Next year, NASA plans to launch a new Mars rover to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. A new study shows that the rover’s Jezero crater landing site is home to deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that just happens to be particularly good at preserving biosignatures. “Using a technique we developed that helps us find rare, hard-to-detect mineral phases in data taken from orbiting spacecraft, we found two outcrops of hydrated silica within Jezero crater,” said Jesse Tarnas, a Ph....

In recent months, people have reported seeing a parade of star-like points passing across the night sky. The formation is not extraterrestrial, or even astrophysical in origin, but is in fact a line of satellites, recently launched by SpaceX, that will eventually be joined by many more to form Starlink, a “megaconstellation” that will wrap around the Earth as a global network designed to beam high-speed internet to users anywhere in the world....

By developing nanoparticle “backpacks” that hold immune-stimulating drugs, and attaching them directly to T cells, the MIT engineers showed in a study of mice that they could enhance those T cells’ activity without harmful side effects. In more than half of the treated animals, tumors disappeared completely. “We found you could greatly improve the efficacy of the T cell therapy with backpacked drugs that help the donor T cells survive and function more effectively....

Skydio, a San Francisco-based startup founded by three MIT alumni, is commercializing an autonomous video-capturing drone — dubbed by some as the “selfie drone” — that tracks and films a subject, while freely navigating any environment. Called R1, the drone is equipped with 13 cameras that capture omnidirectional video. It launches and lands through an app — or by itself. On the app, the R1 can also be preset to certain filming and flying conditions or be controlled manually....

In recent years there have been exciting breakthroughs in wearable technologies, like smartwatches that can monitor your breathing and blood oxygen levels. But what about a wearable that can detect how you move as you do a physical activity or play a sport, and could potentially even offer feedback on how to improve your technique? And, as a major bonus, what if the wearable were something you’d actually already be wearing, like a shirt of a pair of socks?...

The model design, experiments and datasets from the simulations are described in a data description paper recently published on December 10, 2019 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. A monsoon is a seasonal change in atmospheric circulation or prevailing wind direction that is associated with corresponding changes in precipitation resulting from uneven heating of sea and land surfaces. Monsoons blow from cold regions to warm regions, and are responsible for wet and dry seasons in the tropics....

Biological printers could be used to plausibly shuttle vaccines around the globe, but their use could be problematic as vaccines could easily be used as bio-weapons. If it’s possible to email troops the 3D instructions for printing a replacement gun part, then it should be possible to email macromolecules, as long as the printer can deposit an array of nucleotides, sugars, and amino acids where they belong, then link the whole molecule up chemically....

“Tropical fruit production has become a prominent practice in Miami-Dade County,” says Ariel Freidenreich. “For this reason, it is vital that sustainable farming practices are applied to these systems to ensure healthy soils and economically viable fruit production.” “Star fruit are a great snack while working in the sun because they are juicy and sweet,” says Freidenreich. “The Arkin variety is the most popular and widely planted in south Florida....

Physicians could only guess – until recently – at the composition of the black material found in the lungs of smokers who died of emphysema. But research by Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University shows the deposits consist of carbon black nanoparticles that, once embedded in the cells that line the lungs, are impossible to remove. In new papers in the online publication eLife and the journal Nature Immunology, researchers led by Baylor physicians David Corry and Farrah Kheradmand and Rice chemist James Tour identify the material as mostly insoluble nanoparticulate carbon black, tiny specks that result from the incomplete combustion of such organic material as tobacco....

Barron and Chari completed their major objectives for today to prepare the space station for upcoming solar array upgrades by assembling and installing modification kits. The duo built a support bracket onto which a future ISS roll out solar array (iROSA) will be mounted. So far, two of six iROSAs have been deployed on station with four additional arrays to be delivered. The arrays will ultimately augment six of the station’s eight power channels, increasing the station’s total available power from 160 kilowatts to up to 215 kilowatts....

NASA’s real-time 3D visualization tool Eyes on the Earth got a recent upgrade to include more datasets, putting the world at your fingertips. Using the tool, you can track the planet’s vital signs – everything from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to sea level and soil moisture levels – as well as follow the fleet of Earth satellites providing those measurements. Eyes on the Earth offers an engaging, interactive resource to learn more about environmental phenomena and their impacts....

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, finds that Earth’s wet land areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles. A team led by Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, used 14 years of observations from the U.S./German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track global trends in freshwater in 34 regions around the world....

This is the heliosphere, the vast bubble that is generated by the Sun’s magnetic field and envelops all the planets. The borders of this cosmic bubble are not fixed. In response to the Sun’s gasps and sighs, they shrink and stretch over the years. Now, for the first time, scientists have used an entire solar cycle of data from NASA’s IBEX spacecraft to study how the heliosphere changes over time....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:23 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:23 a.m. EDT on May 24), as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 9,600 miles (15,500 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, above a northern latitude of 56 degrees. The region seen here is somewhat chaotic and turbulent, given the various swirling cloud formations. In general, the darker cloud material is deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere, while the bright cloud material is high....

On December 22, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover placed a titanium tube containing a rock sample on the Red Planet’s surface. Over the next two months, the rover will build humanity’s first sample depot on another planet by depositing a total of 10 tubes at the location, called “Three Forks.” The establishment of the depot marks a historic early step in the Mars Sample Return campaign. Perseverance has been taking duplicate samples from rock targets the mission selects....

New images from NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft reveal the shape and size of Pluto’s smallest moon, Styx. Styx – also the faintest of Pluto’s five moons – was discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012, when New Horizons was more than two-thirds into its voyage to Pluto. The Styx images downlinked on October 5, 2015, were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 13, approximately 12....

Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon, are among the several discoveries announced Wednesday by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft’s first ever Pluto flyby. “Pluto New Horizons is a true mission of exploration showing us why basic scientific research is so important,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The mission has had nine years to build expectations about what we would see during closest approach to Pluto and Charon....

This image is a blend of 171 and 193 angstrom light as captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

“Many of the galaxies that existed in the early Universe were so small that their brightness is well below the limit of the current largest telescopes on Earth and in Space, making difficult to study their properties and internal structure,” says Nicolas Laporte, a Kavli Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge. “However, the light coming from the galaxy named RXCJ0600-z6, was highly magnified by gravitational lensing, making it an ideal target for studying the properties and structure of a typical baby galaxies....

Dragonfly wings, lotus leaves, cicada wings — thanks to millennia of evolution, nature has optimized the ways these surfaces and others behave to offer antibacterial functionality. An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers is trying to find the best way to translate these features to create nature-inspired bactericidal surfaces for use in medical implants. They discuss the surface structures and chemical compositions for an ideal implant material in the journal Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing....