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There might be a quadrillion tons of diamonds 100 miles below Earth’s surface. But the farthest we’ve traveled is 7 miles down, so how could we know that? Video Transcript: There’s apparently a quadrillion tons of diamonds 100 miles below Earth’s surface. But we’ve never been that far down, so how do we know there are diamonds there? We should really start by asking how do we know what’s hundreds of miles below earth’s surface in the first place?...

NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team transported the motor segments to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), and will use a crane to lift the booster segments and stack them one by one on the mobile launcher. The bottom section of the boosters, known as the aft assemblies, were completed in November and moved to the VAB, and the first of the two pieces was placed on the mobile launcher November 21....

It is now evident that complex diseases, such as cancer, often require effective drug combinations to make any significant therapeutic impact. As the drugs in these combination therapies become increasingly specific to molecular targets, designing effective drug combinations as well as choosing the right drug combination for the right patient becomes more difficult. Artificial intelligence is having a positive impact on drug development and personalized medicine. With the ability to efficiently analyze small datasets that focus on the specific disease of interest, QPOP, and other small dataset-based AI platforms can rationally design optimal drug combinations that are effective and based on real experimental data and not mechanistic assumptions or predictive modeling....

MIT researchers are employing novel machine-learning techniques to improve the quality of life for patients by reducing toxic chemotherapy and radiotherapy dosing for glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is a malignant tumor that appears in the brain or spinal cord, and prognosis for adults is no more than five years. Patients must endure a combination of radiation therapy and multiple drugs taken every month. Medical professionals generally administer maximum safe drug doses to shrink the tumor as much as possible....

Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of a few to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the “Local Group,” a band of about fifty galaxies whose other large member is the Andromeda Galaxy about 2.3 million light-years away. The closest large cluster of galaxies to us is the Virgo Cluster, about 50 million light-years away, with about 2000 members. The space between the galaxies in clusters is filled with very hot gas – its temperature is of order ten million kelvin, or even higher....

An international team of astronomers, led by Dr. Nikolay Nikolov from the University of Exeter, have found that the atmosphere of the ‘hot Saturn’ WASP-96b is cloud-free. Using Europe’s 8.2m Very Large Telescope in Chile, the team studied the atmosphere of WASP-96b when the planet passed in front of its host star. This enabled the team to measure the decrease of starlight caused by the planet and its atmosphere, and thereby determine the planet’s atmospheric composition....

In new study, astronomers detail the discovery of a gamma-ray burst without a radio afterglow. Astronomers led by a Curtin University researcher have discovered a new population of exploding stars that “switch off” their radio transmissions before collapsing into a Black Hole. These exploding stars use all of their energy to emit one last strong beam of highly energetic radiation – known as a gamma-ray burst – before they die....

This new picture from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory shows the remarkable super star cluster Westerlund 1. This exceptionally bright cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Ara (The Altar). It contains hundreds of very massive and brilliant stars, all of which are just a few million years old — babies by stellar standards. But our view of this cluster is hampered by gas and dust that prevents most of the visible light from the cluster’s stars from getting to Earth....

Using a supercomputer, the researchers integrated the orbits of the sun and its planets forward in time for 10,000 years. After that, they traced the orbits back in time while launching asteroids from the Earth’s surface. During the backwards calculation, they included the asteroids in the simulations in order to study their orbital distributions at today’s date. In this way, they acquired a database of hypothetical asteroids for which the researchers knew that they would land on the Earth’s surface....

We now know that this region is brimming with roving stars, interstellar dust clouds, and a large reservoir of both phenomenally hot and comparatively colder gases. These gases are expected to orbit the black hole in a vast accretion disk that extends a few tenths of a light-year from the black hole’s event horizon. Until now, however, astronomers have been able to image only the tenuous, hot portion of this flow of accreting gas, which forms a roughly spherical flow and showed no obvious rotation....

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and from the University of Cologne, successfully identified two titanium oxides in the extended atmosphere around a giant star. The object VY Canis Major is one of the largest stars in the known universe and close to the end of its life. The detection was made using telescope arrays in the USA and in France....

In June of this year, supernova iPTF13bvn, surprised astrophysicists by revealing its parentage. To date, Type Ib supernovae have appeared to come from nowhere. Type Ib supernovae explosions appear in surveys, but a search back through the archived data has so far resulted in no evidence of a progenitor, likely because they are simply too faint. A recently documented search for progenitors on a dozen Type Ib supernovae resulted in a dozen non-detections....

These halo stars are grouped together in giant structures that orbit the center of our galaxy, above and below the flat disk of the Milky Way. Researchers thought they may have formed from debris left behind by smaller galaxies that invaded the Milky Way in the past. But in a study published today in the journal Nature, astronomers now have compelling evidence showing that some of these halo structures actually originate from the Milky Way’s disk itself, but were kicked out....

Some like it hot, but for creating new stars, a cool cosmic environment is ideal. As a new study suggests, a surge of warm gas into a nearby galaxy — left over from the devouring of a separate galaxy — has extinguished star formation by agitating the available chilled gas. The unique findings illustrate a new dimension to galaxy evolution, and come courtesy of the European Space Agency’s Herschel space observatory, in which NASA played a key role, and NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes....

“It’s not Swiss watch precision,” said Professor Gerhardt Meurer from the UWA node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). “But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way around.” Professor Meurer said that by using simple maths, you can show all galaxies of the same size have the same average interior density....

Most stars in our Universe die of natural causes. They either blow off their outer shells, or simply cool down due to fuel shortage, or they could go out with a bang in a giant supernova explosion. But stars living in the inner region of their galaxy might not be so lucky. They are in danger of getting torn into slim filaments by the supermassive black hole that lurks in the center of most galaxies....

Such an event has only been hinted at so far, but scientists at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and Northwestern University in the US, believe we are getting close to tracking down the first of these so-called ‘hierarchical’ black holes. In a review paper, published in Nature Astronomy, Dr. Davide Gerosa, of the University of Birmingham, and Dr. Maya Fishbach of Northwestern University, suggest that recent theoretical findings together with astrophysical modeling and recorded gravitational wave data will enable scientists to accurately interpret gravitational wave signals from these events....

This observation is among the most demanding analyses carried out by ATLAS so far. Siegfried Bethke, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Physics and former Chairman of the ATLAS Collaboration Board, explains why: “The LHC employs very high energies to force protons into collision. These collisions produce huge amounts of b quarks. It’s an enormous challenge to separate the quarks that Higgs boson decays generate from all the others in this sea of b quarks – it’s even worse than trying to find a needle in the famous haystack!...

The study, published in Cancer Epidemiology, found a link between the occurrence of advanced-stage prostate cancer and a heavy intake of beer over a lifetime. Specifically, the study determined that drinking more than 63 beers a year over a period of 30 to 45 years increased the risk of developing advanced-stage prostate cancer by 37 to 46 percent, depending on the quantity consumed. The study is based on a sample of 3,927 men living in Greater Montreal, with an average age of 64 years....

Testing devices have been improved using different geometries in the testing chamber, and more recently, better results have been achieved using information from rheological testing coupled with results from other tests, such as inner visualization techniques and ultrasonic imaging. But traditional methods have been unable to produce information about time-dependent properties. In a study published this week in Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, Taiki Yoshida, Yuji Tasaka and Peter Fischer introduce an updated method that can measure linear viscoelasticity and phase lag simultaneously in an opaque liquid....