The Water Oxidation Reaction (WOR) is one of the most important reactions on the planet since it is the source of nearly all the atmosphere’s oxygen. Understanding its intricacies can hold the key to improve the efficiency of the reaction. Unfortunately, the reaction’s mechanisms are complex and the intermediates highly unstable, thus making their isolation and characterization extremely challenging. To overcome this, scientists are using molecular catalysts as models to understand the fundamental aspects of water oxidation – particularly the oxygen-oxygen bond-forming reaction....

Earlier this month, at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, the F414-GE-100 engine was installed. This marks a major milestone as the X-59 approaches the completion of its assembly. The F414-GE-100 engine from General Electric Aviation measures 13-foot-long and packs 22,000 pounds of propulsion energy and will power the X-59 as it flies at speeds up to Mach 1.4 and altitudes around 55,000 feet. “The engine installation is the culmination of years of design and planning by the NASA, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric Aviation teams,” said Ray Castner, NASA’s propulsion performance lead for the X-59....

The hunt for extraterrestrial life has just become more intriguing as a group of researchers led by Dr. Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute found new evidence of a key building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. According to new modeling, Enceladus’ ocean should be quite rich in dissolved phosphorus, a crucial ingredient for life. “Enceladus is one of the prime targets in humanity’s search for life in our solar system,” said Glein, a leading expert in extraterrestrial oceanography....

C. thonglongyai is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN and is found in western Thailand and southeast Burma, in limestone caves along rivers. It is the only existing member of the family Craseonycteridae. Its coat is reddish-brown or gray, with a distinctive pig-like snout. Colonies vary in size, but most have an average of 100 individuals per cave. Some caves will have smaller groups from 10 to 15, while others will have up to 500....

Laser and biology experts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working together to develop a platform and experiments to study the structure and components of viruses like the one causing COVID-19, and to learn how viruses interact with their surrounding environment. The experiments could provide new insight on how to reduce the infectiousness of viruses. The new platform will build upon Berkeley Lab’s world-leading R&D efforts in laser-based plasma acceleration, in which a laser pulse creates an exotic, superhot state of matter known as a plasma that in turn rapidly accelerates charged particles – electrons and ions....

Last August, sea ice north of Greenland showed its vulnerability to the long-term effects of climate change, according to a study published on July 1, 2021, in the open-access journal Communications Earth & Environment. “Current thinking is that this area may be the last refuge for ice-dependent species. So if, as our study shows, it may be more vulnerable to climate change than people have been assuming, that’s important,” said lead author Axel Schweiger, a polar scientist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory....

Eta Carinae resides in a large molecular cloud (the Carina Nebula) surrounded by a double-lobed structure of gas and dust that probably resulted from prodigious mass ejections and intermittent winds from the star (or others nearby). Eta Carinae itself is known to be highly variable; John Herschel (the son of Astronomer Royal William Herschel) first called attention to this star and a particularly dramatic flaring event it underwent in 1837 dubbed “The Great Eruption....

People with COVID-19 may lose their sense of smell and taste for up to five months after infection, according to a preliminary study released today, February 22, 2021, that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 73rd Annual Meeting being held virtually April 17 to 22, 2021. “While COVID-19 is a new disease, previous research shows that most people lose their sense of smell and taste in early stages of the illness,” said study author Johannes Frasnelli, M....

Rocky planets may have formed by two fundamentally different processes, but it is unclear which one built the terrestrial planets of our solar system. The planets formed either by collisions among planetary embryos from the inner solar system or by accreting sunward-drifting millimeter-sized “pebbles” from the outer solar system. In the new research, the team showed that the isotopic compositions of Earth and Mars predominantly result from the accretion of planetary bodies from the inner solar system, including material from the innermost disk unsampled by meteorites, with only a few percentages of a planet’s mass coming from outer solar system bodies....

Using clusters of tiny magnetic particles about 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have shown that they can manipulate how thousands of cells divide, morph and develop finger-like extensions. This new tool could be used in developmental biology to understand how tissues develop, or in cancer research to uncover how cancer cells move and invade surrounding tissues, the researchers said....

