Since their invention more than 60 years ago, diamond anvil cells have made it possible for scientists to recreate extreme phenomena – such as the crushing pressures deep inside the Earth’s mantle – or to enable chemical reactions that can only be triggered by intense pressure, all within the confines of a laboratory apparatus that you can safely hold in the palm of your hand. To develop new, high-performance materials, scientists need to understand how useful properties, such as magnetism and strength, change under such harsh conditions....

As the researchers reported in the journal Science, that matters because, “Pressure alters the physical, chemical and electronic properties of matter.” Understanding those changes could lead to new materials or new phases of matter for use in all kinds of technologies and applications, said Valery Levitas, a paper co-author and Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering at Iowa State University, the Vance Coffman Faculty Chair and professor in aerospace engineering....

As the final flight test for SpaceX, this mission will validate the company’s crew transportation system, including the launch pad, rocket, spacecraft, and operational capabilities. This also will be the first time NASA astronauts will test the spacecraft systems in orbit. Behnken will be the joint operations commander for the mission, responsible for activities such as rendezvous, docking and undocking, as well as Demo-2 activities while the spacecraft is docked to the space station....

Titan’s abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment. DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface. “We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explains Dr....

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is being used at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to create parts for the J-2X and RS-25 rocket engines that will power the SLS, whose maiden voyage is slated for 2017. NASA expects SLM to simplify the process of making certain parts and in some cases, it will halve the cost of production, provided that the components can withstand the rigors of lifting the largest launch vehicle ever built into space....

At 11:21 p.m. EDT on Monday, September 26, NASA’s Artemis I Moon rocket left launch pad 39B atop the crawler-transporter and began its 4-mile trek to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Managers had met Monday morning and made the decision based on the latest weather predictions associated with Hurricane Ian, after additional data gathered overnight failed to show improving expected conditions for the Kennedy Space Center area....

NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet’s dust-producing deserts. This is crucial information that will help advance our understanding of airborne dust’s effects on climate. However, EMIT has demonstrated another critical capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere....

Dubbed Galaxy of Horrors, the fun but informative series resulted from a collaboration of scientists and artists and was produced by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The same program is behind the popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series, which imagines humans visiting some of the thousands of known worlds outside our solar system. Lurking beyond our solar system, among the billions of stars and the exoplanets that orbit them, is another sort of Milky Way altogether....

The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I flight test are rolling to launch pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of launch. Credit: NASA The journey began at around 11:17 p.m. EDT (8:17 p.m. PDT) on November 3 as the crawler-transporter began the approximately 4-mile journey from the VAB to the launch pad. Once outside the VAB high-bay doors, the Moon rocket made a planned pause allowing the team to reposition the crew access arm on the mobile launcher before continuing to the launch pad....

OSIRIS-REx is a mission to figure out where we came from, as asteroids are remnants from the formation of our solar system. But while the spacecraft might tell us some things about where we have been and where we are headed, it also can remind us of where we are right now. This composite image of the Earth and Moon is made from data captured by OSIRIS-REx’s MapCam instrument on October 2, 2017, when the spacecraft was approximately 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) from Earth, about 13 times the distance between the Earth and Moon....

“This mission spent seven years in the radiation belts, and broke all the records for a spacecraft to tolerate and operate in that hazardous region, all with no interruptions,” said Nelofar Mosavi, Van Allen Probes project manager at Johns Hopkins APL. “This mission was about resiliency against the harshest space environment.” Originally slated for a two-year mission, the spacecraft flew through the Van Allen belts — rings of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field — to understand how particles were gained and lost by the belts....

VIPER is the first resource-mapping mission on the surface of another celestial body. While on the Moon, VIPER will get a close-up view of the location and concentration of ice and other resources, assisting in the advancement of science and human exploration as part of Artemis missions. Scientists and mission operators will leverage near real-time Earth-to-Moon communications and work together to drive the rover along an unexplored region of the Moon’s South Pole....

The experiment was enabled by focusing laser light from NIF — the size of three football fields — onto a target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second. “These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production as well as open new avenues of research,” said Jill Hruby, DOE under secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA administrator....

The presence of chemicals made as the body breaks down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates can predict whether 9/11 first responders exposed to toxic dust at the World Trade Center site subsequently develop lung disease, a new study finds. NYU School of Medicine researchers say their experiments are the first to suggest which compounds may have prevented disease in firefighters and emergency workers at the disaster site. Specifically, their study linked 30 such chemicals—called metabolites—to increased protection against obstructive airway disease (OAD), which blocks air from flowing out of the lungs....

Although such spatial patterns of correlated activation have been consistently detected across neuroimaging centers around the world, the nature of these correlations was not clear. “We do not yet fully understand how the brain communicates over long distances. We know that distant areas exhibit signal correlations, and that they are implicated in brain function, but we do not completely understand their nature,” says Noam Shemesh, principal investigator of the Preclinical MRI Lab at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon, and senior author of a study published on February 6th, 2023, in the journal Nature Communications....

Neurons are sociable cells that, in the long run, die in isolation. During development, they, therefore, grow out cellular processes, termed neurites, to establish synaptic connections with other neurons. Once they receive sufficient or too much synaptic input, however, they stop growing or shrink. By this, neurons avoid long-term over-excitation. It is widely assumed among researchers that neuronal growth is hereby controlled to stabilize neuronal activity at a specific target level....

Several molecules that act as natural brakes on immune activity have been discovered, which has opened the door to immunotherapy — a potentially highly effective way of leveraging the immune system to attack cancer cells. For immunotherapy to reach its full potential in human patients, however, more must be learned about factors driving cancer immunity. Now, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) and Fox Chase Cancer Center show for the first time that a molecule called EGR4 — known mainly for its role in male fertility — serves as a critical brake on immune activation....

One week later, the first laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 triggered the two-and-a-half-year-long COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Interestingly, the worldwide research team behind the influenza report had also looked into the treatment of coronaviruses before the virus that temporarily halted their work arrived. “At the time we thought MERS would be the big target, which we were worried about because of its 35% mortality rate,” said David Markovitz, M....

“Diet-based therapy for eosinophilic esophagitis will be much easier to follow for many people if it involves cutting just one food from the diet rather than six,” said Hugh Auchincloss, M.D., acting director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH. EoE is a chronic disease characterized by an overabundance of white blood cells called eosinophils in the esophagus. Allergic inflammation due to food drives the disease by damaging the esophagus and preventing it from working properly....

The new comet was first spotted in April 2020, by an amateur astronomer named Michael Mattiazzo using data from a SOHO instrument called Solar Wind Anisotropies, or SWAN — as seen here. The comet appears to leave the left side of the image and reappear on the right side around May 3, because of the way SWAN’s 360-degree all-sky maps are shown, much like a globe is represented by a 2D map....