The first such observation, which took place in August of 2017, made history for being the first time that both gravitational waves and light were detected from the same cosmic event. The April 25 merger, by contrast, did not result in any light being detected. However, through an analysis of the gravitational-wave data alone, researchers have learned that the collision produced an object with an unusually high mass. Simulation of the binary neutron star coalescence GW190425 This movie shows a numerical simulation representing the binary neutron star coalescence and merger which resulted in the detected gravitational-wave event GW190425....

University of Miami Miller School of Medicine researchers led a unique and groundbreaking randomized controlled trial showing umbilical cord derived mesenchymal stem cell infusions safely reduce risk of death and quicken time to recovery for the severest COVID-19 patients, according to results published in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine in January 2021. The study’s senior author, Camillo Ricordi, M.D., director of the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) and Cell Transplant Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said treating COVID-19 with mesenchymal stem cells makes sense....

The use of hearing aids was linked with lower risks of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, and injurious falls in an analysis of medical information on 114,862 older adults with hearing loss. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease/dementia, anxiety/depression, and injurious falls within three years after being diagnosed with hearing loss was 18%, 11%, and 13% lower, respectively, for those who used hearing aids versus those who did not....

A clinical trial in which two test drugs failed to help patients with mild COVID-19 nevertheless had a silver lining: It proved the viability of a study model in which a medication’s potential arrhythmic side effects are safely, effectively monitored without the participants ever setting foot in a hospital or clinic. The findings are reported today (December 20, 2021) in the journal Communications Medicine. They also suggest that remote studies can expand clinical research to broader populations and greatly reduce participants’ burdens of time, travel and cost, said Dr....

Helium is predicted to be among the most readily-detectable species in the atmospheres of exoplanets, especially in extended and escaping atmospheres. Searches for helium, however, have until now been unsuccessful. CfA astronomers Antonija Oklopcic, Laura Kreidberg, Jonathan Irwin, and David Charbonneau were among a team of astronomers reporting in this week’s Nature the first convincing detection of helium in an exoplanet, the warm gas giant WASP-107b. This object orbits its star every 5....

Smoking either traditional or non-combustible cigarettes while wearing a surgical mask results in a doubling in exhaled carbon monoxide and impaired blood vessel function compared to non-mask periods. That’s the finding of research published today (July 7, 2022) in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Author Professor Ignatios Ikonomidis of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece said: “The study suggests that smoking any tobacco product has become even more hazardous during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the need to wear a mask for long hours....

ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star. Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients to make solar systems like our own. Water, essential to life on Earth, has previously been detected outside of our Solar System as gas and ice coated onto tiny dust grains near sites of active star formation, and in proto-planetary discs capable of forming alien planetary systems....

The study found that people with the highest levels of the antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin and beta-cryptoxanthin in their blood were less likely to develop dementia decades later than people with lower levels of the antioxidants. Lutein and zeaxanthin are found in leafy, green vegetables such as spinach, kale, broccoli, summer squash, and peas. Beta-cryptoxanthin is found in fruits such as oranges, mangoes, papaya, tangerines, peaches, and persimmons. “Extending people’s cognitive functioning is an important public health challenge,” said study author May A....

This newly released image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a view of the Mars Curiosity Rover amid rocky terrain on Mount Sharp. The car-size rover, climbing up lower Mount Sharp toward its next destination, appears as a blue dab against a background of tan rocks and dark sand in the enhanced-color image from the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The exaggerated color, showing differences in Mars surface materials, makes Curiosity appear bluer than it really looks....

The microscopic world resembles our world in some surprising ways. The environment around us is inhabited by microbes living in complex communities — some friendly and some not so friendly. Microbes compete with each other for resources and must also hide from or fight predators. One example of this is the fungus Rhizopus, which grows in the soil and on spoiled food and is the cause of “black fungus” outbreaks in covid patients....

An international collaboration elucidates the mechanisms that facilitate accurate identification of moving images. Imagine meeting a friend on the street, and imagine that with every step they take, your visual system has to process their image from scratch in order to recognize them. Now imagine if the same thing were to happen for every object and creature that moves around us. We would live in a constant state of uncertainty and inconsistency....

The Hubble Space Telescope serves as a “weather satellite” for monitoring Jupiter’s stormy weather. The iconic Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, shows that it’s shrinking a little in the Hubble images, but it still dominates the entire southern atmosphere, plowing through the clouds like a cargo ship. Hubble astronomers patiently wait to get close-up snapshots as Earth make its nearest annual approach to Jupiter – an astronomical alignment called an opposition, when Jupiter is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun....

This newly released Hubble image shows a delicate blue group of stars — actually an irregular galaxy named IC 3583 — located 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). It may seem to have no discernible structure, but IC 3583 has been found to have a bar of stars running through its center. These structures are common throughout the Universe, and are found within the majority of spiral, many irregular, and some lenticular galaxies....

Blue is typically an indicator of hot, young stars. In this case, however, the stellar oddities are aging, sun-like stars that have prematurely cast off their outer layers of material, exposing their extremely blue-hot cores. Astronomers were surprised when they spotted these stars because physical models show that only an unusual type of old star can be as hot and as bright in ultraviolet light. While Hubble has spied these ultra-blue stars before in Andromeda, the new observation covers a much broader area, revealing that these stellar misfits are scattered throughout the galaxy’s bustling center....

The results, which will be published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, raise many new questions about the formation of massive stars. An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster R136 in ultraviolet light for the first time....

“The first hypernova was detected in 1998 as a very energetic type of supernova that followed a gamma-ray burst. This was the first evidence of the connection between both phenomena” says Luca Izzo, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), and leader of the study. The scenario that has been proposed to explain the phenomena involves a star over 25 times more massive than the Sun that, once it has exhausted its fuel, suffers the collapse of its core....

On March 19, 2021, the Fagradalsfjall volcano erupted after lying dormant for 800 years. Three months later, the volcano on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula is still spewing lava and expanding its flow field. The natural-color images above show the lava flow progression from March, May, and June 2021. Note the ground around the volcano was still covered in snow in March. The darkest areas in May and June show where lava has cooled and piled up across the valley floors....

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft deliberately slammed into Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos, on Monday, September 26, 2022. This was the first planetary defense test in which a spacecraft attempted to modify the orbit of an asteroid through kinetic impact. Two days after DART’s collision, astronomers Teddy Kareta (Lowell Observatory) and Matthew Knight (US Naval Academy) captured the vast plume of dust and debris blasted from the asteroid’s surface with the 4....

The blog “Ladyplanet. Natürlich Frau sein” is quite certain: “Our cycle is linked to that of the moon. The most obvious connection is the length of the two cycles,” it says. The newspaper “Berliner Tagesspiegel” comes to the opposite conclusion: “The length of women’s menstrual cycles is an average value, for some it lasts longer, for others it is shorter. Even one and the same woman can have cycles of different lengths....

Swirling clouds, big colorful belts, giant storms. The beautiful and incredibly turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter has been showcased many times. But what is going on below the clouds? What is causing the many storms and eruptions that we see on the ‘surface’ of the planet? However, to study this, visible light is not enough. We need to study Jupiter using radio waves. New radio wave images made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most complex astronomical observatory ever built on Earth, provide a unique view of Jupiter’s atmosphere down to fifty kilometers below the planet’s visible (ammonia) cloud deck....