Astronomers have long theorized that fountains such as this continually recirculate a galaxy’s star-forming fuel. New Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of Abell 2597 show the first clear and compelling evidence for the simultaneous infalling and outflow of gas driven by a supermassive black hole. The researchers report their observations in the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal. “The supermassive black hole at the center of this giant galaxy acts like a mechanical ‘pump’ in a water fountain,” said Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lead author on the paper....

In the recently published study, the origins of the dunes were tracked to a wave guide formed within the mesosphere and its boundary, the mesopause. The study also posits that this new auroral form provides researchers with a novel way to investigate conditions in the upper atmosphere. The study was published in the first issue of the high-impact journal AGU Advances. An unknown fingerprint appears in the sky Minna Palmroth, Professor of Computational Space Physics at the University of Helsinki, heads a research group developing the world’s most accurate simulation of the near-Earth space and space weather that cause auroral emissions....

Loneliness is estimated to affect roughly one in five adults in the United States. It also stands as a public health crisis because loneliness has been tied to depression, cardiovascular disease, and dementia, among other conditions. As such, a team of researchers at Penn Medicine came together to determine what topics and themes could be associated with loneliness by accessing content posted by users on Twitter. By applying linguistic analytic models to tweets, the researchers found users who tweeted about loneliness post significantly more often about mental well-being concerns and things like struggles with relationships, substance use, and insomnia....

Microbes are of special interest: They were not only the first life forms on Earth. They also turned our planet into a tolerable environment for plants and animals and thus their activity paved the way for life as we know it today. Some of these early microbes were cyanobacteria that thrived in early shallow waters. They produced oxygen by photosynthesis, and sometimes the oxygen got trapped as bubbles within sticky microbial mats....

Living cells are difficult to grow in the laboratory, so researchers sometimes work with synthetic cells, but these have had research limitations because they lack real cell characteristics. “One of the challenges of cell research is it’s sometimes very hard to run controlled experiments on a cell’s motility, especially due to surface enzyme activity,” said Darrell Velegol, distinguished professor of chemical engineering. “The research team developed a simple way to make an artificial cell that doesn’t do everything a regular cell does, like reproduce, have genetic mutations or anything like that, but it actively moves....

Astronomers in Germany have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to help them chart and explain the structure and dynamics of the universe around us with unprecedented accuracy. The team, led by Francisco Kitaura of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, report their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Scientists routinely use large telescopes to scan the sky, mapping the coordinates and estimating the distances of hundreds of thousands of galaxies and so enabling them to create a map of the large-scale structure of the Universe....

The Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics in Pohang, South Korea, Dr. Matti Järvinen, Dr. Tuna Demircik, and Dr. Christian Ecker from the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, have now created a new model that allows them to GET one step closer to answering this question. They combine models from nuclear physics, which are not applicable at high densities, with a method employed in string theory to describe the transition to dense and hot quark matter....

The OSIRIS-REx team first observed a particle ejection event in images captured by the spacecraft’s navigation cameras taken on January 6, 2019, just a week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu. At first glance, the particles appeared to be stars behind the asteroid, but on closer examination, the team realized that the asteroid was ejecting material from its surface. After concluding that these particles did not compromise the spacecraft’s safety, the mission began dedicated observations in order to fully document the activity....

RIKEN neuroscientists have discovered a surprising mechanism for how neuronal activity in mice is dynamically tuned—with signaling at some synapses increasing, while other synapses go quiet—so as to promote the process of learning and memory formation1. This finding provides new insights into the role brain cells called astrocytes play in memory creation. A team led by Yukiko Goda of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science has been seeking to understand the neural processes underlying learning and memory formation....

The international research team observed the young protostar L1527 in the Taurus molecular cloud at a high spatial resolution with ALMA, and discovered an unexpected chemical change in the transition zone between the infalling envelope and the gas disk. So far, it has been believed that interstellar matter is smoothly delivered to the gas disk around the protostar without any significant chemical changes. However, it is now found to be oversimplified....

