Minor repairs that were identified through detailed inspections have mostly been completed. Preparations are underway to ready the mobile launcher and VAB for rollout. This includes configuring the mobile launcher arms and umbilicals and continuing to retract the access platforms surrounding SLS and Orion as work is completed. Testing of the reaction control system on the twin solid rocket boosters is complete and those components are ready for flight. Additionally, flight batteries have been installed and are ready....

The Arizona desert possesses many characteristics that are analogous to a lunar environment. These include challenging terrain, interesting geology, and minimal communications infrastructure, all of which astronauts will experience near the lunar South Pole during Artemis missions. The Joint Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program Test Team (JETT) Field Test #3 and Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) are the two analog missions taking place in October 2022. They will provide crucial data and lessons learned as teams conduct operations in a simulated lunar environment to practice for the real event....

Rubins, along with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, will close the hatch to the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft at 6:10 p.m. EDT to begin the journey back to Earth. The trio will undock from the space-facing port of the station’s Poisk module at 9:34 p.m., heading for a parachute-assisted landing at 12:56 a.m. (10:56 a.m. Kazakhstan time) Saturday, April 17, on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan....

Enter a cleaner, sleeker design born of the Federal Design Improvement Program and officially introduced in 1975. It featured a simple, red unique type style of the word NASA. The world knew it as “the worm.” Created by the firm of Danne & Blackburn, the logo was honored in 1984 by President Reagan for its simplistic, yet innovative design. NASA was able to thrive with multiple graphic designs. There was a place for both the meatball and the worm....

Will aid patients with fat malabsorption issues including gastric bypass surgery, obese adults. There are several million people worldwide with various fat malabsorption syndromes including those who have undergone gastric bypass surgery and those with obesity. These patients often have a difficult time absorbing vitamin D and both groups of patients are at an increased risk for vitamin D deficiency and therefore at higher risk for osteoporosis and osteomalacia (softening of the bones)....

Using bacteria to breakdown and ferment agricultural waste into ethanol, MSU microbiologists have developed bioelectrochemical systems known as microbial electrolysis cells, which use a second bacterium, Geobacter sulfurreducens, to produce energy more than 20 times higher than existing methods. A new biofuel production process created by Michigan State University researchers produces energy more than 20 times higher than existing methods. The results, published in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology, showcase a novel way to use microbes to produce biofuel and hydrogen, all while consuming agricultural wastes....

The study, published on January 27 in the journal Brain, supports the idea that components in the human blood can modulate the formation of new brain cells, a process termed neurogenesis. Neurogenesis occurs in an important part of the brain called the hippocampus which is involved in learning and memory. While Alzheimer’s disease affects the formation of new brain cells in the hippocampus during the early stages of the disease, previous studies have only been able to study neurogenesis in its later stages through autopsies....

Daphnis (5 miles or 8 kilometers across) orbits within the 42-kilometer (26-mile) wide Keeler Gap. Cassini’s viewing angle causes the gap to appear narrower than it actually is, due to foreshortening. The little moon’s gravity raises waves in the edges of the gap in both the horizontal and vertical directions. Cassini was able to observe the vertical structures in 2009, around the time of Saturn’s equinox. Like a couple of Saturn’s other small ring moons, Atlas and Pan, Daphnis appears to have a narrow ridge around its equator and a fairly smooth mantle of material on its surface — likely an accumulation of fine particles from the rings....

This hellish ecosystem — where breathing alone could be lethal for most of us — seems to have finally crowned its king. At a size of between 46 and 52 mm in length, the centipede Cryptops speleorex is the largest of the cave’s inhabitants known to date. The new species is described in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys. Already isolated from the outside world several millions years ago during the Neogene, the Movile cave has been drawing the attention of scientists ever since its unexpected discovery in 1986 by Romanian workers, searching for locations suitable for building a power plant in the southeastern parts of the country....

Loyola Marymount University’s Kristen Covino and her colleagues used data housed at the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory on migrating Black-throated Blue Warblers between 1965 and 2015. Across the United States, researchers working with this program safely capture migrating birds, collect data on them, and fit them with metal leg bands with unique codes that allow them to be identified if they’re captured again. Analyzing almost 150,000 individual records, Covino and her colleagues found that the timing of the birds’ spring migration has advanced over the last fifty years, with early migrants passing through banding sites approximately one day earlier each decade....

