Near the equator, there is a rhythmic wave structure in a cloud belt. Near the north pole, the mottled texture of high clouds is juxtaposed with atmospheric holes that look similar to IR views of Saturn’s pole. Several image processing techniques were required to tease out these details, which are usually very subtle but coherent. It’s common in astronomy to take large numbers of images at a rapid rate, and then stack them up in order to bring out details....

NASA’s Kepler space telescope may be retired, but the discoveries continue to rack up for this historic planet-hunting mission. Kepler rang in the new year with several new planet discoveries, including a previously overlooked planet of unusual size, as well as a super Earth and a Saturn-sized world orbiting a Sun-like star. In the meantime, the Kepler mission has released its final record of the spacecraft’s full field of view before the depletion of fuel permanently ended its work....

Discovered by: Chontos et al. using NASA’s Kepler telescope Date: February 2019 Key Facts: This newly-confirmed exoplanet is a massive hot Jupiter that whips around its star every 3.85 days. From the surface, the star would appear 60 times larger in diameter than the Sun as seen from Earth. Details: Despite being the very first planet candidate discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, Kepler-1658b had a rocky road to confirmation....

86% of the 2,400 scientists who responded to the survey stated that their labs are safe places to work. Yet just under half experienced injuries, ranging from animal bites to chemical inhalation. A large part of the scientists also noted frequently working alone, unreported injuries and insufficient safety training. Nature Publishing Group and the firm BioRAFT helped launch the survey. UCLA’s Center for Laboratory Safety plans to analyze the data more closely later this year....

NIH’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) program is a public-private partnership to develop a coordinated research strategy for speeding development of the most promising treatments and vaccine candidates. ACTIV-2 is a master protocol designed for evaluating multiple investigational agents compared to placebo in adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19. The trial, led by the NIAID-funded AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) and supported by PPD (Wilmington, North Carolina), will enroll participants at sites around the world....

Rice University scientists have transformed their laser-induced graphene (LIG) into self-sterilizing filters that grab pathogens out of the air and kill them with small pulses of electricity. Hospitals may be particularly interested in the flexible filter that chemist James Tour developed at the Rice lab. Hospitalized patients have a 1-in-31 risk of developing an illness that may be antibiotic-resistant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The device described in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano captures bacteria, fungi, spores, prions, endotoxins, and other biological contaminants carried by droplets, aerosols, and particulate matter....

Lateral flow tests are cheaper and produce a result in just 30 minutes — much faster than the time it takes to receive a PCR test result, which can take 1-3 days. The finding could be pivotal to national strategies looking to tackle the next phase of the pandemic, especially as timely and rapid testing becomes even more important once the current restrictions lift in England. As part of the study, over 2,500 people with mild to moderate flu-like symptoms were assessed by GPs in the district of Liezen (population 79,652), Austria, between October 22 and November 30, 2020, and tested for viral antigen using lateral flow tests....

This 70 km-wide crater and its surrounds, captured by ESA’s Mars Express, is a composite of two images taken in March 2007 and February 2017. It focuses on a large crater in the Margaritifer Terra region in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and includes a portion of Erythraeum Chaos to the north (right in the main color image below). The region is located at the northern edge of Noachis Terra, which at 3....

152 billion tonnes of fresh water – equivalent to 20 x Loch Ness or 61 million Olympic sized swimming pools, entered the seas around the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia when the megaberg A68A melted over 3 months in 2020/2021, according to a new study. In July 2017, the A68A iceberg snapped off the Larsen-C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula and began its epic 3.5-year, 4,000-km (2,500-mile) journey across the Southern Ocean....

Halloween has come and gone, but Yale physicist Bonnie Fleming still has ghosts in her machine. On October 15, Fleming and colleagues at the MicroBooNE physics experiment in Illinois detected their first neutrino candidates, which are also known as ghost particles. It represents a milestone for the project, involving years of hard work and a 40-foot-long particle detector that is filled with 170 tons of liquid argon. “It’s nine years since we proposed, designed, built, assembled, and commissioned this experiment,” said Fleming, a professor of physics and also MicroBooNE’s co-spokesperson....

