CfA astronomers Giovanni Fazio, Joe Hora, Steve Willner, Matt Ashby, Mark Gurwell, and Howard Smith and a team of colleagues carried out a series of multiwavelength monitoring campaigns that included the IRAC camera onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as the ground-based Keck telescope and the Submillimeter Array. Spitzer was able to monitor the black hole fluctuations continuously for 23.4 hours during each session, something that no ground-based observatory is capable of doing, and something that reliably enables scientists to spot slow trends (as distinct from short bursts)....

The Spitzer Space Telescope circles the Sun in an Earth-trailing orbit, and it is currently 1.66 astronomical units away from Earth (one AU is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun). Scientists had predicted that if it ever became possible to observe a microlensing flash from two well-separated vantage points, a parallax measurement (the apparent angular difference between the positions of the star as seen from the two separated sites) would determine the distance of the dark object....

A Durham University astronomer collaborating with a team of international scientists have mapped more than a quarter of the northern sky using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a pan-European radio telescope. The map reveals an astonishingly detailed radio image of more than 4.4 million objects and a very dynamic picture of our Universe, which now has been made public for the first time. The vast majority of these objects are billions of light-years away and are either galaxies that harbor massive black holes or are rapidly growing new stars....

Nearly four billion years ago, life arose on Earth. Life appeared because our planet had a rocky surface, liquid water, and a blanketing atmosphere. But life thrived thanks to another necessary ingredient: the presence of a protective magnetic field. A new study of the young, Sun-like star Kappa Ceti shows that a magnetic field plays a key role in making a planet conducive to life. “To be habitable, a planet needs warmth, water, and it needs to be sheltered from a young, violent Sun,” says lead author Jose-Dias Do Nascimento of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and University of Rio G....

“Thanks to this discovery, astrophysicists will be able to study and evaluate the evolution patterns of young white dwarfs — and successfully look for similar systems in the galaxy,” — noted the main author of the article, astrophysicist Sergei Popov. It is widely believed, based on theoretical considerations, that young white dwarfs — the compact remnants of solar-like stars — should experience a phase of contraction in their early life....

Various bacterial pathogens can escape our immune system by staying and multiplying within our body cells (intracellularly). The intracellular propagation of pathogens later leads to cell breakdown and the release of microorganisms that infect neighboring cells, spread and cause tissue damage and infectious disease. However, the body has a response to this bacterial strategy: programmed cell death, or apoptosis, reacts to cellular stress situations during infections and causes quick suicide of the infected cells....

A bacterial disease outbreak is threatening a collection of 3,200 coconut palms in the South Pacific. This gene bank is located in Papua New Guinea and is part of an international collection of the South Pacific’s coconut species. The warning was issued at a meeting of the pacific coconut research and development strategy in Samoa two weeks ago, convened by the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community....

Michigan Medicine researchers studying a class of naturally occurring protein called Sestrin have found that it can mimic many of exercise’s effects in flies and mice. The findings could eventually help scientists combat muscle wasting due to aging and other causes. “Researchers have previously observed that Sestrin accumulates in muscle following exercise,” said Myungjin Kim, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology. Kim, working with professor Jun Hee Lee, Ph....

In December 2021, Bitcoin had an approximate market value of 960 billion US dollars with a roughly 41 percent global market share among cryptocurrencies. Although known to be energy intensive, the extent of Bitcoin’s climate damages – estimates of financial damage from carbon emissions and the impact of climate change on economies – is unclear. Benjamin Jones and colleagues present economic estimates of climate damages from Bitcoin mining between January 2016 and December 2021....

International study quantified and characterized charcoal and soot produced by incomplete burning of trees and transported by river to the Atlantic. Molecular markers Carbon-14 levels and contents in samples were measured using molecular markers, such as the polycarboxylic acid released by oxidation of aromatic polycyclical hydrocarbons in black carbon. Quantitative measurement of the markers was combined with molecular characterization of the samples using ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry. Samples collected in localities relatively distant from the Atlantic, such as Óbidos in Pará State, were younger, while those collected farther downstream were older....

The international research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in collaboration with the European Society of Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC), found that transmission of COVID-19 from mother to baby was rare and generally mild when it occurred. But despite this, almost half of all babies did not receive any breast milk, with only a quarter being breastfed and the majority of mothers and babies having no skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth....

Mapping this part, called the spike protein, is an essential step so researchers around the world can develop vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat the virus. The paper is publishing Wednesday, February 19, 2020, in the journal Science. The scientific team is also working on a related viable vaccine candidate stemming from the research. Jason McLellan, associate professor at UT Austin who led the research, and his colleagues have spent many years studying other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV....

Researchers from UCLA believe using plasma could promise a significant breakthrough in the fight against the spread of COVID-19. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, modeling conducted in June showed strains of the novel coronavirus on surfaces like metal, leather, and plastic were killed in as little as 30 seconds of treatment with argon-fed, cold atmospheric plasma. The researchers used an atmospheric pressure plasma jet they built with a 3D printer to spray surfaces that were treated with SARS-CoV-2 cultures....

What distinguishes terahertz quantum cascade lasers from other lasers is the fact that they emit light in the terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum. They have applications in the field of spectroscopy where they are used in chemical analysis. The lasers could also eventually provide ultra-fast, short-hop wireless links where large datasets have to be transferred across hospital campuses or between research facilities in universities — or in satellite communications....

A particularly well-preserved bushy-tailed fossilized theropod could imply that most of the dinosaurs actually had feathers. The dinosaur, named Sciurumimus albersdoerferi lived 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era, in what is now Germany. S. albersdoerferi died in fine-grained sediments, allowing for an almost photographic impression of the filaments that covered its body. There have been other feathered therapods discovered before, inspiring the speculation that most dinosaurs had feathers instead of scales....

The red arcs are narrow, curved lines on the moon’s surface, and are among the most unusual color features on Saturn’s moons to be revealed by Cassini’s cameras. Images taken using clear, green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters were combined to create the enhanced-color views, which highlight subtle color differences across the icy moon’s surface at wavelengths not visible to human eyes. A few of the red arcs can be seen faintly in observations made earlier in the Cassini mission, which has been in orbit at Saturn since 2004....

The new findings, published April 15 in Nature Astronomy, are the first confirmation of just how deep some of Titan’s lakes are (more than 300 feet, or 100 meters) and of their composition. They provide new information about the way liquid methane rains on, evaporates from, and seeps into Titan — the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface....

Six months after a warning was published in the medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine that gonorrhea was quickly becoming untreatable by the last two effective drugs, the CDC reports that one of those drugs no longer works. That just leaves one antibiotic to treat the disease, which is caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The bulletin, which was published on August 9th, states that there is a high enough percentage of resistance to the oral antibiotic cephalosporin cefixime that the CDC no longer recommends using it as a first-line regimen for the treatment of gonococcal infections....

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has shed new light on the mystery of why giant elliptical galaxies have few, if any, young stars. This new evidence highlights the important role that supermassive black holes play in the evolution of their host galaxies. Because star-forming activity in many giant elliptical galaxies has shut down to very low levels, these galaxies mostly house long-lived stars with low masses and red optical colors. Astronomers have therefore called these galaxies “red and dead”....

They found that a type of container from the 9-11th century, called amphorae, traditionally used for transporting wine contained chemical traces of grapes and were found as far away as Sardinia and Pisa, suggesting that the wine was exported across the Mediterranean. Working with researchers from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, the research team from the University of York’s BioArch facility analyzed the content of the amphorae by identifying chemical traces trapped in the body of the container, and found compounds comparable to those found in ceramic jars used by some producers today for maturing wine....