A new European-led telescope could map the dusty, hidden half of the universe, all without using fossil fuels. If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the center of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of dust that make it hard to see what is going on.
Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.
As space missions travel farther from Earth, spacecraft must increasingly be able to process and store their own data. Soon, artificial intelligence (AI) could be the primary tool for handling this growing volume of information.
A study of 66 million GPS mobility records shows that racial minorities are not as well served by transit as white New Yorkers. Publishing in PNAS Nexus, Yong Li and colleagues mapped the number of job sites, banks, health care facilities, parks, and schools that could be reached in an hour or less via buses and trains from a particular neighborhood.
While neutrinos are some of the most abundant particles in the universe, they remain among the least understood. One of the biggest puzzles is their mass: although experiments have shown that neutrinos must have some mass, pinning down exactly how much has proven extraordinarily difficult.
Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae—one of the closest and best studied globular clusters. The finding is reported in the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Cosmologists have long struggled to determine whether the universe’s accelerating expansion is being driven by a simple cosmological constant, or whether dark energy’s influence is evolving over time. In a new analysis published in Physical Review D, Samsuzzaman Afroz and Suvodip Mukherjee at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, have identified a subtle impact on the inference of the nature of dark energy, due to a tiny mismatch between a fundamental cosmological distance relation and two key datasets used to measure the properties of dark energy.
Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, published in the journal Icarus, showcases one of the reasons why—many small asteroids are spinning ridiculously fast.
Tidal wetlands are critical, yet vulnerable ecosystems. Tidal marshes, mangrove forests, and tidal flats support biodiversity, protect against flooding and storm surges, sequester carbon, and improve water quality. Due to human development and climate change, tidal wetland areas have been shrinking globally. A new study using 40 years of satellite data shows that this loss has been accelerating in the U.S. and that this acceleration is being increasingly driven by extreme weather events.
A joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted off into orbit Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield.
Before Smile can begin studying how Earth responds to the streams of particles and bursts of radiation from the sun, the spacecraft had to complete an extraordinary journey here on Earth.
As the global push toward a carbon-neutral society accelerates, understanding how microorganisms metabolize methanol with high efficiency has become increasingly critical. At the University of Tsukuba, researchers have applied cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to resolve the high-resolution three-dimensional structure of a key methanol metabolizing enzyme in yeast. Their work reveals that enzymes with nearly identical overall architectures can nonetheless perform distinct functions depending on environmental conditions.
Perovskites are a class of materials with a unique crystal structure that suits applications such as fabricating solar cells, light-emitting diodes and transistors. However, molecules in thin layers often cannot arrange themselves properly because the process proceeds too quickly. Now, an international research team led by Tomasz Marszalek from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has developed a new approach to controlling low-cost solution processing, thereby improving the formation of well-ordered perovskite layers and enabling their broader application in optoelectronic devices. Their paper is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In December 2023, scientists looking at Mars data stumbled across something completely unexpected—observations of an atmospheric effect never before seen in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. Using instruments aboard NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission, scientists identified a phenomenon known to occur in Earth’s magnetosphere, where charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out of a tube along magnetic structures called flux tubes.
Ghost forests, the cemetery-like groupings of dead trees killed by saltwater intrusion, have become haunting symbols of sea level rise overtaking land along the Mid-Atlantic coast. But a new study published in Nature Sustainability, led by William & Mary’s Batten School & VIMS, points to even more dramatic land losses in the region’s coastal farmlands, where the rate of marsh encroachment is happening nearly twice as fast.
As misinformation spreads faster than ever across digital platforms, new research highlights growing risks to public understanding of planetary defense, an area of science that deals with the threat from asteroid and comet impacts, with potentially global consequences.
Looking back at 14 years of Hubble telescope data for Jupiter’s moon Europa has given Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists a better understanding of its tenuous atmosphere. The findings have cast doubt on previous evidence suggesting that the icy moon intermittently discharges faint water plumes from a presumed subsurface ocean.
Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals,” these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but recent spectral analysis suggests they better match the space-weathered lunar silicates that make up the moon’s surface. As such, there has been an ongoing debate about whether these cosmic stalkers are actually visitors from the belt or blasted pieces of the moon. A new study, published in Icarus, from researchers Elisa Alessi and Robert Jedicke provides strong hints that the belt is the more likely source—but pretty soon we’ll get a definitive answer from a spacecraft.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer regions and dots the inky-black background.
They rank among the darkest and coldest places in the solar system: Hundreds of lunar craters, many of them at the moon’s south pole, never receive direct sunlight and lie in permanent shadow. That’s exactly why physicist Jun Ye and his colleagues suggest that these craters are the perfect place to build a critical component for an ultrastable laser.