A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which was published in the journal Nature on March 8, focuses on the smoke from the “Black Summer” megafire in eastern Australia, which burned from December 2019 into January 2020....

With a tensor language prototype, “speed and correctness do not have to compete … they can go together, hand-in-hand.” High-performance computing is required for an ever-increasing number of jobs, such as image processing or other deep learning applications on neural nets, that require sifting through massive volumes of data in a reasonable length of time. It is usually assumed that in carrying out such activities, there are inescapable trade-offs between speed and dependability....

The announcement was first made in a letter MIT President L. Rafael Reif sent to the Institute community. At a time of rapid advances in intelligence research across many disciplines, the Intelligence Quest — MIT IQ — will encourage researchers to investigate the societal implications of their work as they pursue hard problems lying beyond the current horizon of what is known. Some of these advances may be foundational in nature, involving new insight into human intelligence, and new methods to allow machines to learn effectively....

When Lauryn Kortman enrolled in Founder’s Journey, MIT’s entrepreneur-based first-year student seminar, she didn’t expect it would lead to a role in fusion research. As part of the program’s arranged visit to the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), Kortman learned about SPARC, a new fusion experiment that expects to demonstrate a faster and less-expensive path to carbon-free energy. The project embodied her own entrepreneurial spirit and sparked in her a desire to be part of the team....

Emissions from coal power stations could be drastically reduced by a new, energy-efficient material that adsorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide, then releases it when exposed to sunlight. In a study published on February 10 in Angewandte Chemie, Monash University and CSIRO scientists for the first time discovered a photosensitive metal-organic framework (MOF) – a class of materials known for their exceptional capacity to store gases. This has created a powerful and cost-effective new tool to capture and store, or potentially recycle, carbon dioxide....

Aerobic exercises are activities in which the large muscles move in a rhythmic manner for a sustained time. They can be done at low intensity or high intensity and include walking, brisk walking, running, bicycling, swimming and many others. “Exercise is medicine, and there is no question that moderate to vigorous physical activity is beneficial to overall cardiovascular health. However, like medicine, it is possible to underdose and overdose on exercise – more is not always better and can lead to cardiac events, particularly when performed by inactive, unfit, individuals with known or undiagnosed heart disease,” said Barry A....

Finally, some good news has emerged about the novel coronavirus that has spread to many countries across the world. Chinese professors report in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics that it doesn’t appear that the viral infection is transmittable from pregnant mothers to newborns at birth. The study is the second out of China within the last month to confirm that mothers infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during pregnancy did not infect their babies....

“Even a modest reduction in lawn mowing frequency can bring a host of environmental benefits: increased pollinators, increased plant diversity, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, a longer, healthier lawn makes it more resistant to pests, weeds, and drought events,” said Dr. Chris Watson, lead author of the study. The issue with regular lawn mowing is that it favors grasses, which grow from the base of the plant, and low-growing species like dandelion and clover....

Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, the year’s globally averaged temperature was 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1.02 degrees Celsius) warmer than the baseline 1951-1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. 2020 edged out 2016 by a very small amount, within the margin of error of the analysis, making the years effectively tied for the warmest year on record. “The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, typifying the ongoing and dramatic warming trend,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt....

On Artemis I, Flight Day 17 (Friday, December 2), teams collected additional images with Orion’s optical navigation camera and downlinked a wide variety of data files to the ground. This included downloading data from the Hybrid Electronic Radiation Assessor, or HERA. The radiation detector measures charged particles that pass through its sensors. Measurements from HERA and several other radiation-related sensors and experiments aboard Artemis I will help NASA better understand the space radiation environment future crews will experience and develop effective protections....