Electronic devices such as cameras, microphones, and pressure sensors enable machines to sense and quantify their environments optically, acoustically, and physically. Our sense of smell, however, despite being one of nature’s most primal senses, has proven very difficult to replicate artificially. Evolution has refined this sense over millions of years and researchers are working hard to catch up. A keen sense of smell is a powerful ability shared by many organisms....

Last year, a fleet of NASA spacecraft got a detailed look at the life cycle of the 2018 global dust storm that ended the Opportunity rover’s mission. And while scientists are still puzzling over the data, two papers recently shed new light on a phenomenon observed within the storm: dust towers, or concentrated clouds of dust that warm in sunlight and rise high into the air. Scientists think that dust-trapped water vapor may be riding them like an elevator to space, where solar radiation breaks apart their molecules....

Researchers can explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution by studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past. One principal example is the Permian-Triassic climatic crises. This series of climatic shifts was driven by global warming that occurred between the Middle Permian (265 million years ago) and Middle Triassic (230 million years ago). These climatic shifts caused two of the largest mass extinctions in the history of life at the end of the Permian, the first at 261 million years ago and the other at 252 million years ago, the latter eliminating 86% of all animal species worldwide....

Since the early days of the COVID pandemic, scientists have aggressively pursued the secrets of the mechanisms that allow severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to enter and infect healthy human cells. Early in the pandemic, University of California San Diego’s Rommie Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist, helped develop a detailed visualization of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that efficiently latches onto our cell receptors. Now, Amaro and her research colleagues from UC San Diego, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered how glycans—molecules that make up a sugary residue around the edges of the spike protein—act as infection gateways....

In a paper published today scientists have studied the Vela Pulsar, a neutron star in the southern sky, that is 1,000 light years away. Neutron stars are not only the densest objects in the Universe, but they rotate very fast and regularly. Until they don’t. Occasionally these neutron stars start to spin faster, caused by portions of the inside of the star moving outwards. It’s called a “glitch” and it provides astronomers a brief insight into what lies within these mysterious objects....

The precision instrument, called the High Resolution Coronal Imager or Hi-C for short, flew aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. “This was the third launch of Hi-C,” said Amy Winebarger, principal investigator for the Hi-C mission at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. “Our second launch in 2016 had an issue with the camera on-board the telescope of the instrument....

Solar cells, incorporating the mineral perovskite, have been the focus of attention since the material was first shown to work in 2009. Solar cells that are built using this material are more efficient than current solar panels. Current solar panels capture 15% to 18% of the solar energy on average, while perovskite solar cells have been found to be as much as 28% efficient. But there are major obstacles to using these materials commercially: The materials are not stable, and they contain water-soluble lead, which is a health hazard....

The Prawn Nebula, also known as IC 4628, is an emission nebula, which means its gas has been energized, or ionized, by the radiation of nearby stars. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula’s hydrogen atoms. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state by recombining with hydrogen nuclei, they emit energy in the form of light, causing the nebula’s gas to glow....

Bright patches of nebulosity near newborn stars, Herbig-Haro objects like HH 7–11 are transient phenomena. Traveling away from the star that created them at a speed of up to about 150,000 miles per hour, they disappear into nothingness within a few tens of thousands of years. The young star that is the source of HH 7–11 is called SVS 13, and all five objects are moving away from SVS 13 toward the upper left....

The Calabash Nebula, pictured here — which has the technical name OH 231.8+04.2 — is a spectacular example of the death of a low-mass star like the Sun. This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the star going through a rapid transformation from a red giant to a planetary nebula, during which it blows its outer layers of gas and dust out into the surrounding space. The recently ejected material is spat out in opposite directions with immense speed — the gas shown in yellow is moving close to a million kilometers an hour....

NGC 6744 is similar to our home galaxy in more ways than one. Like the Milky Way, NGC 6744 has a prominent central region packed with old yellow stars. Moving away from the galactic core, one can see parts of the dusty spiral arms painted in shades of pink and blue; while the blue sites are full of young star clusters, the pink ones are regions of active star formation, indicating that the galaxy is still very lively....

In contrast to the Milky Way, NGC 5033 is missing a central bar. Instead, it has a bright and energetic core called an active galactic nucleus, which is powered by a supermassive black hole. This active nucleus gives it the classification of a Seyfert galaxy. Due to the ongoing activity, the core of NGC 5033 shines bright across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This released energy shows that the central black hole is currently devouring stars, dust, and gas getting too close to it....

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has uncovered surprising new clues about a hefty, rapidly aging star whose behavior has never been seen before in our Milky Way galaxy. Nicknamed it “Nasty 1,” a play on its catalog name of NaSt1, the star may represent a brief transitory stage in the evolution of extremely massive stars. First discovered several decades ago, Nasty 1 was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our sun....

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years....

An image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot-wide (almost 16 meter) parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater. “If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape,” said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

An afternoon whirlwind on Mars lofts a twisting column of dust more than half a mile (800 meters) high in an image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The active dust devil displays a delicate arc produced by a westerly breeze partway up its height. The dust plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter. The image was taken during the time of Martian year when that planet is farthest from the sun....

Indoor air quality strategies and the prevention of COVID transmission. Zhang’s plan is detailed in a recent editorial published in the journal “Science and Technology for the Built Environment” called “Integrating IAQ control strategies to reduce the risk of asymptomatic SARS CoV-2 infections in classrooms and open plan offices.” “Classrooms and open-space offices present a special challenge because of their relatively large occupant density, which can lead to a higher chance of person-to-person cross infection in the space via airborne transmission as well as through direct or indirect contacts,” Zhang says....

Limiting access to food in mice increases levels of the hormone, ghrelin, which may also increase motivation to exercise, according to a study published in the Journal of Endocrinology. The study suggests that a surge in levels of the appetite-promoting hormone, ghrelin, after a period of fasting prompted mice to initiate voluntary exercise. These novel findings indicate that better diet control, for example limiting food intake to mealtimes or fasting intermittently, could help overweight people maintain a more effective exercise routine, lose weight and avoid debilitating complications such as diabetes and heart disease....

“The combination of creativity and analytical thinking has once again paid off big time for NASA,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We realized that the orbit was going to carry Juno into Jupiter’s shadow, which could have grave consequences because we’re solar-powered. No sunlight means no power, so there was a real risk we might freeze to death. While the team was trying to figure out how to conserve energy and keep our core heated, the engineers came up with a completely new way out of the problem: Jump Jupiter’s shadow....

Two large studies carried out independently in the UK both found a slight increase in risk of intracranial thromboses in some populations after the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. There is a slightly elevated risk of intracranial thrombosis events following vaccination with the AstraZeneca ChAdOx1-S COVID vaccine, according to two new studies publishing today (February 22nd, 2022) in PLOS Medicine. The first paper, by William Whiteley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues from the BHF Data Science Centre, UK, analyzed the electronic health records of 46 million adults in England....