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Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980....

Quasars are very bright, distant and active supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Typically located at the centers of galaxies, they feed on infalling matter and unleash fantastic torrents of radiation. Among the brightest objects in the universe, a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined, and its jets and winds shape the galaxy in which it resides....

Wildfires have been burning across the state of California for weeks – some of them becoming larger complexes as different fires merge. One of those was the August Complex Fire, which reportedly began as 37 distinct fires caused by lightning strikes in northern California on August 17. That fire is still burning over a month later. The August Complex Fire and others this fire season have been sending far-reaching plumes of wildfire smoke into the atmosphere that worsen air quality in California and beyond....

Once you reach your fifties, you may anticipate some health changes, such as the beginning of bone loss. You may not expect such challenges in your prime—that is, unless you suffered from osteoporosis, limited mobility or were an astronaut. Scientists have known since the early days of space flight that microgravity negatively affects bone density at an advanced rate. Examining this consequence of living in space provides researchers the opportunity for accelerated study of bone health....

Neandertals are known to have used tools, but the extent to which they were able to exploit coastal resources has been questioned. In this study, Villa and colleagues explored artifacts from the Neandertal archaeological cave site of Grotta dei Moscerini in Italy, one of two Neandertal sites in the country with an abundance of hand-modified clam shells, dating back to around 100,000 years ago. The authors examined 171 modified shells, most of which had been retouched to be used as scrapers....

On May 29, an asteroid the size of a bus came whizzing past Earth at 10 times the speed of a fired bullet. The near-miss asteroid, named 2012 KT42 — or “KT42” for short — streaked across the orbits of weather and television satellites, 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, making it the sixth-closest asteroid approach on record. While the object had little chance of colliding with Earth, its approach gave scientists an opportunity to run a rapid-response program — or as MIT’s Richard Binzel calls it, an asteroid-tracking “fire drill” — to gain as much information as possible from the incoming space rock....

The images are the first ever made of the Sun with a facility where ESO is a partner. The results are an important expansion of the range of observations that can be used to probe the physics of our nearest star. The ALMA antennas had been carefully designed so they could image the Sun without being damaged by the intense heat of the focused light. The ALMA telescope has been used to study the Sun for the first time....

Scientists have created a new way to detect the proteins that make up the pandemic coronavirus, as well as antibodies against it. They designed protein-based biosensors that glow when mixed with components of the virus or specific COVID-19 antibodies. This breakthrough could enable faster and more widespread testing in the near future. The research appears in Nature. To diagnose coronavirus infection today, most medical laboratories rely on a technique called RT-PCR, which amplifies genetic material from the virus so that it can be seen....

The studies indicate that the quasar — a galaxy harboring a black hole 300 million times more massive than the Sun — has a jet of fast-moving particles only about 1,000 years old. While other quasars have been found at its distance and beyond, it is the first found at such a distance with the strong radio emission indicating an active jet. Only a small fraction of quasars have such jets....

What might look like a colossal jet shooting away from a galaxy turns out to be an illusion. New data from the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) reveal that two galaxies, one lying behind the other, have been masquerading as one. In a new image highlighting the chance alignment, radio data from the VLA are blue and infrared observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are yellow and orange, respectively....

Jonathan Boreyko, an associate professor in mechanical engineering, has developed an aircraft thermal management technology that stands ready for adaptation into other areas. The research was published in Advanced Functional Materials on August 18, 2020. Boreyko was the recipient of a Young Investigator Research Program award in 2016, given by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This award funded the development of planar bridging-droplet thermal diodes, a novel approach to thermal management....

This year, astronomers around the world have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of X-ray astronomy. Few objects better illustrate the progress of the field in the past half-century than the supernova remnant known as SN 1006. When the object we now call SN 1006 first appeared on May 1, 1006 A.D., it was far brighter than Venus and visible during the daytime for weeks. Astronomers in China, Japan, Europe, and the Arab world all documented this spectacular sight....

Juno snapped the new pics of the most iconic feature of the solar system’s largest planetary inhabitant during its Monday (July 10) flyby. The images of the Great Red Spot were downlinked from the spacecraft’s memory on Tuesday and placed on the mission’s JunoCam website Wednesday morning. “For hundreds of years scientists have been observing, wondering and theorizing about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio....

The world’s fastest data transmission rate has been achieved by a team of University College London engineers who reached an internet speed a fifth faster than the previous record. Working with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, the research team led by Dr. Lidia Galdino (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering), achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second (178,000,000 megabits a second) – a speed at which it would be possible to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second....

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have significantly boosted the output from a system that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions, using heat from the sun or another source. The system, which builds on a design initially developed three years ago at MIT by members of the same team, brings the process closer to something that could become a practical water source for remote regions with limited access to water and electricity....

This week in the journal Frontiers, researchers describe a single function that accurately describes all existing available data on active cases and deaths — and predicts forthcoming peaks. The tool uses q-statistics, a set of functions and probability distributions developed by Constantino Tsallis, a physicist and member of the Santa Fe Institute’s external faculty. Tsallis worked on the new model together with Ugur Tirnakli, a physicist at Ege University, in Turkey....

The article, “Origin of water in the inner Solar System: Planetesimals scattered inward during Jupiter and Saturn’s rapid gas accretion”, was published in the planetary science journal Icarus. The authors of the article are André Izidoro, who is affiliated with São Paulo State University’s Guaratinguetá School of Engineering (FEG-UNESP) and supported by a Young Investigator Grant from FAPESP, and the American astrophysicist Sean Raymond, who is currently with the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory in France....

Maintenance and maintenance of massive structures are particularly important in space, where the circumstances are harsh and human technology has a limited lifetime. Robotics, autonomous systems, and extravehicular activities have all proven helpful for servicing and maintenance missions and have assisted the space community in conducting innovative research on a variety of space missions. Robotics and autonomous systems advancements provide a wide range of in-space services. This includes, but is not limited to, manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, astronomy, earth observation, and debris removal....

Forgot to water that plant on your desk again? It may soon be able to send out an SOS. MIT engineers have created sensors that can be printed onto plant leaves and reveal when the plants are experiencing a water shortage. This kind of technology could not only save neglected houseplants but, more importantly, give farmers an early warning when their crops are in danger, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P....

In this week’s issue of the journal Science, researchers from Princeton University and Uppsala University in Sweden report that the newcomer belonging to one species mated with a member of another species resident on the island, giving rise to a new species that today consists of roughly 30 individuals. The study comes from work conducted on Darwin’s finches, which live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The remote location has enabled researchers to study the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection....