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An air of uncertainty descended on MIT’s campus in early March. Whispers and rumors about campus closing down swirled in the hallways. Students convened en masse on Killian Court to dance, hug, and cry as they were told they had until the end of the week to vacate campus. Within days, the Infinite Corridor’s usual stream of activity and noise was silenced. While MIT’s dorms and classrooms became unnervingly quiet, there was a thrum of activity among faculty and researchers....

Researchers at the Universities of Leeds and Chicago have uncovered an important mechanism behind the generation of astrophysical magnetic fields such as that of the Sun. Scientists have known since the 18th Century that the Sun regularly oscillates between periods of high and low solar activity in an 11-year cycle, but have been unable to fully explain how this cycle is generated. In the ‘Information Age’, it has become increasingly important to be able to understand the Sun’s magnetic activity, as it is the changes in its magnetic field that are responsible for ‘space weather’ phenomena, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections....

The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes that shook parts of Turkey and Syria on February 6, 2023, caused widespread destruction, some of which extended beyond urban areas. In the days since the earthquakes struck, many new landslides became visible in satellite images. The Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 acquired an image (above-right) that shows a group of small landslides along a valley east of Sarıseki, Türkiye, on February 14, 2023....

UMass Amherst researchers used remote sensing to quantify the previously underestimated erosion. More than one-third of the Corn Belt in the Midwest – nearly 30 million acres – has completely lost its carbon-rich topsoil, according to University of Massachusetts Amherst research that indicates the U.S. Department of Agriculture has significantly underestimated the true magnitude of farmland erosion. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, research conducted by UMass Amherst graduate student Evan Thaler, along with professors Isaac Larsen and Qian Yu in the department of geosciences, developed a method using satellite imagery to map areas in agricultural fields in the Corn Belt of the Midwestern U....

In a larger Context Camera image, the individual “cells” are about 5 to 10 kilometers wide. With HiRISE, we see much greater detail of these cells, like sand ripples that indicate wind erosion has played some role here. We also see distinctive exposures of bedrock that cut across the floor and wall of the cells. These resemble dykes, which are usually formed by volcanic activity. Additionally, the lack of impact craters suggests that the landscape, along with these features, have been recently reshaped by a process, or number of processes that may even be active today....

Supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun and usually reside at the center of massive galaxies. When dormant and not feeding on the gas and stars surrounding them, SMBHs emit very little light; the only way astronomers can detect them is through their gravitational influences on stars and gas in their vicinity. However, in the early universe, when SMBHs were rapidly growing, they were actively feeding – or accreting – materials at intensive rates and emitting an enormous amount of radiation – sometimes outshining the entire galaxy in which they reside, the researchers said....

Researchers from TU/e and the FOM Foundation have successfully made a ‘magnetic domain-wall ratchet’ memory, a computer memory that is built up from moving bits of magnetized areas. This memory potentially offers many advantages compared to standard hard disks, such as a higher speed, lower electricity consumption and much longer life. Using concentrated ion bundles the researchers have influenced the magnetic wires the bits move through, and they have successfully controlled bits at the nanometer scale and subsequently constructed a new memory....

Via the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, heralding in a new era for space exploration and utilization. While NASA is leading the Artemis program, international partnerships will play a key role in achieving a sustainable and robust presence on the Moon while preparing to conduct a historic human mission to Mars. With numerous countries and private sector players conducting missions and operations in cislunar space, it’s critical to establish a common set of principles to govern the civil exploration and use of outer space....

Named after one of the largest constellations in the night sky, Orion is the name given to the spacecraft that will carry the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. However, before NASA flies astronauts aboard, the spacecraft, powered by the new Space Launch System rocket, will travel tens of thousands of miles on a flight test around the Moon. Watch as teams at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida prepare Orion for that journey, outfitting the spacecraft with its necessary components as it moves along its path to the pad....

NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft captured this new image of Saturn with its wide-angle camera on December 2, 2016. The north pole of Saturn sits at the center of its own domain. Around it swirl the clouds, driven by the fast winds of Saturn. Beyond that orbits Saturn’s retinue of moons and the countless small particles that form the ring. Although the poles of Saturn are at the center of all of this motion, not everything travels around them in circles....

Scientists continue to analyze the latest data from Dawn as the spacecraft makes its way to its third mapping orbit. “The craters we find on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about the same size and density as Ceres. The features are pretty consistent with an ice-rich crust,” said Dawn science team member Paul Schenk, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston....

NASA has plans in the works to overcome huge challenges and send humans to Mars. In the meantime, we’ve been sending rovers, landers, and orbiters to the surface of the Red Planet, and developing technologies to dispatch more advanced robots to other solar system destinations, such as the Moon, asteroids, and Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Many locales include such obstacles as craggy cliffs, steep canyons, and slick ice covering a subsurface ocean....

NASA will launch four Earth science missions in 2022 to provide scientists with more information about fundamental climate systems and processes including extreme storms, surface water and oceans, and atmospheric dust. Scientists will discuss the upcoming missions at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) 2021 Fall Meeting, hosted in New Orleans between December 13 and 17. NASA has a unique view of our planet from space. NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites provide high-quality data on Earth’s interconnected environment, from air quality to sea ice....

The briefing will be held in James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, located at 300 E St. SW in Washington. NASA Television and the agency’s website will carry the briefing live. Participants in the briefing will be: Media and the public also may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA. For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, measures 3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers, across and is larger than the planet Mercury. Cassini scientists have been watching the moon’s south pole since a vortex appeared in its atmosphere in 2012. See PIA14919 and PIA14920 (images below) to learn more about this mass of swirling gas around the pole in the atmosphere of the moon....

Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt together with dental technicians have digitally analyzed modern human teeth using an engineering approach, finite element method, to evaluate the biomechanical behavior of teeth under realistic loading. They report results, showing that very widespread loss of dental material (enamel and dentine) at the base of the crown might be linked to the reduction of tooth wear in our industrialized societies....

“Metabolism” describes the body’s chemical changes that create the necessary ingredients for growth and overall health. Metabolites are the substances made and used during these metabolic processes—or, as a new discovery out of Scripps Research and its drug development arm, Calibr, indicates, they could also be potent molecules for treating severe diseases. Researchers used cutting-edge drug discovery technologies to uncover a metabolite that converts white fat cells (“bad” fat) to brown fat (“good” fat) cells....

Both positive and negative emotional experiences are stored particularly well in human memory. This phenomenon is important to our survival, since we need to remember dangerous situations in order to avoid them in the future. Previous studies have shown that a brain structure called the amygdala, which is important in the processing of emotions, plays a central role in this phenomenon. Emotions activate the amygdala, which in turn facilitates the storage of information in various areas of the cerebrum....

The first data describing this new direction for fighting COVID-19 were published today (June 17, 2020) in the journal Nano Letters. The “nanosponges” were developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego and tested by researchers at Boston University. The UC San Diego researchers call their nano-scale particles “nanosponges” because they soak up harmful pathogens and toxins. In lab experiments, both the lung cell and immune cell types of nanosponges caused the SARS-CoV-2 virus to lose nearly 90% of its “viral infectivity” in a dose-dependent manner....

The next generation of computers promises far greater power and faster processing speeds than today’s silicon-based based machines. These “quantum computers” — so-called because they would harness the unique quantum mechanical properties of atomic particles — could draw their computing power from a collection of super-cooled molecules. But chilling molecules to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the temperature at which they can be manipulated to store and transmit data, has proven to be a difficult challenge for scientists....