Like dancers in a chorus line, atoms’ movements become synchronized when lowered to extremely cold temperatures. To study this bizarre phenomenon, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, researchers need to cool atoms to a temperature just above absolute zero – the point at which atoms have the least energy and are close to motionless. The goal of NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is to study ultra-cold quantum gases in a facility instrument developed for use on the International Space Station....

IXPE is scheduled to launch no earlier than 1 a.m. EST Thursday, December 9, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Live launch coverage will begin at 12:30 a.m. on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. On Tuesday, December 7, NASA will hold a payload briefing at 1 p.m. and a prelaunch news briefing at 5:30 p....

After launching Sunday, December 11, at 2:38 a.m. EST (Saturday, December 10, at 11:38 p.m. PST) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, NASA’s Lunar Flashlight has communicated with mission controllers and confirmed it is healthy. About 53 minutes after launch, the small satellite, or SmallSat, was released from its dispenser to begin a four-month journey to the Moon to seek out surface water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole....

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times....

The layered sedimentary deposits inside the giant canyons of Mars have puzzled scientists for decades. These light toned deposits have fine, horizontal laminations that are unlike the rugged rim rock of the Valles Marineris as seen by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Various ideas for the origin of the layered sediments have suggested lake deposits, wind blown dust and sand, or volcanic materials that erupted after the canyon was formed, and possibly filled with water....

“I’m delighted at this latest accomplishment by NASA, another first that demonstrates once again how the United States leads the world in space,” said John Holdren, assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “New Horizons is the latest in a long line of scientific accomplishments at NASA, including multiple missions orbiting and exploring the surface of Mars in advance of human visits still to come; the remarkable Kepler mission to identify Earth-like planets around stars other than our own; and the DSCOVR satellite that soon will be beaming back images of the whole Earth in near real-time from a vantage point a million miles away....

Sound waves from the nascent universe, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs), left their imprint on the cosmos by influencing galaxy distribution. Researchers have explored this imprint back to when the universe was three billion years old, or roughly 20% of its current age of 13.8 billion years – the same epoch Roman’s BAO studies are optimized to investigate. Now a team of scientists has demonstrated that the mission could peer even farther back in time to explore impressions left by BAOs....

“The James Webb Space Telescope team represents the best of our humanity and an enduring pursuit to better understand the cosmos. Every new image is a new discovery,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Webb is the culmination of decades of persistence and once-unthinkable human ingenuity made possible by international partnerships. Together, we are unfolding the universe and inspiring the world.” The award will be presented at the Space Foundation’s yearly opening ceremony of the Space Symposium in Colorado on April 17....

Children previously infected with COVID-19 develop natural circulating antibodies that last for at least seven months, according to a new study led by researchers at UTHealth Houston. The study was published today (March 18, 2022) in Pediatrics. Researchers examined data from 218 children across the state of Texas between the ages of 5 and 19 who were enrolled in the Texas CARES survey, which began in October of 2020 with the goal of assessing COVID-19 antibody status over time among a population of adults and children in Texas....

“The biggest challenge many people don’t realize is that even nature has no solution for the amount of energy we use,” said University of Chicago chemist Wenbin Lin. Not even photosynthesis is that good, he said: “We will have to do better than nature, and that’s scary.” “Artificial photosynthesis” is one possible option scientists are exploring. This entails reworking a plant’s system to make our own kinds of fuels. However, the chemical equipment in a single leaf is incredibly complex, and not so easy to turn to our own purposes....

Researchers from ETH Zurich have now used a new technique to produce complex glass objects with 3D printing. The method is based on stereolithography, one of the first 3D printing techniques developed during the 1980s. David Moore, Lorenzo Barbera, and Kunal Masania in the Complex Materials group led by ETH professor André Studart have developed a special resin that contains plastic, and organic molecules to which glass precursors are bonded....

The WHO refers to the steadily increasing number of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics as a “silent pandemic.” The situation is made worse by the fact that there haven’t been many new drugs introduced to the market in recent decades. Even now, not all infections can be properly treated, and patients still run the risk of harm from routine interventions. New active substances are urgently required to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria....

What time is it? The answer, no matter what your initial reference may be — a wristwatch, a smartphone, or an alarm clock — will always trace back to the atomic clock. The international standard for time is set by atomic clocks — room-sized apparatuses that keep time by measuring the natural vibration of atoms in a vacuum. The frequency of atomic vibrations determines the length of one second — information that is beamed up to GPS satellites, which stream the data to ground receivers all over the world, synchronizing cellular and cable networks, power grids, and other distributed systems....

These batteries can be used in extremely low-frequency communications and in devices such as blinking lights, electronic beepers, voltage-controlled oscillators, inverters, switching power supplies, digital converters and function generators, and eventually for technologies related to modern computers. In Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing, Helena Braga and colleagues at the University of Porto in Portugal and the University of Texas at Austin, report making their very simple battery with two different metals, as electrodes and a lithium or sodium glass electrolyte between them....

New research by Yale University scientists helps pave the way for the next generation of solar cells, a renewable energy technology that directly converts solar energy into electricity. In a pair of recent papers, Yale engineers report a novel and cost-effective way to improve the efficiency of crystalline silicon solar cells through the application of thin, smooth carbon nanotube films. These films could be used to produce hybrid carbon/silicon solar cells with far greater power-conversion efficiency than reported in this system to date....

The fossilized remains of Mansourasaurus were unearthed by an expedition undertaken by the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology (MUVP) initiative, an effort led by Dr. Hesham Sallam of the Department of Geology at Mansoura University in Mansoura, Egypt. Sallam is the lead author of the paper published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that names the new species. The field team included several of his students, many of whom–Ms....

During the process, known as lysosomal exocytosis, neurons release protein waste that cannot be broken down and recycled. The revelation, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, might solve one of Parkinson’s disease’s mysteries and lead to new techniques for treating or preventing the neurological disease. “Our results also suggest that lysosomal exocytosis could be a general mechanism for the disposal of aggregated and degradation-resistant proteins from neurons—in normal, healthy circumstances and in neurodegenerative diseases,” said study senior author Dr....

“Our discovery of widespread antibiotic sensitivities in the multidrug-resistant pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa opens up the opportunity to limit the development of antibiotic resistance and perhaps even revert it. This could be important for the treatment of several chronic infections including the life-long lung infections of patients with cystic fibrosis,” says Professor and Scientific Director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability, Morten Sommer. The researchers found some antibiotic vulnerabilities of multidrug-resistant pathogens were preserved across clinical isolates isolated over decades at the Cystic fibrosis clinic at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen....

Imagine a sheet of material just one layer of atoms thick—less than a millionth of a millimeter. While this may sound fantastical, such a material exists: it is called graphene, and it is made from carbon atoms in a honeycomb arrangement. First synthesized in 2004 and then soon hailed as a substance with wondrous characteristics, scientists are still working on understanding it. Postdoc Areg Ghazaryan and Professor Maksym Serbyn at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) together with colleagues Dr....

The study is based on the recent Gaia Data Release 2. This provided the astronomical community with accurate information on the position and movement of millions of stars, mostly in the Milky Way. Ph.D. student Helmer Koppelman is part of the research group of Professor of Dynamics, Structure, and Formation of the Milky Way Amina Helmi, who has been involved in the Gaia mission almost from its inception. He started analyzing the data right after the release and published a preprint of the article just eight days later....