Noise, excessive vibration, and relative inefficiency are drawbacks of the piston-based internal combustion engines (ICE) that power today’s lawn and garden equipment, such as leaf blowers and lawn trimmers. But now MIT startup LiquidPiston has developed a rotary ICE that it says is significantly smaller, lighter, and quieter, as well as 20 percent more fuel-efficient than the ICEs used in many such small-engine devices. “If you think of handheld tools — for example, a chain saw or hedge trimmer — after about a half hour you don’t want to use it anymore because your hand feels like it’s going to fall off,” says Alexander Shkolnik PhD ’10, president of LiquidPiston and co-inventor of the engine....

On Thursday, NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet following a nail-biting entry and descent sequence vividly known as the “seven minutes of terror.” If all goes according to plan, the car-sized explorer will blast safely down into Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide impact basin that once may have hosted a river delta flooded with water, and possibly life. Over the next year and a half of its primary mission, Perseverance will explore the crater and collect rock samples that will one day be returned to Earth, where scientists hope to study them for evidence of ancient microbial life....

Professor Hiroyuki Isobe from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo, and his team create nanoscopic material structures, primarily from carbon. Their aim is to explore new ways to create carbon nanostructures and to find useful applications for them. The most recent breakthrough from their lab is a new form of carbon nanotube with a very specific arrangement of atoms that has attracted much attention in the field of nanomaterials....

Scientists have cracked a molecular code that may open the way to destroying or correcting defective gene products, such as those that cause genetic disorders in humans. The code determines the recognition of RNA molecules by a superfamily of RNA-binding proteins called pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins. When a gene is switched on, it is copied into RNA. This RNA is then used to make proteins that are required by the organism for all of its vital functions....

High-harmonic generation has long been used to merge photons from a pulsing laser into one, ultrashort photon with much higher energy, producing extreme ultraviolet light and X-rays used for a variety of scientific purposes. Traditionally, gases have been used as sources of harmonics, but a research team led by Gennady Shvets, professor of applied and engineering physics in the College of Engineering, has shown that engineered nanostructures have a bright future for this application....

Shortly before conducting the burn, Orion was traveling more than 57,00 miles (92,000 km) above the lunar surface, marking the farthest distance it will reach from the Moon during the mission. While in lunar orbit, flight controllers will monitor key systems and perform checkouts while in the environment of deep space. The orbit is distant in that Orion will fly about 40,000 miles (64,000 km) above the Moon. Due to the distance of the orbit, it will take Orion nearly a week to complete half an orbit around the Moon, where it will exit the orbit for the return journey home....

Behnken and Hurley began their day in the Astronaut Crew Quarters inside Kennedy’s Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. The pair put on their black-and-white SpaceX spacesuits, took the elevator down to the ground level and exited through a pair of double doors, where their transport vehicle – a Tesla Model X — waited. With smiles and waves, they climbed in for the 20-minute ride to Launch Complex 39A....

Over the next 12 years, Lucy will fly by one main-belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids, making it the agency’s first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids. Lucy will investigate these “fossils” of planetary formation up close during its journey. “Lucy embodies NASA’s enduring quest to push out into the cosmos for the sake of exploration and science, to better understand the universe and our place within it,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson....

1—Remind me, what is pi? Pi, also written π, is the Swiss Army knife of numbers. No matter how big or small a circle – from the size of our universe all the way down to an atom or smaller – the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around it) to its diameter (the distance across it) is always equal to pi. Most commonly, pi is used to answer questions about anything circular or spherical, so it comes in handy especially when you’re dealing with space exploration....

CAPSTONE will perform several such maneuvers during its four-month-long journey to lunar orbit to refine its trajectory to the Moon. The next trajectory correction maneuver is targeted for late July. CAPSTONE is taking a long but fuel-efficient route to the Moon, flying about 958,000 miles (1.54 million kilometers) from Earth before looping back around to its near rectilinear halo orbit. Following its launch on June 28, CAPSTONE orbited Earth attached to Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage, which maneuvered it into position for its journey to the Moon....