The observation is equivalent to using a telescope on Earth to see a flea on the surface of Pluto. The extraordinary observation was made possible by the rare geometry and characteristics of a pair of stars orbiting each other. One is a cool, lightweight star called a brown dwarf, which features a “wake” or comet-like tail of gas. The other is an exotic, rapidly spinning star called a pulsar. “The gas is acting like a magnifying glass right in front of the pulsar,” says Robert Main, lead author of the paper describing the observation being published May 24 in the journal Nature....

Most galaxies are members of a cluster, a grouping of several to thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, is a member of the “Local Group,” a set of about fifty galaxies whose other large member is the Andromeda galaxy about 2.3 million light-years away. The closest large cluster of galaxies to us is the Virgo Cluster, with about 2000 members; its center is about 50 million light-years away....

Deep-space missions require precise navigation, in particular when approaching bodies such as Mars, Venus or a comet. How precise? It’s necessary to pinpoint a spacecraft 100 million kilometers from Earth to within 1 km. To achieve this level of accuracy, ESA experts use ‘quasars’ – the most luminous objects known in the Universe – as beacons in a technique known as Delta-Differential One-Way Ranging, or delta-DOR. Quasars are fascinating objects that can emit 1000 times the energy of our entire Milky Way galaxy....

About 35 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Eridanus (The River), lies the spiral galaxy NGC 1637. Back in 1999, the serene appearance of this galaxy was shattered by the appearance of a very bright supernova. Astronomers studying the aftermath of this explosion with ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile have provided us with a stunning view of this relatively nearby galaxy. Supernovae are amongst the most violent events in nature....

The reductive approach to chemical reactions is attractive to scientists, as it’s convenient when interpreting results and easier to work with. However, if a more simplistic experimental framework is adopted, these tests may overlook the critical aspect of intracellular crowding. If there is less space available for each molecule, the resulting effective concentration is boosted, increasing the chemical potential. When more molecules are crammed together, there is also the possibility that reactants will link up, causing the chemical potential to respond drastically....

Cornell bioengineers and physicians have created an artificial ear that looks and acts like a natural ear, giving new hope to thousands of children born with a congenital deformity called microtia. In a study published online on February 20 in the journal PLOS One, Cornell biomedical engineers and Weill Cornell Medical College physicians described how 3D printing and injectable gels made of living cells can fashion ears that are practically identical to a human ear....

Swinburne Professor Jeff Cooke, who is also a Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), was a key member of the research team. “Stars that are literally torn apart by the gravitational tidal forces of black holes help us better understand what exists in the Universe,” says Professor Cooke. “These observations help us explore extreme physics and energies that cannot be created on Earth....

Should we delay COVID-19 vaccination in children? The net benefit of vaccinating children is unclear, and vulnerable people worldwide should be prioritized instead, say experts in The BMJ on July 8, 2021. But others argue that COVID-19 vaccines have been approved for some children and that children should not be disadvantaged because of policy choices that impede global vaccination. Dominic Wilkinson, Ilora Finlay, and Andrew Pollard say for a health system to offer any vaccine to a child, two key ethical questions must be asked....

The Dixie fire in Northern California has surpassed the Bootleg fire in Oregon to become the largest fire so far this year in the United States. As of August 6, 2021, the Dixie fire had charred more than 432,000 acres (675 square miles/1,750 square kilometers). On August 4, 2021, an astronaut on the International Space Station shot a photo of the Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume (top). The second image, also acquired on August 4, shows the fire as observed by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) on Landsat 7....

In a study published on February 27 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers say that 11 minutes a day (75 minutes a week) of moderate-intensity physical activity – such as a brisk walk – would be sufficient to lower the risk of diseases such as heart disease, stroke and a number of cancers. Cardiovascular diseases – such as heart disease and stroke – are the leading cause of death globally, responsible for 17....