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Dr. Catherine Frieman recently excavated an untouched ancient barrow near the town of Looe in South East Cornwall. Her 14-day-dig over Easter was the first time such a site in the area has been excavated to modern archaeological standards. She said when digging began, local farmers told her they’d plowed the field in their childhood, so she didn’t expect the site to be so well preserved. “We were so excited to find such a lot of archaeology on the site despite scores of generations of plowing, but to find an intact clay urn buried 4,000 years ago just 25 centimeters beneath the surface is nothing short of a miracle,” said Dr....

The universe can be a violent place. Stars die or collide with each other and black holes devour everything that gets too close. These and other events produce flashes of light in the night sky that astronomers call transients. The Zwicky Transient Facility is currently one of the largest transient surveys astronomers use to study the ever-changing universe. The survey is also a treasure trove of rare, strange, and unusual events that often astronomers discover by chance....

Quasars, which are powered by the feeding frenzies of colossal supermassive black holes, are the most energetic objects in the Universe. They occur when gas in the superheated accretion disk around a supermassive black hole is inexorably drawn inwards, shedding energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted by quasars is enormous, with the most massive examples easily outshining entire galaxies. Today, an international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar known to date....

This is amongst the largest examinations to measure the general composition of materials in other planetary systems, and begins to allow scientists to draw more general conclusions on how they are forged, and what this might mean for finding Earth-like bodies elsewhere. “Most of the building blocks we have looked at in other planetary systems have a composition broadly similar to that of the Earth,” said researcher Dr. Siyi Xu of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, who was presenting the work at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston....

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major. This animation shows the location of galaxy GN-z11, which is the farthest galaxy ever seen....

A team of international astronomers, including Professor Albert Zijlstra from the University of Manchester, predict it will turn into a massive ring of luminous, interstellar gas and dust, known as a planetary nebula. A planetary nebula marks the end of 90% of all stars active lives and traces the star’s transition from a red giant to a degenerate white dwarf. But, for years, scientists weren’t sure if the sun in our galaxy would follow the same fate: it was thought to have too low mass to create a visible planetary nebula....

High-energy neutrinos are hard-to-catch particles that scientists think are created by the most powerful events in the cosmos, such as galaxy mergers and material falling onto supermassive black holes. They travel at speeds just shy of the speed of light and rarely interact with other matter, allowing them to travel unimpeded across distances of billions of light-years. The neutrino was discovered by an international team of scientists using the National Science Foundation’s IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station....

The X-ray flare was first detected by Integral on 13 August 2017 from an unknown source in the direction of the crowded center of our Milky Way. The sudden detection triggered a slew of follow-up observations in the following weeks to pin down the culprit. The observations revealed a strongly magnetized and slowly rotating neutron star that had likely just begun to feed on material from a neighboring red giant star....

Most stages of astronomical evolution happen over timescales far longer than a human lifetime, and even far longer than humanity’s entire history. Supernova explosions are spectacular exceptions to that rule. Several different pathways can lead to a supernova explosion, one of which is the death of a supermassive star. After a supermassive star has begun to die, it goes through various stages of fusing different elements, forming a red supergiant....

Wadden Sea noises The researchers studied eight harbor seal pups—1 to 3 weeks old—that were being held in a rehabilitation center (the Dutch Seal Center Pieterburen) before being released back into the wild. To investigate whether the pups could adapt their voices to noises in the environment, the team first recorded noises from the nearby Wadden Sea. For several days, the sea noises were then played back to the pups, in three degrees of loudness (varying from no sound to 65 decibels), but with a similar tone height to that of the seal pups’ calls....

On a Friday afternoon this past December, more than 130 scientists gathered on a Zoom meeting to talk about omicron, the latest SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern, which has ripped across the globe with ferocious infectivity. The collection of names and faces on the call spanned disciplines—virology, epidemiology, infectious diseases, immunology, computational biology, critical care medicine; it spanned institutions—Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts; it spanned countries—the United States, South Africa, Botswana, England, and India....

The blast came from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away. It released five times more energy than the previous record holder. Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from the Curtin University node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, said the event was extraordinarily energetic. “We’ve seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive,” she said....

The planetary system around star HR8799 is remarkably similar to our Solar System. A research team led by astronomers from the University of Groningen and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research has used this similarity to model the delivery of materials by asteroids, comets and other minor bodies within the system. Their simulation shows that the four gas planets receive material delivered by minor bodies, just like in our Solar System....

Brain changes in autism are comprehensive throughout the cerebral cortex, not only confined to particular regions traditionally considered to affect language and social behavior. These are the findings of a new study, led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which substantially refines scientists’ understanding of how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) progresses at the molecular level. Published on November 2 in the journal Nature, the study represents a comprehensive effort to characterize ASD at the molecular level....

Yale researchers using a new brain imaging analysis method have confirmed that smoking cigarettes activates a dopamine-driven pleasure and satisfaction response differently in men compared to women. The study, to be published in The Journal of Neuroscience, used a new way of analyzing PET (positron emission tomography) scans to create “movies” of the dopamine response during smoking to demonstrate for the first time that smoking-induced dopamine activation occurs in a different brain region and much faster in nicotine-dependent men than women....

Pathogenic bacteria without their virulent factors could be rendered harmless and eliminated by the human immune system. That’s the goal that a group of researchers have been striving for, and they recently managed to block the Brucella bacteria from bonding with its host. The scientists published their findings in the journal Chemistry & Biology. Infectious diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria have been problematic, but antibiotics have been able to keep them in check....

Researcher Brooke Kidner has analyzed the frequency and acoustics of belching while speaking. By zeroing in on the specific pitches and sound qualities of a midspeech burp in “Rick and Morty,” the work takes aim at finding what latent linguistic meaning might be found in the little-studied gastrointestinal grumbles. “There have not been any serious attempts to acoustically or phonetically describe the characteristics of belching in over 60 years,” Kidner said....

Squamous cell lung cancer kills more people each year than breast, colorectal or prostate cancer, ranking second only to lung adenocarcinoma in the number of deaths it causes. But unlike adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma has no treatments aimed at the specific genetic alterations that drive it. This may be about to change. A new paper published online in Nature holds out hope that people with the second most common type of lung cancer may one day benefit from targeted therapies that have transformed treatments for patients with other types of lung cancer....

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars. UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the “Sabatier reaction” from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it’s a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit....

Drugs currently available to treat AD have limited therapeutic capacity. At a time when both the human and monetary costs of the disease are projected to rise dramatically in the coming decades, there is a critical need to provide individuals with readily-deployable strategies that can decrease the likelihood of acquiring the disease or slow its progression. Researchers, therefore, investigated whether exercise training in asymptomatic individuals harboring risk for AD improves markers associated with AD....