In the new issue of Nature, CfA astronomers Matt Ashby, Chris Hayward, and Tony Stark join with thirty-five of their colleagues to report discovering a massive protocluster dating back to an epoch less than two billion years after the Simulations of the formation of a group of galaxies in an expanding universe, featuring no cosmological constant (left) and a very large cosmological constant (right). . The team has been using the South Pole Telescope to identify distant galaxy clusters at millimeter wavelengths....

In a letter to Nature, a team of astronomers, including Marc Sarzi from the University of Hertfordshire, report the exciting discovery of a new way to measure the mass of supermassive black holes in galaxies. By measuring the speed with which carbon monoxide molecules orbit around such black holes, this new research opens the possibility of making these measurements in many more galaxies than ever before. Supermassive black holes and galaxies A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping....

An international team of researchers, utilizing data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, has uncovered new evidence that red giants – stars that have reached the end of their lifecycle and have depleted their hydrogen supply – frequently experience significant structural variations, or “glitches,” deep within their inner core. The stellar glitches popularized in the media have to do with a star’s rotation, but lead author Mathieu Vrard studies a different kind of defect....

The discovery last year sparked a large observational campaign: originally identified as the first known interstellar asteroid, the small body was later revealed to be a comet, as further observations showed it was not slowing down as fast as it should have under gravity alone. The most likely explanation of the tiny variations recorded in its trajectory was that they are caused by gasses emanating from its surface, making it more akin to a comet....

2 dimensional dark matter map estimated by weak lensing technique. The dark matter is concentrated in dense clumps. (Credit: NAOJ) Mystery of the accelerated Universe In the 1930’s, Edwin Hubble and his colleagues discovered the expansion of the Universe. This was a big surprise to most of the people who believed that the Universe stayed the same throughout eternity. A formula relating matter and the geometry of space-time was required in order to express the expansion of the Universe mathematically....

Lead researcher Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths from ANU said the features of the radio images were more than three times finer than previous SMC images, which allowed the team to probe the interactions between the small galaxy and its environment with more accuracy. “We were able to observe a powerful outflow of hydrogen gas from the Small Magellanic Cloud,” said Professor McClure-Griffiths from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU....

Without clocks or modern tools, ancient Mexicans watched the sun to maintain a farming calendar that precisely tracked seasons and even adjusted for leap years. Before the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico’s agricultural system fed a population that was extraordinarily large for the time. Whereas Seville, the largest urban center in Spain, had a population of fewer than 50,000, the Basin, now known as Mexico City, was home to as many as 3 million people....

Kazem Kashefi and Adam Brown found that the metal-tolerant bacteria C. metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride, a toxic chemical compound found in nature. They exhibited their findings as part of the cyber art competition Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. The bacteria are at least 25 times stronger than previously reported. Their work is part of an art installation called The Great Work of the Metal Lover, which uses biotechnology, art, and alchemy to turn liquid gold into pure gold....

350 years ago, the French monk Anthelme Voituret saw a bright new star flare into life in the constellation of Vulpecula. Over the following months, the star became almost as bright as Polaris (the North Star) and was monitored by some of the leading astronomers of the day before it faded from view after a year.[1] The new star eventually gained the name CK Vulpeculae and was long considered to be the first documented example of a nova — a fleeting astronomical event arising from an explosion in a close binary star system in which one member is a white dwarf, the remnant of a Sun-like star....

CfA astronomer Mark Gurwell was a member of a large team of astronomers that monitored variability of the blazar CTA102 from 2013-2017 spanning the electromagnetic spectrum from radio to gamma rays, in particular using the Submillimeter Array to measure crucial short (mm/submm) wavelength radio emission. Although this bright blazar had been under surveillance since 1978, it was only since the launch of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in 1992 that its gamma-ray variability was discovered, and the launch of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope mission 2008 enabled continued observations....

Findings debunk dozens of prominent published papers claiming to read minds with EEG. Is it possible to read a person’s mind by analyzing the electric signals from the brain? The answer may be much more complex than most people think. Purdue University researchers – working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience – say a prominent dataset used to try to answer this question is confounded, and therefore many eye-popping findings that were based on this dataset and received high-profile recognition are false after all....

A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy. Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began....

Andros is around 160 km (99 mi) from north to south, and 70 km (43 mi) from east to west at its widest point. The island is largely unpopulated and has undeveloped stretches of land. Even though it is considered a single island, Andros is an archipelago made up of hundreds of small islets and cays connected by estuaries and swamplands together with three major islands: North Andros, Mangrove Cay, and South Andros....

To help stem escalating carbon dioxide emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels, some scientists have proposed seeding the oceans with iron — an essential ingredient that can stimulate phytoplankton growth. Such “iron fertilization” would cultivate vast new fields of phytoplankton, particularly in areas normally bereft of marine life. A new MIT study suggests that iron fertilization may not have a significant impact on phytoplankton growth, at least on a global scale....

Scientists’ calculations based on how carbon-based greenhouse gas levels link to movements of magma just below the earth’s surface suggest that such geological change has caused the largest temporary global warming of the past 65 million years. Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) are extremely large accumulations of igneous rocks which occur when magma travels through the crust towards the surface. Geologists at the University of Birmingham have created the first mechanistic model of carbon emissions changes during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) — a short interval of maximum temperature lasting around 100,000 years some 55 million years ago....

A new study from MIT suggests that combining kinase inhibitors with experimental drugs known as ribonucleases could lead to better results. In tests with human cancer cells, the researchers found that the two drugs given together kill cells much more effectively than either drug does on its own. The combination could also help to prevent tumors from developing drug resistance, says Ronald Raines, the Firmenich Professor of Chemistry at MIT....

Researchers demonstrated new chip-based devices that contain all the optical components necessary for quantum key distribution while increasing real-world security. The fast and cost-effective platform is poised to facilitate implementation of extremely secure data communication that can be used to protect everything from emails to online banking information. Advances in computing technology will soon leave today’s methods for encrypting online data vulnerable to eavesdropping. Quantum key distribution offers impenetrable encryption by using the quantum properties of light to generate secure random keys between users for encrypting and decrypting their online data....

The Queensland Brain Institute researchers made the finding after studying the link between the enzyme Fyn and the protein Tau in frontotemporal dementia. The research team was led by Professor Frederic Meunier and Dr. Ramón Martnez-Mármol. They discovered that Fyn, a key aspect of memory and learning, becomes extremely active when immobilized inside synapses, the connection hubs between neurons where neuronal communication takes place. “Using super-resolution microscopy, we can now see these enzymes individually and in real-time, moving around randomly in live neurons,” Lead author Dr....

The disastrous consequences of climate “tipping points” could be averted if global warming was reversed quickly enough, new research suggests. Until now, crossing these thresholds has been assumed to be a point of no return, but the new study — published in the journal Nature — concludes that thresholds could be “temporarily exceeded” without prompting permanent shifts. The research team, from the University of Exeter and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), say the time available to act would depend on the level of global warming and the timescale involved in each tipping point....

Researchers have analyzed samples of asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil—one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples. This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites....