While there is extensive data demonstrating the negative impact of vehicle-generated air pollution on health, there is a lack of research on how specific types of traffic, such as bottleneck traffic, can lead to negative health outcomes. A study led by a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health has now found that traffic congestion may be linked to lower birth weights. Published in the journal Science Advances, the study found consistent associations between traffic delays and a nine-gram reduction in birth weight among infants born to parents who reside in areas with heavy traffic, such as highways or freeways....

Nickel Foam Filter Catches, Heats and Kills the Virus and other Pathogens Researchers from the University of Houston, in collaboration with others, have designed a “catch and kill” air filter that can trap the virus responsible for COVID-19, killing it instantly. Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, collaborated with Monzer Hourani, CEO of Medistar, a Houston-based medical real estate development firm, and other researchers to design the filter, which is described in a paper published in Materials Today Physics....

The galactic crash will become a massive galaxy cluster. Scientists know this because the collision is located 12.4 billion light-years from Earth. Its light began traveling to where we could see it when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old, or about a tenth of the universe’s current age. Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the known universe, with as many as 1,000 galaxies. The new study focuses on a protocluster known as SPT2349-56....

Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March. This finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our solar system’s nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri. At its peak, the newly recognized flare was 10 times brighter than our sun’s largest flares, when observed at similar wavelengths....

The discovery was made by Christopher Martens, assistant professor of kinesiology and applied physiology and director of the Delaware Center for Cognitive Aging Research, and Dr. Dimitrios Kapogiannis, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging. The finding is significant because it supports the idea that NR, upon reaching the brain, can alter the metabolism of relevant biological pathways involved in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Their work, supported by an NIH grant, and in part by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH National Institute on Aging, was recently published in the journal Aging Cell....

The scientists presented their findings at a meeting of American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, California. Some of the fungi belong to the genus Penicillium, which was the source of the potent antibiotic penicillin. Finding multicellular organisms in such a deprived environment “extends what we understand about the limits of life on the planet”, states Heath Mills, a molecular geo¬micro-biologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who collaborated with Brandi Reese, a biogeochemist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, while studying the fungi....

This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. This orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile. Clouds of gas and interstellar dust are the raw materials from which stars are made....

In 2005, images of a brilliant watery plume erupting from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus captivated the world. The giant column of vapor, ice particles, and organic molecules spraying from the moon’s south polar region suggested that there’s a liquid water ocean below Enceladus’ ice shell and confirmed the moon is geologically active. The plume also thrust Enceladus and other worlds in the outer solar system, with no atmospheres and far from the heat of the Sun, toward the top of NASA’s list of places to search for signs of life....

The unnamed binary star system nearly 10,000 light years from Earth and is known only by its astronomical catalog number TYC 2505-672-1. It sets a new record for both the longest duration stellar eclipse and the longest period between eclipses in a binary system. Discovery of the system’s extraordinary properties was made by a team of astronomers from Vanderbilt and Harvard with the assistance of colleagues at Lehigh, Ohio State and Pennsylvania State universities, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and the American Association of Variable Star Observers and is described in a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal....

The researchers used W. M. Keck Observatory to obtain the first-ever direct observational evidence showing that corotating halo gas is not only possible but common. Their findings suggest that the whirling gas halo will eventually spiral in towards the disk. “This is a major breakthrough in understanding how galactic disks grow,” said Martin, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara and lead author of the study. “Galaxies are surrounded by massive reservoirs of gas that extend far beyond the visible portions of galaxies....

A new galaxy class has been identified using observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Gemini South telescope, and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Nicknamed “green bean galaxies” because of their unusual appearance, these galaxies glow in the intense light emitted from the surroundings of monster black holes and are among the rarest objects in the Universe. Many galaxies have a giant black hole at their center that causes the gas around it to glow....

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing the structure of the young universe. BOSS charts the history of the universe’s expansion in order to illuminate the nature of dark energy, and new measures of large-scale structure have yielded the most precise measurement of expansion since galaxies first formed....

The researchers studied molecules in clouds of gas in a distant galaxy, so far away that its light has taken half the age of the universe to reach us. To make the measurement they used the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array, an array of six 22-meter radio telescopes in eastern Australia. “When we look at this galaxy with our telescopes, we see it as it was when the universe was younger – and warmer – than it is now,” says Sebastien Muller....

An international team of astronomers used ALMA to observe a distant galaxy called MACS1149-JD1. They detected a very faint glow emitted by ionized oxygen in the galaxy. As this infrared light traveled across space, the expansion of the Universe stretched it to wavelengths more than ten times longer by the time it reached Earth and was detected by ALMA. The team inferred that the signal was emitted 13.3 billion years ago (or 500 million years after the Big Bang), making it the most distant oxygen ever detected by any telescope....

Kilonovae — the giant explosions that occur when two neutron stars orbit each other and finally collide — are responsible for creating both great and small things in the universe, from black holes to the atoms in the gold ring on your finger and the iodine in our bodies. They give rise to the most extreme physical conditions in the Universe, and it is under these extreme conditions that the Universe creates the heaviest elements of the periodic table, such as gold, platinum, and uranium....

Though they appear at similar altitudes, aurora and airglow are produced by different physical processes. Nighttime airglow (or nightglow) is a type of chemiluminescence—the emission of light from chemical interactions between oxygen, nitrogen, and other molecules in the upper atmosphere. Airglow occurs all around the Earth, all the time. However, “nightglow” is much easier to spot over a dark Earth than “dayglow,” as airglow is just one billionth as bright as the Sun....

Flowering plants are characterized by an astonishing diversity of flowers of different shapes and sizes. This diversity has arisen in adaptation to selection imposed by different pollinators including among others bees, flies, butterflies, hummingbirds, bats or rodents. Although several studies have documented that pollinators can impose strong selection pressures on flowers, our understanding of how flowers diversify remains fragmentary. For example, does the entire flower adapt to a pollinator, or do only some flower parts evolve to fit a pollinator while other flower parts may remain unchanged?...

Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close. NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, a space-based observatory, and the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii were among the first to help identify the stellar remains. Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lie quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches....

The scientists published their findings in the journal PNAS. Vera Gorbunova, from the University of Rochester in New York, and her colleagues have shown that the rodents have evolved a different way of dealing with cancer than a similarly cancer-resistant cousin, Heterocephalus glaber. 23% of humans die of cancer, but blind mole rats, which can live up to 21 years, seem to be mostly immune to the disease. These animals are subject to terrific stresses underground, darkness, scarcity of food, immense numbers of pathogens, and low oxygen levels, states co-author Eviatar Nevo, from the University of Haifa in Israel....

Wolf-Rayet stars are among the most massive stars known. They are at the end of their short lives, but rather than simply running out of fuel and exploding, they push out their outer layers with an extremely powerful stellar wind. This produces a surrounding nebula rich in ionized helium, carbon, and nitrogen, but almost no hydrogen. The surface temperature of the remaining star can be over 200,000 K, making them the most luminous stars known....