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This disease, which was first detected near Miami in 2014, has now impacted coral reefs in Jamaica, St. Maarten, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Belize, among other locations. The findings of this study may help researchers to develop testing and treatment methods that can reduce the risk of further disease transmission. Researchers suggest that transport through ship hulls, where the vessel takes on ballast water in one region to keep it stable and releases it at a different port, may have contributed to disease spread....

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have uncovered young, massive, compact galaxies whose raucous star-making parties are ending early. The firestorm of star birth has consumed much of the gaseous fuel needed to make future generations of stars, and the powerful stellar winds of the newly born stars have blown away any remaining fuel. Now the party’s over for these gas-starved galaxies, and they are on track to possibly becoming so-called “red and dead galaxies,” composed only of aging stars....

Researchers now think the region’s widespread loss of glacier ice helped set the stage for the quake. In a recently published research article, scientists with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute found that ice loss near Glacier Bay National Park has influenced the timing and location of earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater in the area during the past century. Scientists have known for decades that melting glaciers have caused earthquakes in otherwise tectonically stable regions, such as Canada’s interior and Scandinavia....

On June 22, 2021, the Moderate Resolution imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of dust blowing from North Africa toward Italy. As this time-lapse animation shows, the dust appears to have traveled from Algeria and Mali, blowing across more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) due to a large mesoscale convective weather system. The dust is expected to continue traveling farther north into Europe this week, according to forecasts by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service....

Tests performed by astronauts on the International Space Station suggest that bacteria can extract useful materials from rocks on Mars and the Moon. The findings could aid efforts to develop ways of sourcing metals and minerals — such as iron and magnesium — essential for survival in space. Bacteria could one day be used to break rocks down into soil for growing crops, or to provide minerals for life support systems that produce air and water, researchers say....

On July 9, 2015 the four spacecraft of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission began flying in a pyramid shape for the first time. The four-sided pyramid shape—called a tetrahedron—means that scientists’ observations will be spread out over three dimensions. MMS will be gathering data to study a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, which—along with many other places in the universe—happens when the magnetic field surrounding Earth connects and disconnects from the magnetic field carried by solar wind, realigning the very shape of Earth’s magnetic bubble and sending particles flying off at incredible speeds....

One use of medical image analysis is to crunch datasets of patients’ medical images and capture structural relationships that may indicate the progression of diseases. In many cases, analysis requires use of a common image template, called an “atlas,” that’s an average representation of a given patient population. Atlases serve as a reference for comparison, for example to identify clinically significant changes in brain structures over time. Building a template is a time-consuming, laborious process, often taking days or weeks to generate, especially when using 3D brain scans....

However, none of these interventions, even when properly used and combined, give complete protection from infection, and the authors note that some of the findings, particularly around face masks and eye protection, are supported by low-certainty evidence, with no completed randomized trials addressing COVID-19 for these interventions (table 2). The study, conducted to inform WHO guidance documents, is the first time researchers have systematically examined the optimum use of these protective measures in both community and healthcare settings for COVID-19....

With the unexplained gas release posing a serious question about the incident’s environmental impact, a suite of complementary Earth observation satellites carrying optical and radar imaging instruments were called upon to characterize the gas leak bubbling in the Baltic. Although methane partly dissolves in water, released later as carbon dioxide, it is not toxic. However, it is the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas in our atmosphere causing climate change....

Since the first event was detected fifteen years ago, improvements in our instruments and dedicated arrays have led to many more detections! In another milestone, an international team of astronomers recently made high-precision measurements of a repeating FRB located in the spiral galaxy Messier 81 (M81)- the closest FRB observed to date. The team’s findings have helped resolve some questions about this mysterious phenomenon while raising others. The international team was made up of researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the Onsala Space Observatory, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center (VIRAC), and multiple universities and research institutes in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Canada, China, India, Italy, the U....

“It’s a bit of a crazy thing to blast two black holes head-on very close to the speed of light,” said Thomas Helfer, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University who produced the simulations. “The gravitational waves associated with the collision might look anticlimactic, but this is one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe.” The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, is the first detailed look at the aftermath of such a cataclysmic clash, and shows how a remnant black hole would form and send gravitational waves through the cosmos....

The new developments may help bolometers find their way to quantum computers. If the new radiation detector manages to function as well in space as it does in the laboratory, it can also be used to measure cosmic microwave background radiation in space more accurately. “The new detector is extremely sensitive, and its noise level — how much the signal bounces around the correct value, is only one-tenth of the noise of any other bolometer....

The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft carrying Vande Hei and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos docked to the station’s Rassvet module at 7:05 a.m. EDT. Docking occurred two orbits and about three hours after a 3:42 a.m. launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Vande Hei, Novitskiy, and Dubrov will join the Expedition 64 crew when hatches open about 9 a.m. Expedition 65, with NASA astronaut Shannon Walker as commander, will begin Friday, April 16, upon the departure of NASA’s Kate Rubins, Roscosmos’ Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and departing station commander Sergey Ryzhikov....

In this image, a remote galaxy is greatly magnified and distorted by the effects of gravitationally warped space. After its public release, astronomers used the picture to measure the galaxy’s distance of 9.4 billion light-years. This places the galaxy at the peak epoch of star formation in cosmic evolution. In this particular snapshot, a science discovery followed the release of a Hubble observation of a striking example of a deep-space optical phenomenon dubbed an “Einstein ring....

InSight’s two-year mission will be to study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including Earth and the Moon, formed. InSight launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5. The lander touched down Monday, November 26, near Mars’ equator on the western side of a flat, smooth expanse of lava called Elysium Planitia, with a signal affirming a completed landing sequence at approximately noon PST (3 p....

“We are all excited about the decision that moves the Europa Clipper mission one key step closer to unlocking the mysteries of this ocean world,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are building upon the scientific insights received from the flagship Galileo and Cassini spacecraft and working to advance our understanding of our cosmic origin, and even life elsewhere.” The mission will conduct an in-depth exploration of Jupiter’s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life, honing our insights into astrobiology....

Earth’s driest ecosystems are a study in extremes: They can be blazingly hot stretches of sand like the Sahara Desert or shatteringly cold expanses of ice such as those in Greenland and Antarctica. These arid regions receive very little annual precipitation, and the effects of climate change in these ecosystems are poorly understood. A joint effort between NASA and the Qatar Foundation aims to address that — and, in the process, help communities that are being impacted by those changes....

“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically....

NASA’s DART spacecraft is currently cruising toward its highly-anticipated September 26 encounter with the binary asteroid Didymos. Meanwhile, during the journey, the spacecraft’s imager — the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO — has snapped thousands of pictures of stars. The pictures provide the data necessary for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) team leading the mission for NASA to support ongoing spacecraft testing and rehearsals in preparation for the spacecraft’s kinetic impact into Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos....

New results from NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter suggest that either “sprites” or “elves” could be dancing in the upper atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet. It is the first time these bright, unpredictable and extremely brief flashes of light — formally known as transient luminous events, or TLE’s — have been observed on another world. The findings were published on October 27, 2020, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets....