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Astronomers have found evidence of hundreds of black holes in a galaxy 250 million light years away. The discovery, made with a worldwide network of radio telescopes, gives scientists a new way to find out how black holes are created. A team led by astronomers at Chalmers University of Technology and Onsala Space Observatory has been monitoring radio signals from the core of the galaxy Arp 220, which lies 250 million light-years from Earth....

Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are emerging multi-functional materials that are gradually finding their way out of the research labs and into a myriad of real-world applications. For example, MOFs can store dangerous gasses, catalyze chemical reactions, deliver drugs in controlled fashion, and may even be used in rechargeable batteries and solar cells. The team’s findings are described in the paper titled “The Advent of Electrically Conducting Double-Helical Metal–Organic Frameworks Featuring Butterfly-Shaped Electron-Rich π-Extended Tetrathiafulvalene Ligands,” which was published on March 18, 2020, as the cover article in Applied Materials & Interfaces, a journal published by the American Chemical Society....

Theoretical physicists developed a theory called loop quantum gravity in the 1990s that marries the laws of microscopic physics, or quantum mechanics, with gravity, which explains the dynamics of space and time. Ashtekar, Olmedos, and Singh’s new equations describe black holes in loop quantum gravity and showed that black hole singularity does not exist. “In Einstein’s theory, space-time is a fabric that can be divided as small as we want....

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, scientists from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea, and co-workers developed flexible and efficient transparent solar cells that have color-neutrality. Based on the silicon microwires embedded in the transparent polymer matrix, they demonstrated transparent, flexible, and even stretchable solar cells. This freestanding film was successfully utilized for building block of transparent solar cells....

The army has just handed out financial awards to private companies in hopes that they might develop better obscurants. Most large military hardware emits infrared radiation, which allows heat-seeking ordinances to track their location. When these large targets are surrounded by obscurant particles, their infrared shadow disappears into what’s called the fog of war. To deploy these obscurants, grenades are filled with bronze flakes and detonated near the object that should be hidden....

The Rosette Nebula is located in the Milky Way Galaxy roughly 5,000 light-years from Earth and is known for its rose-like shape and distinctive hole at its center. The nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium, and other ionized gases with several massive stars found in a cluster at its heart. Stellar winds and ionizing radiation from these massive stars affect the shape of the giant molecular cloud....

Although PCR is usually performed in a laboratory, which means test results aren’t immediately available, this new lab-on-a-chip can process and present results in a matter of minutes. The chip is made from silicon, the same material that is used to make electronic chips. Silicon itself is cheap, however, it is expensive to process into chips which requires massive, ‘extremely clean’ factories otherwise known as cleanrooms. To make the new lab-on-chip, the researchers developed a series of methods to produce the chips in a standard laboratory, cutting the costs and time they take to fabricate, potentially allowing them to be produced anywhere in the world....

Members of the same team that first described these off-target effects in human cells describe their new platform, called GUIDE-seq (Genome-wide Unbiased Identification of Double-stranded breaks Evaluated by Sequencing) in a report published in Nature Biotechnology. “GUIDE-seq is the first genome-wide method of sensitively detecting off-target DNA breaks induced by CRISPR-Cas nucleases that does not start with the assumption that these off-target sites resemble the targeted sites,” said J. Keith Joung, HMS associate professor of pathology at Mass General and senior author of the paper....

More than 350 years ago, the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke looked through a microscope at a thin slice of cork and discovered that it was made of small, box-like compartments, which he named “cells.” From that moment on, Hooke and countless inquisitive minds after him strove for a better view of these fundamental building blocks of life. And now, the window into the cellular world has become a lot clearer....

Just about every galaxy the size of our own Milky Way or larger contains a monster black hole at its center. Observations show galaxy mergers occur frequently in the universe, but so far no one has seen a merger of these giant black holes. “We know galaxies with central supermassive black holes combine all the time in the universe, yet we only see a small fraction of galaxies with two of them near their centers,” said Scott Noble, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

Scientists have been sifting through data gathered from observing the object’s quick pass in front of a star – an astronomical event known as an occultation – on June 3. More than 50 mission team members and collaborators set up telescopes across South Africa and Argentina, along a predicted track of the narrow shadow of MU69 that the occultation would create on Earth’s surface, aiming to catch a two-second glimpse of the object’s shadow as it raced across the Earth....

Both clonidine and dexmedetomidine are potent painkillers, but since they are so sedative, they are seldom used outside of hospitals. “We showed that it’s possible to separate the analgesic and sedative effects related to this receptor, said Brian Shoichet, Ph.D., professor in the School of Pharmacy, and one of four senior authors of the study, which appears in the Sept. 30, 2022, issue of Science. “That makes it a very promising target for drug development....

That’s been a challenge. In vitro models, like cells in a dish, have been too simple, and in vivo models — human brain tissue — too complex. Now, as reported in Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created a “just right” model of the BBB-brain interface using microfluidically linked organ chips that react to drugs like methamphetamine the same way the human brain does....

Water on Mars, in the form of brines, may not be as widespread as previously thought, according to a new study by researchers at the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences. Researchers combined data on brine evaporation rates, collected through experiments at the center’s Mars simulation chamber, with a global weather circulation model of the planet to create planetwide maps of where brines are most likely to be found....

The new species, Gunakadeit joseeae, is the most complete thalattosaur ever found in North America and has given paleontologists new insights about the thalattosaurs’ family tree, according to a paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports. Scientists found the fossil in Southeast Alaska in 2011. Thalattosaurs were marine reptiles that lived more than 200 million years ago, during the mid to late Triassic Period, when their distant relatives — dinosaurs — were first emerging....

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), built by SLAC for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, collects information on high-energy gamma rays from numerous sources in the sky. Among these are small, elusive objects called pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of times per second. Their name derives from the beams their magnetic fields produce as a result of this spin, which look like the pulsing beam of a lighthouse when, by chance, they happen to sweep across our field of view....

Called SHMOOSE, the protein is a tiny “microprotein” encoded by a newly discovered gene within the cell’s energy-producing mitochondria. A mutation within this gene partially inactivates the SHMOOSE microprotein and is linked to a 30% higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease across four different cohorts. According to the researchers, almost 25% of people of European ancestry have the mutated version of the protein. The research was published on September 21 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry....

A team of 70 scientists from the U.S., China, Australia and Japan today reports having sequenced and annotated the genome of the “sacred lotus,” which is believed to have a powerful genetic system that repairs genetic defects, and may hold secrets about aging successfully. The scientists sequenced more than 86 percent of the nearly 27,000 genes of the plant, Nelumbo nucifera, which is revered in China and elsewhere as a symbol of spiritual purity and longevity....

Norbert Stefan, Andreas Birkenfeld and Matthias Schulze summarize and discuss data from large and well-performed studies that investigated independent relationships of obesity with the severity of COVID-19. Thereby, they can disentangle the contribution of obesity, visceral fatness and impaired metabolic health for the course of COVID-19. In this respect they found convincing evidence that obesity and overt diabetes, but also visceral obesity and even mild hyperglycemia, represent important risk factors for the disease course....

With novel optoelectronic chips and a new partnership with a top silicon-chip manufacturer, MIT spinout Ayar Labs aims to increase speed and reduce energy consumption in computing, starting with data centers. Backed by years of research at MIT and elsewhere, Ayar has developed chips that move data around with light but compute electronically. The unique design integrates speedy, efficient optical communications — with components that transmit data using light waves — into traditional computer chips, replacing less efficient copper wires....