After several weeks of bad weather and strong winds, the latest pair of high-altitude drop tests of the ExoMars parachutes took place in Kiruna, Sweden. The 15 m-wide first stage main parachute performed flawlessly at supersonic speeds, while the 35 m-wide second stage parachute experienced one minor damage, but decelerated the mock-up of the landing platform as expected. The ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars mission, with the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok surface platform, is scheduled for launch in September 2022....

Using a unique combination of nanoscale imaging and chemical analysis, an international team of researchers has revealed a key step in the molecular mechanism behind the water splitting reaction of photosynthesis, a finding that could help inform the design of renewable energy technology. “Life depends on the oxygen that plants and algae split from water; how they do it is still a mystery, but scientists, including our team, are slowly peeling away the layers to get to the answer,” said Vittal K....

Computer simulations of cells evolving over tens of thousands of generations reveal why some organisms retain a disused switch mechanism that turns on under severe stress, changing some of their characteristics. Maintaining this “hidden” switch is one means for organisms to maintain a high degree of gene expression stability under normal conditions. Tomato hornworm larvae are green in warmer regions, making camouflage easier, but black in cooler temperatures so that they can absorb more sunlight....

The next phase of a global drive to map the night sky will bring the cosmos into greater focus than at any in human history. Yale University scientists are involved in all of the major aspects of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an initiative that spans four continents and includes 200 astronomers at more than 40 institutions. They will chart thousands of nearby galaxies, probe the composition of stars throughout the Milky Way with novel clarity, and measure the expansion of the universe during a particularly murky period....

Different physical systems can be used to make a quantum computer. Trapped ions that form a crystal have led the research field for years, but when the system is scaled up to large ion crystals this method gets very slow. Complex arithmetic operations cannot be performed fast enough before the stored quantum information decays. A Stockholm University research group may have solved this problem by using giant Rydberg ions, 100 million times larger than normal atoms or ions....

Let’s assume we are dancing on a meadow, quickly spinning about our own axis. At some point we hop on a rotating carousel. We may end up hurting ourselves when both rotations add up and angular momentum is transferred. Are similar phenomena also present in quantum mechanical systems? After years of preparation, a team at the TU Wien managed to conduct an experiment where the spin of a neutron traverses through a region with a rotating magnetic field....

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have measured the size of an asteroid candidate for NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), a proposed spacecraft concept to capture either a small asteroid, or a boulder from an asteroid. The near-Earth asteroid, called 2011 MD, was found to be roughly 20 feet (6 meters) in size, and its structure appears to contain a lot of empty space, perhaps resembling a pile of rubble....

The EBC-46 compound, also known as tigilanol tiglate, functions by promoting a localized immune response against tumors. The response shatters the blood vessels of the tumor, ultimately killing the cancerous cells. Following its very high success rate in treating a particular kind of cancer in dogs, clinical trials testing EBC-46 in humans have recently begun. However, due to its complicated structure, EBC-46 looked to be synthetically inaccessible, meaning that no conceivable approach for making it practically in a laboratory appeared to exist....

Astronomers now know that Tycho’s new star was not new at all. Rather it signaled the death of a star in a supernova, an explosion so bright that it can outshine the light from an entire galaxy. This particular supernova was a Type Ia, which occurs when a white dwarf star pulls material from, or merges with, a nearby companion star until a violent explosion is triggered. The white dwarf star is obliterated, sending its debris hurtling into space....

But a startling recent discovery by the Pacunam Lidar Initiative, a research consortium involving a Brown University anthropologist, has ancient Mesoamerican scholars across the globe wondering whether they know Tikal as well as they think. Using light detection and ranging software, or lidar, Stephen Houston, a professor of anthropology at Brown University, and Thomas Garrison, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered that what was long assumed to be an area of natural hills a short walk away from Tikal’s center was actually a neighborhood of ruined buildings that had been designed to look like those in Teotihuacan, the largest and most powerful city in the ancient Americas....

A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf’s atmosphere from within. Brown dwarfs are mysterious celestial objects that are not quite stars and not quite planets. They are about the size of Jupiter but typically dozens of times more massive. Still, they are less massive than the smallest stars, so their cores do not have enough pressure to fuse atoms the way stars do....

