In this image, numerous sweeping arcs seem to congregate at various bright regions. You may wonder: What is being shown? Air traffic routes? Information moving around the global internet? Magnetic fields looping across active areas on the Sun? In fact, this is a map of the entire sky in X-rays recorded by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a payload on the International Space Station. NICER’s primary science goals require that it target and track cosmic sources as the station orbits Earth every 93 minutes....

Galaxy DLA0817g, nicknamed the Wolfe Disk after the late astronomer Arthur M. Wolfe, is the most distant rotating disk galaxy ever observed. The unparalleled power of ALMA made it possible to see this galaxy spinning at 170 miles (272 kilometers) per second, similar to our Milky Way. “While previous studies hinted at the existence of these early rotating gas-rich disk galaxies, thanks to ALMA we now have unambiguous evidence that they occur as early as 1....

The work, published in Nature on January 7, 2020, was enabled by a new analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, launched in 2013 with the mission of precisely measuring the position, distance, and motion of the stars. The research team’s innovative approach combined the super-accurate data from Gaia with other measurements to construct a detailed, 3D map of interstellar matter in the Milky Way, and noticed an unexpected pattern in the spiral arm closest to Earth....

Methane is formed under the absence of oxygen by natural biological and physical processes, e.g. in the sea floor. It is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the activity of microorganisms this gas is inactivated before it reaches the atmosphere and unfolds its harmful effects on Earth’s climate. Researchers from Bremen have now proven that these microorganisms are quite picky about their diet. All life on Earth is based on carbon and its compounds....

Sometime between March 2010 and May 2012, a meteor streaked across the Martian sky and broke into pieces, slamming into the planet’s surface. The resulting craters were relatively small — just 13 feet (4 meters) in diameter. The smaller the features, the more difficult they are to spot using Mars orbiters. But in this case — and for the first time — scientists spotted them with a little extra help: artificial intelligence (AI)....

The Broken Hill (Kabwe 1) skull is one of the best-preserved fossils of the early human species Homo heidelbergensis and was estimated to be about 500,000 years old. Professor Rainer Grün from the Environmental Futures Research Institute led the team which analyzed the skull and other fossil human remains found in the vicinity including a tibia and femur midshaft fragment. The material is curated at the Natural History Museum in London, where collaborators Professor Chris Stringer and Senior Curator Michael Rumsey work....

Scientists have detected a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat coming from a cosmic gas cloud. The inconspicuous cloud in the constellation Aquila is beating with the rhythm of a neighboring precessing black hole, indicating a connection between the two objects, as the team led by DESY Humboldt Fellow Jian Li and ICREA Professor Diego F. Torres from the Institute of Space Sciences (IEEC-CSIC) reports in the journal Nature Astronomy. Just how the black hole powers the cloud’s gamma-ray heartbeat over a distance of about 100 light years remains enigmatic....

The dress rehearsal will demonstrate the team’s ability to load more than 700,000 gallons of cryogenic, or super-cold, propellants into the rocket at the launch pad, practice every phase of the launch countdown, and drain propellants to demonstrate safely standing down on a launch attempt. The test will be the culmination of months of assembly and testing for SLS and Orion, as well as preparations by launch control and engineering teams, and set the stage for the first Artemis launch....

Slightly larger than Earth, they don’t have the density of rock. And yet, they are denser than the gas-giant outer planets orbiting our Sun. So, what are they made of? The best answer is that these exoplanets have global oceans at least 500 times deeper than the average depth of Earth’s oceans, which simply are a wet veneer on a rocky ball. The soggy worlds orbit the red dwarf star Kepler-138, located 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra....

On September 18, NASA’s InSight lander celebrated its 1,000th Martian day, or sol, by measuring one of the biggest, longest-lasting marsquakes the mission has ever detected. The temblor is estimated to be about a magnitude 4.2 and shook for nearly an hour-and-a-half. This is the third major quake InSight has detected in a month: On August 25, the mission’s seismometer detected two quakes of magnitudes 4.2 and 4.1. For comparison, a magnitude 4....

Since the dawn of space exploration, NASA missions have primarily relied on radio frequency communications for this transfer of information. But this fall, NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will launch and showcase laser communications — a revolutionary way of communicating data from space to the ground. LCRD’s ground stations, known as Optical Ground Station (OGS) -1 and -2, are located on Table Mountain, California, and Haleakalā, Hawaii. These remote, high-altitude locations were chosen for their clear weather conditions....

As New Horizons crossed the solar system, and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to several hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons reached a rare deep-space milepost – 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and their predecessors, Pioneers 10 and 11....

In the animated image, ATLAS emerges from the top of the frame and approaches the Sun — off camera to left — against gusts of solar wind. Its dust tail, which reflects sunlight, appears white. Mercury is also visible as a bright dot emerging from the left against the stationary starfield. The vertical streaks in the image are artifacts created by saturation from bright background stars. While STEREO recorded this footage, Solar Orbiter crossed one of comet ATLAS’s tails....

“This eclipse gave us an opportunity to cement the idea of the Sun-Earth connection,” said Lika Guhathakurta, who headed up NASA’s science efforts for the August 21 eclipse. “A variety of new observations, instruments and observational platforms were enabled by this eclipse. It will be fascinating to watch how these develop into new research plans and new technology for future use.” A moment in the Sun’s atmosphere While total solar eclipses happen about once every 18 months somewhere on Earth, the August eclipse was rare in its long path over land: The total eclipse lasted about 90 minutes total, from the time it first reached the Oregon coast to when it left the North American mainland in South Carolina....

This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home. A pulse of X-rays and gamma rays lasting just 140 milliseconds swept across the solar system on April 15, 2020. The event was a giant flare from a magnetar, a type of city-sized stellar remnant that boasts the strongest magnetic fields known....

The paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has scientifically identified the 12 emotions that drive and impact success. The study found that, despite being perceived as negative, anxiety and anger can serve as energizers, much like enjoyment and hope. However, these darker feelings are linked with a lack of strategic thinking and poor health, including stress-related psychosomatic symptoms such as headaches, nausea, back pain, and lack of sleep....

What if you could hold a physical model of your own brain, accurate down to its every unique fold? That’s just a normal part of life for Steven Keating, who had a baseball-sized tumor removed from his brain at age 26 while he was a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group. Curious to see what his brain looked like before the tumor was removed, and with the goal of better understanding his diagnosis and treatment options, Keating collected his medical data and began 3-D printing his MRI and CT scans....

Printing soft materials using additive manufacturing has been a big challenge for scientists because if they are not supported, they sag and lose their shape. The new technique, called Suspended Layer Additive Manufacturing (SLAM), uses a polymer-based hydrogel in which the particles have been manipulated to create a self-healing gel. Liquids or gels can be injected directly into this medium and built up in layers to create a 3D shape....

The new approach relies on understanding the way vibrations move through the crystal lattice of lithium ion conductors and correlating that with the way they inhibit ion migration. This provides a way to discover new materials with enhanced ion mobility, allowing rapid charging and discharging. At the same time, the method can be used to reduce the material’s reactivity with the battery’s electrodes, which can shorten its useful life. These two characteristics — better ion mobility and low reactivity — have tended to be mutually exclusive....

Lithium-air batteries are considered highly promising technologies for electric cars and portable electronic devices because of their potential for delivering a high energy output in proportion to their weight. But such batteries have some pretty serious drawbacks: They waste much of the injected energy as heat and degrade relatively quickly. They also require expensive extra components to pump oxygen gas in and out, in an open-cell configuration that is very different from conventional sealed batteries....