA and cell membranes, is an essential element for life. But how it arrived on the early Earth is something of a mystery. Astronomers have now traced the journey of phosphorus from star-forming regions to comets using the combined powers of ALMA and the European Space Agency’s probe Rosetta. “Life appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago, but we still do not know the processes that made it possible,” says Víctor Rivilla, the lead author of a new study published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

The Atacama Desert is one of the Earth’s environments that comes closest to the parched Martian surface. But the Atacama isn’t uniformly dry. When traveling from the relatively less dry southern end of the desert in central Chile to its extremely dry center in northern Chile, the annual precipitation shifts from a few millimeters of rain per year to only a few millimeters of rain per decade. This non-uniformly dry environment provides an opportunity to search for life at decreasing levels of precipitation....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jellyfish capture food particles with their long tentacles, which are equipped with repeating patterns of sticky structures. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston used that design to build a microfluidic chip coated with long strands of repeating DNA sequences that bind to specific proteins or cancer cells as they float by in the blood....

Researchers at the University of Münster have now developed an interface that couples light sources for single photons with nanophotonic networks. This interface consists of so-called photonic crystals, i.e. nanostructured dielectric materials that can enhance a certain wavelength range when light passes through. Such photonic crystals are used in many areas of research, but they had not previously been optimized for this type of interface. The researchers took particular care to achieve this feat in a way that allows for replicating the photonic crystals straightforwardly by using established nanofabrication processes....

What makes modern humans unique? It is a question that has long been a driving force for researchers. Therefore, fascinating insights are revealed by comparisons with our closest relatives, the Neanderthals. The increase in brain size and increased neuron production during brain development are considered to be primary factors for the increased cognitive abilities that occurred during human evolution. However, while both Neanderthals and modern humans develop brains of similar size, very little is known about whether modern human and Neanderthal brains may have differed in terms of their neuron production during development....

Researchers from the Salk Institute studying how plants evolved the abilities to make these natural chemicals have uncovered how an enzyme called chalcone isomerase evolved to enable plants to make products vital to their own survival. The researchers’ hope is that this knowledge will inform the manufacture of products that are beneficial to humans, including medications and improved crops. The study appeared in the print version of ACS Catalysis on September 6, 2019....

The latest study, which featured experiments at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), could help explain the presence of pyrene, which is a chemical compound known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, and similar compounds in some meteorites. A team of scientists, including researchers from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, participated in the study, published March 5 in the Nature Astronomy journal. The study was led by scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and also involved theoretical chemists at Florida International University....

Analysis of samples taken to test for respiratory viruses over the past five years suggests that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 was associated with a large drop in circulation of other common respiratory viruses during the first wave. The study, presented at the recent ESCMID Conference on Coronavirus Disease (ECCVID), is by Dr. Stephen Poole, BRC Clinical Research Fellow from the Southampton NIHR BRC, Southampton, UK, and colleagues. Traditionally, respiratory virus associated disease predominantly affects those with underlying lung diseases....

This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. It is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 meters long and 7 meters tall. “By observing in detail the myriads of stars surrounding the center of the Milky Way we can learn a lot more about the formation and evolution of not only our galaxy, but also spiral galaxies in general,” explains Roberto Saito (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de Valparaíso and The Milky Way Millennium Nucleus, Chile), lead author of the study....

Twenty years ago, a handful of computing experts with a hand-me-down Cray computing cluster began the journey of building the Texas Advanced Computing Center, or TACC, at The University of Texas at Austin into a research organization that today stands at the pinnacle of academic supercomputing. On September 30, 2021, the center and its longest partners — the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Dell Technologies — celebrated the milestone with remarks on the growing importance of advanced computing and TACC’s role powering discoveries across science and engineering....