Since its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail orbited Earth, gathering an immense dataset on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth’s protective magnetic bubble. Geotail was originally slated for a four-year run, but the mission was extended several times due to its high-quality data return, which contributed to over a thousand scientific publications. While one of Geotail’s two data recorders failed in 2012, the second continued to work until experiencing an anomaly on June 28, 2022....

Early theories suggested the craggy outline of a region of the moon’s surface known as Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, was caused by an asteroid impact. If this theory had been correct, the basin it formed would be the largest asteroid impact basin on the moon. However, mission scientists studying GRAIL data believe they have found evidence the craggy outline of this rectangular region — roughly 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) across — is actually the result of the formation of ancient rift valleys....

Discovered in February 1906 by German astrophotographer Max Wolf, the Trojan asteroids are trapped in orbits around the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. They’re essentially following the same orbit, just either far ahead of or behind the giant planet. Lucy is currently one year into a twelve-year, 4-billion-mile voyage to study these ancient asteroids. This gravity assist will place Lucy on a new trajectory for a two-year orbit, at which time it will return to Earth for a second gravity assist....

“The Moon is extremely stable and not influenced by factors on Earth like climate to any large degree. It becomes a very good calibration reference, an independent benchmark, by which we can set our instruments and see what’s happening with our planet,” said air-LUSI’s principal investigator, Kevin Turpie, a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. The air-LUSI flights are part of NASA’s comprehensive satellite calibration and validation efforts....

Conducted in the lab of Prof. Nicolas Dauphas, whose pioneering research studies the isotopic makeup of rocks from Earth and the moon, the new study measured rubidium in both planetary bodies and created a new model to explain the differences. The breakthrough reveals new insights into a conundrum about the moon’s formation that has gripped the field of lunar science over the past decade, known as the “lunar isotopic crisis....

Test could inform doctors on best treatment options. Scientists have developed, for the first time, a score that can accurately predict which patients will develop a severe form of COVID-19. The study, led by researchers at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, is published in The Lancet’s translational research journal EBioMedicine. The measurement, called the Dublin-Boston score, is designed to enable clinicians to make more informed decisions when identifying patients who may benefit from therapies, such as steroids, and admission to intensive care units....

Cassini gets a closer look at Saturn’s rings. It’s difficult to get a sense of scale when viewing Saturn’s rings, but the Cassini Division (seen here between the bright B ring and dimmer A ring) is almost as wide as the planet Mercury. The 2,980-mile-wide (4,800-kilometer-wide) division in Saturn’s rings is thought to be caused by the moon Mimas. Particles within the division orbit Saturn almost exactly twice for every time that Mimas orbits, leading to a build-up of gravitational nudges from the moon....

The result is a treasure trove of scientific information stored in the form of millions of butterfly specimens, offering insights into community ecology, how species originate and evolve, climate change, and interactions between plants and insects. But a comprehensive map of how butterflies are related to each other has been lacking – until now. Lepidopterists Akito Kawahara and Marianne Espeland led a team effort to produce a bigger, better butterfly evolutionary tree with a 35-fold increase in genetic data and three times as many taxa – classification units of organisms – as previous studies....

More than 60 years ago, scientists first recognized scorpions’ propensity to glow under UV light. Until now, only two fluorescent compounds, β-carboline and 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin, had been identified in scorpions’ hard outer shell, or exoskeleton. Masahiro Miyashita and colleagues wondered if there might be other fluorescent molecules with different chemical properties that were missed in previous studies. To find out, the researchers extracted compounds from molted exoskeletons of the scorpion Liocheles australasiae, using chemical conditions different from those used in prior experiments....

Researchers at the University of Missouri have developed a new form of radiation therapy that successfully put cancer into remission in mice without the harmful side effects of conventional chemo and radiation cancer therapies. Cancer painfully ends more than 500,000 lives in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scientific crusade against cancer recently achieved a victory under the leadership of University of Missouri Curators’ Professor M....