NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a set of wispy, goblin-green objects that are the ephemeral ghosts of quasars that flickered to life and then faded. The glowing structures have looping, helical, and braided shapes. “They don’t fit a single pattern,” said Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, who initiated the Hubble survey. Keel believes the features offer insights into the puzzling behavior of galaxies with energetic cores....

Much like the eclectic group of space rebels in the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has some amazing superpowers, specifically when it comes to observing innumerable galaxies flung across time and space. A stunning example is a galaxy cluster called Abell 370 that contains an astounding assortment of several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity. That’s a lot of galaxies to be guarding, and just in this one cluster!...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has picked up the faint, ghostly glow of stars ejected from ancient galaxies that were gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago. The mayhem happened 4 billion light-years away, inside an immense collection of nearly 500 galaxies nicknamed “Pandora’s Cluster,” also known as Abell 2744. The scattered stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy, and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers have assembled forensic evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the spiral galaxy ESO 499-G37, seen here against a backdrop of distant galaxies, scattered with nearby stars. The galaxy is viewed from an angle, allowing Hubble to reveal its spiral nature clearly. The faint, loose spiral arms can be distinguished as bluish features swirling around the galaxy’s nucleus. This blue tinge emanates from the hot, young stars located in the spiral arms. The arms of a spiral galaxy have large amounts of gas and dust, and are often areas where new stars are constantly forming....

In the study, investigators examined the connectivity of the tract between the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a brain region critical for regulating higher-order executive functions, and the habenula, a region that plays a critical role in reward and reward-associated learning. In animal models of addiction, the habenula has emerged as a key driver of drug-seeking behaviors. Specifically, signaling from the PFC to the habenula is disrupted in rodent cocaine addiction models, implicating this PFC-habenula circuit in withdrawal and cue-induced relapse behaviors....

Hurricane Sandy grew big enough to become an awesome visual spectacle even from space, growing to an enormous mass of wind that stretched nearly 1,100 miles across. The image above was captured by NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite on October 28th, at 9:02 a.m. EDT. Sandy is a huge, swirly mass, centered just off the eastern coast of the United States, merging with a cold front on its western edge. As the largest hurricane on record, Hurricane Sandy is a late-season tropical cyclone that affected the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas, and Eastern Canada as well as the Eastern USA....

Center for Hypersonics researcher Dr. David Gildfind said UQ’s large expansion tube facility X3, developed by Professor Richard Morgan, can now be reconfigured into a reflected shock tunnel with test time duration in excess of 10 milliseconds. “That might not sound like a long time, but at these speeds, it more than triples what is now possible within Australia,” Dr. Gildfind said. “This new addition to our facility will allow us to test the type of vehicles that could one day travel from Australia to Europe in two hours....

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, an important historic immigration hub into the United States, are within the New York Harbor at the top of the photograph (south). The harbor, busy with ship traffic, is the terminus of the Hudson River that forms a segment of the border between New Jersey and New York. Four out of the five boroughs of New York are visible in this detailed photograph as well as New Jersey neighborhoods....

That may soon change. Recently, students from BYU’s College of Engineering teamed up with Nanos Foundation to develop a nanofiber membrane that can be sandwiched between the cloth pieces in a homemade mask. While today’s typical cloth mask might block fewer than 50% of virus particles, the membrane — which can be made using simple, inexpensive materials — will be able to block 90 to 99% of particles, increasing effectiveness while preserving breathability....

Nanotechnologies have greatly impacted the food industry through improvements in production, manufacturing, and processing methods, with the goal of making food safer and healthier. However, the use of nanoparticles in phytosanitary products, processing aids, food additives, and food-touching surfaces may result in the transfer of nanoparticles to humans through consumption. A review recently published in Frontiers in Allergy by Mohammad Issa of Université Paris-Saclay and colleagues warns of the potential unintended health consequences of significant changes to food production through the use of nanoparticles....

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Fall 2021 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person August 22-26, and on-demand content will be available August 30-September 30. The meeting features more than 7,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. One cube is at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), but no one is sure how it got there, says Jon Schwantes, Ph....

Meeting the demand for more data storage in smaller volumes means using materials made up of ever-smaller magnets, or nanomagnets. One promising material for a potential new generation of recording media is an alloy of iron and platinum with an ordered crystal structure. Researchers led by Professor Kai Liu and graduate student Dustin Gilbert at the University of California, Davis, have now found a convenient way to make these alloys and tailor their properties....

At this same time the United States and the Soviet Union were nearing the ability to launch a satellite into Earth orbit. JPL, working in collaboration with Wernher von Braun’s rocket efforts for the U.S. Army, believed they were fully capable of the feat, if only given the chance. That opportunity vanished in October 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite....

Other Juno science results released today include that the massive cyclones that surround Jupiter’s north and south poles are enduring atmospheric features unlike anything else encountered in our solar system. The findings are part of a four-article collection on Juno science results being published in the March 8 edition of the journal Nature. “These astonishing science results are yet another example of Jupiter’s curve balls, and a testimony to the value of exploring the unknown from a new perspective with next-generation instruments....

Just days after celebrating its first anniversary in Jupiter orbit, NASA’s Juno Spacecraft will fly directly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the gas giant’s iconic, 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm. This will be humanity’s first up-close and personal view of the gigantic feature — a storm monitored since 1830 and possibly existing for more than 350 years. “Jupiter’s mysterious Great Red Spot is probably the best-known feature of Jupiter,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio....

A large proportion of UK healthcare workers may already have been infected with COVID-19, according to new research led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with University College London. In May, Public Health England added a new loss of taste or smell (anosmia) to the list of symptoms for COVID-19. Research published today in The Lancet Microbe finds a high prevalence of anosmia cases among healthcare workers between mid-February and mid-April....

During the first observing run O1, from September 12, 2015, to January 19, 2016, gravitational waves from three BBH mergers were detected. The second observing run, which lasted from November 30, 2016, to August 25, 2017, yielded a binary neutron star merger and seven additional binary black hole mergers, including the four new gravitational wave events being reported now. The new events are known as GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823 based on the dates on which they were detected....

In a new report entitled “‘Going negative’: An APPRAISAL analysis of the rhetoric of Donald Trump on Twitter” published in the journal Language & Communication, Dr. David Caldwell from the University of South Australia and Dr. Andrew Ross from the University of Sydney have examined how Trump tends to “hyper personalize, character assassinate and use unprofessional language” on Twitter. Trump’s negative, blunt approach, using emotive hashtags to attack Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election campaign proved devastatingly effective, the authors say....

The sex life of corn has gotten a lot of prurient attention over the years. By 5,000 B.C., agriculturalists in the Americas were already producing the first hybrid corn varieties by cross-pollinating plants to generate larger plants or colored kernels. Today, hybrid seed production in corn is a multibillion-dollar industry, and crossbreeding is fundamental to the production of most other species as well. But despite plant reproduction’s central role in agribusiness, researchers have never answered a basic question: Where do plant sex cells come from?...

Black holes are the ultimate Bogeyman. With a well-deserved reputation as monstrous destructive machines, black holes owe their power to huge quantities of mass that warp space and time until the gravitational force they command sucks in everything – even light. No surprise that astrophysicists have long considered gravity the dominant player in shaping the accretion disks of dust and gas surrounding black holes. But that may not be true, at least for spinning black holes....