The development of an ultrathin magnet that operates at room temperature could lead to new applications in computing and electronics – such as high-density, compact spintronic memory devices – and new tools for the study of quantum physics. The ultrathin magnet, which was recently reported in the journal Nature Communications, could make big advances in next-gen memory devices, computing, spintronics, and quantum physics. It was discovered by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley....

As a Martian lander descends toward the Red Planet’s surface, when can its parachute be safely deployed? Open it too early, while the lander is hurtling through the atmosphere, and it might tear off — but open it too late and the lander might not slow down enough to prevent a catastrophic crash landing. There are seemingly endless possibilities in this complex conundrum. One way to solve this puzzle is to use a computer to simulate the Mars landing, which is exactly how students in 16....

Functioning in a similar way to an ultrasound scan using sound waves to generate images of a patient’s body, the scanning method requires only a single seismometer on a planet’s surface in order to work. It can also be used to confirm the size of a planet’s core. The research was published on October 27 in the journal Nature Astronomy. Using the ANU model to scan the entirety of Mars’ interior, the researchers confirmed the Red Planet has a large core at its center – a theory first confirmed by a team of scientists in 2021....

A few hours earlier Hermann Rubens and his wife had visited the Plancks. This being a Sunday, they probably enjoyed coffee and cake together. Rubens was the experimental professor of physics at Humboldt University in Berlin where Planck was the theoretical one. Rubens and his collaborator, Ferdinand Kurlbaum, had recently managed to measure the power emitted by a black body as a function of temperature at the unusually long wavelength of 51 microns....

Researchers discovered that, when compared to animal models lacking the alteration, animals with the germline alteration rs55705857 developed gliomas significantly more frequently and in half the time. The results are also relevant to other cancers and disorders in addition to brain tumors. “While we understand much of the biologic function of germline alterations within genes that code for proteins, we know very little about the biologic function of germline alterations outside of genes that code for proteins....

Stephanie D. Wilson is a veteran of three spaceflights, STS-121 in 2006, STS-120 in 2007, and STS-131 in 2010 and has logged more than 42 days in space. Born in Boston, she attended high school in Pittsfield, Mass., and earned her Bachelor of Science in Engineering Science from Harvard University in 1988. After working at Martin Marietta for two years, she earned her Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin; her graduate research, sponsored by a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Fellowship, focused on the control and modeling of large, flexible space structures....

The ability to store and recover information gives an organism a clear advantage when searching for food or avoiding harmful environments. Traditionally it has been attributed to organisms that have a nervous system. A new study authored by Mirna Kramar (MPI-DS) and Prof. Karen Alim (TUM and MPI-DS) challenges this view by uncovering the surprising abilities of a highly dynamic, single-celled organism to store and retrieve information about its environment....

The findings are being reported today in the journal Nature Energy, by a team led by MIT professor Donald Sadoway, postdocs Huayi Yin and Brice Chung, and four others. Although the basic battery chemistry the team used, based on a liquid sodium electrode material, was first described in 1968, the concept never caught on as a practical approach because of one significant drawback: It required the use of a thin membrane to separate its molten components, and the only known material with the needed properties for that membrane was a brittle and fragile ceramic....

Previous studies have linked vitamin D deficiency with an increased susceptibility to viral and bacterial respiratory infections. Similarly, several observational studies found a strong correlation between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19, but it could be that these effects are confounded and in fact a result of other factors, such as obesity, older age, or chronic illness which are also linked with low vitamin D. To overcome this, researchers were able to calculate “genetically-predicted” vitamin D level, that is not confounded by other demographic, health, and lifestyle factors, by using the information from over one hundred genes that determine vitamin D status....

Although it had previously been suggested that gorillas may beat their chests to convey information, the exact nature of that information was unclear. Edward Wright and colleagues observed and recorded 25 wild, adult male silverback gorillas monitored by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, between January 2014 and July 2016. Body size was determined from photographs by measuring the distance between the gorillas’ shoulder blades. Using sound recordings, the authors measured the duration, number and audio frequencies of 36 chest beats made by six of the males....