“We showed, based on basic physics and chemistry calculations, that the ancient Martian subsurface likely had enough dissolved hydrogen to power a global subsurface biosphere,” said Jesse Tarnas, a graduate student at Brown University and lead author of a study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. “Conditions in this habitable zone would have been similar to places on Earth where underground life exists.” Earth is home to what are known as subsurface lithotrophic microbial ecosystems — SliMEs for short....

In findings published on August 6, 2020, in the journal Current Biology, researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Rennes in France have unveiled a stunning 99-million-year-old fossil pristinely preserving an enigmatic insect predator from the Cretaceous Period — a ‘hell ant’ (haidomyrmecine) — as it embraced its unsuspecting final victim, an extinct relative of the cockroach known as Caputoraptor elegans. The ancient encounter, locked in amber recovered from Myanmar, offers a detailed glimpse at a newly identified prehistoric ant species Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri, and presents some of the first direct evidence showing how it and other hell ants once used their killer features — snapping their bizarre, but deadly, scythe-like mandibles in a vertical motion to pin prey against their horn-like appendages....

This composite photo was made from ten images captured on the morning of November 8, 2022. It shows the progression of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse above the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mars is visible trailing the Moon in this composite. For North America, the partial eclipse began at 4:09 a.m. EST (1:09 a.m. PST), with totality beginning at 5:16 a....

Although the benefits of dietary nitrate on exercise, including improved endurance and heightened high-intensity performance, are well documented, researchers still have much to uncover about the mechanisms behind this effect and how the body converts ingested nitrate into usable nitric oxide for cells. In an effort to fill this knowledge gap, researchers from the University of Exeter and the National Institutes of Health in the US conducted a study in which they traced the distribution of nitrate ingested by ten healthy volunteers in saliva, blood, muscle, and urine....

That was when Pavao, a senior Space Physics major, realized she was about to become a part of something big – a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that describes a rare binary star system with uncommon features. The Nature paper, published on February 1, 2023, and co-authored with Dr. Noel D. Richardson, assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Embry-Riddle, describes a twin-star system that is luminous with X-rays and high in mass....

In most of the Baltic Sea, there are two annual blooms – the spring bloom and the cyanobacterial (also called blue-green algae) bloom in late summer. The Baltic Sea faces many serious challenges, including toxic pollutants, deep-water oxygen deficiencies, and toxic blooms of cyanobacteria affecting the ecosystem, aquaculture, and tourism. Cyanobacteria have qualities similar to algae and thrive on phosphorus in the water. High water temperatures and sunny, calm weather often lead to particularly large blooms that pose problems to the ecosystem....

The new planet, named HD 21749b, orbits a bright, nearby dwarf star about 53 light years away, in the constellation Reticulum, and appears to have the longest orbital period of the three planets so far identified by TESS. HD 21749b journeys around its star in a relatively leisurely 36 days, compared to the two other planets — Pi Mensae b, a “super-Earth” with a 6.3-day orbit, and LHS 3844b, a rocky world that speeds around its star in just 11 hours....

NASA is considering nuclear thermal propulsion—a way to power spacecraft with a nuclear reactor, which could cut travel times in half compared to traditional rockets. A nuclear-fueled system will need sophisticated materials that can withstand extreme temperatures, hydrogen propellant, and radiation. ORNL’s experiment exposed prototype components to electrically heated temperatures reaching over 2,400 degrees Celsius (4,350 degrees Fahrenheit). Soon, scientists will take a scaled-up version, containing fuel surrogates and instrumentation, to the Ohio State University Research Reactor and see how it fares when neutron irradiation is added....

The astronomers propose that around 8 billion to 10 billion years ago, an unknown dwarf galaxy smashed into our own Milky Way. The dwarf did not survive the impact: It quickly fell apart, and the wreckage is now all around us. “The collision ripped the dwarf to shreds, leaving its stars moving in very radial orbits” that are long and narrow like needles, said Vasily Belokurov of the University of Cambridge and the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City....