Earlier this month, the European Space Agency (ESA) released observational data from the Gaia telescope (Gaia Early Data Release 3 or EDR3), in continuation to the DR1 and DR2 releases of the years 2016 and 2018. Gaia accrues accurate knowledge about, for example, the Milky Way stars, distant extragalactic quasars, and the asteroids of our Solar System. Quasars are bright, star-like objects that allow for the determination of planet Earth’s orientation in space....

Chemical oscillators have long been studied by engineers and scientists. The researchers who discovered the chemical oscillator that controls the human circadian rhythm —responsible for our bodies’ day and night rhythm — earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Though understanding of chemical oscillators and other biological chemical processes has evolved significantly, scientists do not know enough to control the chemical activities of living cells. This is leading engineers and scientists to turn to synthetic oscillators that work in test tubes rather than in cells....

As the COVID-19 shutdowns and stay-at-home orders brought much of the world’s travel and commerce to a standstill, people around the world started noticing clearer skies as a result of lower levels of air pollution. Now, researchers have been able to demonstrate that those clearer skies had a measurable impact on the output from solar photovoltaic panels, leading to a more than 8 percent increase in the power output from installations in Delhi....

NASA Goddard’s Aki Roberge explains how observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile tell us about poison gas, comet swarms and a hypothetical planet around Beta Pictoris. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center An international team of astronomers exploring the disk of gas and dust around a nearby star have uncovered a compact cloud of poisonous gas formed by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies....

The findings could have significant impacts on climate change predictions as the ability of secondary forests to soak up carbon from the atmosphere may have been overestimated. By taking large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, forests regrowing after clear-felling — commonly called secondary forests — have been thought an important tool in combatting human-caused climate change. However, the study by a group of Brazilian and British researchers shows that even after 60 years of regrowth, the studied secondary forests held only 40% of the carbon in forests that had not been disturbed by humans....

DEET may chemically ‘cloak’ humans from malaria-carrying mosquitos, rather than repel them. Since its invention during the Second World War for soldiers stationed in countries where malaria transmission rates were high, researchers have worked to pinpoint precisely how DEET actually affects mosquitos. Past studies have analyzed the chemical structure of the repellent, studied the response in easier insects to work with, such as fruit flies, and experimented with genetically engineered mosquito scent receptors grown inside frog eggs....

A radical new approach combining archaeology, genetics, and microscopy can reveal long-forgotten secrets of human diet, sanitation, and movement from studying parasites in ancient poo, according to new Oxford University research. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology and School of Archaeology have applied genetic analysis to 700-year-old parasites found in archaeological stool samples to understand a variety of characteristics of a human population. It is the first time this combined parasitological and ancient DNA (aDNA) approach has been applied to understand the epidemiology of historical parasites....

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0....

Australia’s newest radio telescope is predicted to find an unprecedented 700,000 new galaxies, say scientists planning for CSIRO’s next-generation Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). In a paper to be published Sunday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Australian researchers have combined computer simulations with ASKAP’s specifications to predict the new telescope’s extraordinary capabilities. “ASKAP is a highly capable telescope. Its surveys will find more galaxies, further away and be able to study them in more detail than any other radio telescope in the world until the SKA Is built,” said Dr....

The remarkable exoplanet discoveries made by the Kepler and K2 missions have enabled astronomers to begin to piece together the history of the Earth and to understand how and why it differs from its diverse exoplanetary cousins. Two still outstanding puzzles include the differences between the formation and evolution of rocky versus non-rocky small planets, and why there seems to be a size gap with very few exoplanets at or about two Earth-radii in size (planets with smaller radii are likely to be rocky or Earth-like in their composition)....

The early days of our Solar System were a tempestuous time. Theoretical models of this period predict that after the gas giants formed they rampaged through the Solar System, ejecting small rocky bodies from the inner Solar System to far-flung orbits at great distances from the Sun. In particular, these models suggest that the Kuiper Belt — a cold region beyond the orbit of Neptune — should contain a small fraction of rocky bodies from the inner Solar System, such as carbon-rich asteroids, referred to as carbonaceous asteroids....

CfA astronomers Eduardo Gonzalez-Alfonso, Matt Ashby, and Howard Smith have now discovered that the ionized molecule OH+ traces hot gas in these outflows and also (probably) from the torus of material thought to ring the black hole. The scientists led a team that reduced and modeled three far infrared lines of OH+ and one of the ionized water molecules H2O+ in the galaxy Markarian 231. The lines confirm much of the diagnostics from the neutral molecular gas analyses; the most curious result, however, was the huge abundance of the ionized material, nearly 10% of the neutral gas....

Some 3.9 billion years ago in the heart of a distant galaxy, the intense tidal pull of a monster black hole shredded a star that passed too close. When X-rays produced in this event first reached Earth on March 28, 2011, they were detected by NASA’s Swift satellite, which notified astronomers around the world. Within days, scientists concluded that the outburst, now known as Swift J1644+57, represented both the tidal disruption of a star and the sudden flare-up of a previously inactive black hole....

A team of astronomers led by the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have succeeded in observing the death throws of a giant star in unprecedented detail. In February of 1987 astronomers observing the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy, noticed the sudden appearance of what looked like a new star. In fact they weren’t watching the beginnings of a star but the end of one and the brightest supernova seen from Earth in the four centuries since the telescope was invented....

There are currently about fifty known exoplanets with diameters that range from Mars-sized to several times the Earth’s and that also reside within their stars’ habitable zone – the orbital range within which their surface temperatures permit water to remain liquid. A “water world” is an extreme case, an exoplanet defined as being covered by a deep ocean, perhaps as deep as hundreds of kilometers, and among these fifty are several that might be candidates for this category....

Stars form in stellar eggs, cosmic clouds of gas and dust which collapse due to gravity. If something interferes with the gravity-driven contraction, star formation will be suppressed. There are many potential sources of interference near the Galactic Center. Strong turbulence can stir up the clouds and prevent them from contracting, or strong magnetic fields can support the gas against self-gravitational collapse. Previous observations indicated that star formation near the Galactic Center is much less efficient....

NASA scientists using Earth-based radar have produced sharp views of a recently discovered asteroid as it slid silently past our planet. Captured on June 8, 2014, the new views of the object designated “2014 HQ124″ are some of the most detailed radar images of a near-Earth asteroid ever obtained. The radar observations were led by scientists Marina Brozovic and Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The JPL researchers worked closely with Michael Nolan, Patrick Taylor, Ellen Howell and Alessondra Springmann at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to plan and execute the observations....

Active galactic nuclei, also known as quasars, are massive black holes with matter orbiting around them. They emit two oppositely directed jets of plasma traveling out into space at close to the speed of light. Any massive black hole has matter orbiting around it, slowly falling toward it and emitting light. This matter forms what is known as an accretion disk. Due to a mechanism that is not yet fully understood, part of the matter approaching the black hole makes an escape....

Researchers at the Unversitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech (UPC) in Spain were able to use an enzymatic pre-treatment, which was combined by the deposition of nanoparticles and biopolymers under ultrasonic irradiation. The result was SONO, a pilot line of antibacterial and antifungal medical textiles based on a sonochemical process. The technique creates fully sterile antimicrobial textiles that could keep hospital-acquired infections at bay. Hospitals are faced with nosocomial infections, which aren’t present and without evidence of incubation at the time of admission....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Porcupine quills are actually large, stiff hairs that help defend the animals against their predators. The rodents don’t throw their quills, but they do shed them easily, and they can become firmly embedded in their enemies. The North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) has about 30,000 quills, each of which is adorned with 700 to 800 barbs....