The discovery was announced June 12 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis. Cold quasars are galaxies that have an abundance of cold gas that is still able to produce new stars, despite having a quasar — a bright core powered by supermassive black holes — at its center. Gas falling toward a quasar at the center of a galaxy forms an accretion disk that can produce a large amount of electromagnetic energy and luminosity hundreds of times greater than a typical galaxy....

Discovery of unique virus traits offer possible explanations as to why older adults and people with diabetes or heart disease can have more severe responses to COVID-19 than others, say USC researchers. Seeking to understand why COVID-19 is able to suppress the body’s immune response, new research from the University of Southern California (USC) Leonard Davis School of Gerontology suggests that mitochondria are one of the first lines of defense against COVID-19 and identifies key differences in how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, affects mitochondrial genes when compared to other viruses....

The artifacts show that our earliest human ancestors colonized East Asia over two million years ago. They were found by a Chinese team that was led by Professor Zhaoyu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and included Professor Robin Dennell of Exeter University. The tools were discovered at a locality called Shangchen in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau. The oldest are ca. 2.12 million years old, and are c....

A newly published study reveals a new drug compound that inhibits the negative effects of a protein called STtriatal-Enriched tyrosine Phosphatase and reverses the brain deficits of Alzheimer’s disease in mice. Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have discovered a new drug compound that reverses the brain deficits of Alzheimer’s disease in an animal model. Their findings are published in the August 5 issue of the journal PLoS Biology. The compound, TC-2153, inhibits the negative effects of a protein called STtriatal-Enriched tyrosine Phosphatase (STEP), which is key to regulating learning and memory....

Astronomers first recognized the GRB phenomenon 46 years ago. The blasts appear at random locations in the sky about once a day, on average. The most common type of GRB occurs when a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel. Its core collapses and forms a black hole, which then blasts jets of particles outward at nearly the speed of light. These jets pierce the star and continue into space....

Scarring the southern highlands of Mars is one of the Solar System’s largest impact basins: Hellas, with a diameter of 2300 km and a depth of over 7 km. Hellas is thought to have formed between 3.8 and 4.1 billion years ago, when a large asteroid hit the surface of Mars. Since its formation, Hellas has been subject to modification by the action of wind, ice, water and volcanic activity....

The findings, from a preliminary study of cells lining both the nose and trachea, could advance the search for the best target for topical or local antiviral drugs to treat COVID-19, and offers further clues into why people with the virus sometimes lose their sense of smell. A summary of the findings appears in a letter published on August 18, 2020, in the European Respiratory Journal. “Loss of the sense of smell is associated with COVID-19, generally in the absence of other nasal symptoms, and our research may advance the search for a definitive reason for how and why that happens, and where we might best direct some treatments,” says Andrew Lane, M....

A partial tail of the dinosaur was first discovered in the outer shelf deposits of the Upper Cretaceous Hakobuchi Formation in the Hobetsu district of Mukawa Town, Hokkaido, in 2013. Ensuing excavations found a nearly complete skeleton that is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Japan. It’s been known as “Mukawaryu,” nicknamed after the excavation site. In the current study, a group of researchers led by Professor Yoshitsugu Kobayashi of the Hokkaido University Museum conducted comparative and phylogenetic analyses on 350 bones and 70 taxa of hadrosaurids, which led to the discovery that the dinosaur belongs to the Edmontosaurini clade, and is closely related to Kerberosaurus unearthed in Russia and Laiyangosaurus found in China....

As the internet of things expands, it is expected that we will need to have millions of products online, both in public spaces and in homes. Many of these will be the multitude of sensors to detect and measure moisture, particle concentrations, temperature, and other parameters. For this reason, the demand for small and cheap sources of renewable energy is increasing rapidly, in order to reduce the need for frequent and expensive battery replacements....

Transmitted to Earth on December 24, this image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) extends New Horizons’ highest-resolution views of Pluto to the very center of Sputnik Planum, the informally named icy plain that forms the left side of Pluto’s “heart” feature. Sputnik Planum is at a lower elevation than most of the surrounding area by a couple of miles, but is not completely flat. Its surface is separated into cells or polygons 10 to 25 miles (16 to 40 kilometers) wide, and when viewed at low sun angles (with visible shadows), the cells are seen to have slightly raised centers and ridged margins, with about 100 yards (100 meters) of overall height variation....