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The glowing jumble of gas clouds visible in this new image make up a huge stellar nursery nicknamed the Prawn Nebula. Taken using the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, this may well be the sharpest picture ever taken of this object. It shows clumps of hot new-born stars nestled in among the clouds that make up the nebula. Located around 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), the nebula formally known as IC 4628 is a huge region filled with gas and clumps of dark dust....

Three massive volcanic eruptions occurred on Jupiter’s moon Io within a two-week period in August of last year. This led astronomers to speculate that such “outbursts,” which can send material hundreds of miles above the surface, might be much more common than they thought. “We typically expect one huge outburst every one or two years, and they’re usually not this bright,” said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of one of two papers describing the eruptions....

These new temperature zones will be marked in deep purple and hot pink on weather maps. Climate scientists have had to revise the upper bounds of temperatures they never expected to depict. The seven-day-record-breaking heatwave has lit hundreds of wildfires and poses a catastrophic danger to some of the most populous parts of the country. To put this in another perspective, when the outside temperature reaches 108ºF (42ºC), like it did in Syndey last week, it’s too hot to safely operate your iPhone....

Newborn stars “feed” at a furious rate and grow through surprisingly frequent feeding frenzies, a recent analysis of data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope shows. Outbursts from stellar babies at the earliest stage of development – when they’re about 100,000 years old, or the equivalent of a 7-hour-old infant – occur roughly every 400 years, the analysis found. These eruptions of luminosity are signs of feeding binges as the young, growing stars devour material from the disks of gas and dust that surround them....

UVA’s Hui-wang Ai, PhD, and Shen Zhang, PhD, have developed a simple and effective improvement to fluorescent “biosensors” widely used in scientific and medical research. The biosensors detect specific targets inside cells and sets them aglow, so that scientists can monitor and quantify biological events they otherwise could not. Most fluorescent protein biosensors give a green or yellow glow, but Ai and Zhang have discovered a way to shift the green to red....

Every day in the United States, 45,000 planes fly across the country carrying some 1.7 million passengers. A frequent traveler’s individual contribution to climate change is dominated by aviation, and yet is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize. The United States is the largest contributor to aviation carbon dioxide emissions in the world. In fact, it is responsible for more than a quarter of all carbon dioxide emitted from flying....

The study in mice and published in Nature Cell Biology, shows how the body clock mechanism boosts our ability to maintain our bodies when we are most active. And because we know the body clock is less precise as we age, the discovery, argues lead author Professor Karl Kadler, may one day help unlock some of the mysteries of aging. The discovery throws fascinating light on the body’s extracellular matrix — which provides structural and biochemical support to cells in the form of connective tissue such as bone, skin, tendon, and cartilage....

The advent of artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things is expected to change modern electronics and bring forth the fourth Industrial Revolution. The pressing question for many researchers is how to handle this technological revolution. “It is important for us to understand that the computing platforms of today will not be able to sustain at-scale implementations of AI algorithms on massive datasets,” said Thirumalai Venkatesan, one of the authors of a paper published in Applied Physics Reviews today (April 21, 2020), from AIP Publishing....

“The discovered object connects two rare populations of celestial objects, namely dusty starbursts and luminous quasars, and thereby provides a new avenue toward understanding the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe,” says Seiji Fujimoto, a postdoctoral fellow based at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The discovery can be attributed to the Hubble Space Telescope operated jointly by ESA and NASA. With its location in space – undisturbed by weather changes, pollution etc....

New research published in the journal Environmental Entomology examines which flowers bumble bees select in the Sierra Nevada region of California. Researchers from The Institute for Bird Populations, the University of Connecticut, and the USDA Forest Service compared which species of flowers the bees used relative to the availability of each flower species across the landscape. They found that each bumble bee species in the study selected a different assortment of flowers, even though the bees were foraging across the same landscape....

“This suggests that the solid Earth has a greater capacity to store water than previously thought,” said research scientist Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the study. Significantly more water was lost from cracks and soil within fractured mountain rock during drought and gained during heavy precipitation than hydrology models show. Argus is giving a talk on the new finding today at the American Geophysical Union’s fall conference in New Orleans....

This consistent mutation load could assist clinicians in more precisely choosing patients for clinical trials of innovative immunotherapies or predicting a patient’s treatment outcome with immune checkpoint blockade, a form of immunotherapy. The work was recently published in the journal Nature Medicine. “There’s a lot of frustration in trying to use tumor mutation burden as a universal predictive biomarker of immunotherapy response across cancers,” says senior study author Valsamo Anagnostou, M....

Cassini’s camera had already imaged an impressive cloud hovering over Titan’s south pole at an altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers). However, that cloud, first seen in 2012, turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. A much more massive ice cloud system has now been found lower in the stratosphere, peaking at an altitude of about 124 miles (200 kilometers). The new cloud was detected by Cassini’s infrared instrument – the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, or CIRS – which obtains profiles of the atmosphere at invisible thermal wavelengths....

Regarding the consequences of this study, João Zilhão notes that “an influent model on our origins suggests the common consumption of water resources -rich in Omega3 and other fatty acids that favor the development of brain tissues- would have increased the cognitive skills of modern anatomy humans. That is, those humans who, in Africa, were contemporaries of Neanderthals and are usually regarded as the only ancestors of the current Homo sapiens....

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief spurts of radio emission, lasting just one-thousandth of a second, whose origins are mysterious. Fewer than two dozen have been identified in the past decade using giant radio telescopes such as the 1,000-foot dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Of those, only one has been pinpointed to originate from a galaxy about 3 billion light-years away. The other known FRBs seem to also come from distant galaxies, but there is no obvious reason that, every once in a while, an FRB wouldn’t occur in our own Milky Way galaxy too....

A new study that has involved monitoring of Alpha Centauri for more than a decade by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory provides encouraging news about one key aspect of planetary habitability. It indicates that any planets orbiting the two brightest stars in the Alpha Cen system are likely not being pummeled by large amounts of X-ray radiation from their host stars. X-rays and related Space Weather effects are bad for unprotected life, directly through high radiation doses and indirectly through stripping away planetary atmospheres (a fate thought to have been suffered by Mars in our own Solar System)....

In China, traditional Chinese medicine has the same status in the health system as modern medical science. This has led thousands of science activists to protest that the state neglects its duty to treat its citizens with evidence-based medicine. New research from the University of Copenhagen has investigated these protests. In the West, the number of people challenging scientific authority has been growing in past decades. This has, among other things, led to a decline in the support for mass vaccination programs and to an increase in alternative forms of treatment....

American and Chinese Scientists Leading Efforts on COVID-19 Despite the political tensions between the United States and China, scientists in the two countries are working together more than ever to study the COVID-19 virus, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed the scientific papers that researchers around the world produced on coronaviruses before and after the arrival of COVID-19. They found that the United States and China were world leaders in the topic area before COVID-19 and they remain so now....

There are only five bodies in our solar system that are known to bear rings. The most obvious is the planet Saturn; to a lesser extent, rings of gas and dust also encircle Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The fifth member of this haloed group is Chariklo, one of a class of minor planets called centaurs: small, rocky bodies that possess qualities of both asteroids and comets. Scientists only recently detected Chariklo’s ring system — a surprising finding, as it had been thought that centaurs are relatively dormant....

Published December 11, 2019, in Nature, the findings are important because atmospheric CO2 has increased 40 percent since the dawn of the industrial age, contributing heavily to a warming planet. Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science and colleagues from the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Granada in Spain used data mining as a springboard for diving into a key challenge: dealing with the water portion of smokestack gases that greatly complicates removing the CO2....