Planetary nebulae are known in the neighborhood of the Sun as colorful objects that appear at the end of a star’s life as it evolves from the red giant to white dwarf stage: when the star has used up its fuel for nuclear fusion, it blows off its gas envelope into interstellar space, contracts, becomes extremely hot, and excites the expanding gas envelope to glow. Unlike the continuous spectrum of the star, the ions of certain elements in this gas envelope, such as hydrogen, oxygen, helium, and neon, emit light only at certain wavelengths....

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have designed a new type of magnet that could aid devices ranging from doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks to medical machines that create detailed pictures of the human body. Tokamaks depend on a central electromagnet known as a solenoid to produce electrical currents and magnetic fields that confine plasma — a hot, charged state of matter made up of free electrons and atomic nuclei — so that fusion reactions may take place....

The researchers crafted the sensor using a natural protein called lanmodulin, which has the ability to bind rare earth elements with remarkable precision. This protein was uncovered five years ago by some of the same researchers from Penn State who are involved in the presented study. They were able to genetically reprogram the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper, which defies the trends observed with most transition metal-binding molecules....

“Most studies dating surfaces on the Moon or Mars rely on counting how many impact craters have formed and knowing the cratering rate, but on the moons of Saturn, we do not know the cratering rate,” said Bell, author of “Relative Crater Scaling Between the Major Moons of Saturn: Implications for Planetocentric Cratering and the Surface Age of Titan” appearing in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. “Previous chronologies of the Saturn system have assumed that the craters on the moons of Saturn virtually all came from objects orbiting the Sun....

The work also could help astronomers more effectively study planets around stars unlike our sun, and better use the limited, expensive resources of the James Webb Space Telescope, now expected to launch in 2021. “We are modeling unfamiliar atmospheres, not just assuming that the things we see in the solar system will look the same way around another star,” said Andrew Lincowski, UW doctoral student and lead author of a paper published November 1 in Astrophysical Journal....

Spiral galaxies are some of the most beautiful and photogenic residents of the universe. Our own Milky Way is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous arms. And nearly 70 percent of the galaxies closest to the Milky Way are spirals. But despite their common shape, how galaxies like ours get and maintain their characteristic arms has proved to be an enduring puzzle in astrophysics....

Registry data reveals safety of COVID-19 vaccines in people with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases. COVID-19 is the disease caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since it emerged at the end of 2019, the virus has caused a global pandemic. In February 2021, EULAR, the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology, launched COVAX – a physician-reported registry to collect information about COVID vaccination in people with both inflammatory and non-inflammatory RMDs....

In this striking new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile young stars huddle together against a backdrop of clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. The star cluster, known as NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group of stars we see here. Clusters like this are celestial laboratories that allow astronomers to learn more about how stars evolve....

Waterproof fabrics that whisk away sweat could be the latest application of microfluidic technology developed by bioengineers at the University of California, Davis. The new fabric works like human skin, forming excess sweat into droplets that drain away by themselves, said inventor Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. One area of research in Pan’s Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at UC Davis is a field known as microfluidics, which focuses on making “lab on a chip” devices that use tiny channels to manipulate fluids....

The area shown above is south of Pluto’s dark equatorial band informally named Cthulhu Regio, and southwest of the vast nitrogen ice plains informally named Sputnik Planum or Sputnik Planitia, as the mission team recently redesignated the area to more accurately reflect the low elevation of the plains. North is at the top; in the western portion of the image, a chain of bright mountains extends north into Cthulhu Regio....

Implementing this approach has proven challenging, however. One obstacle is that once the islets are transplanted, they will die if they don’t receive an adequate supply of oxygen. Now, researchers at MIT, working with a company called Beta-O2 Technologies, have developed and tested an implantable device that furnishes islet cells with their own supply of oxygen, via a chamber that can be replenished every 24 hours. “Getting oxygen to these cells is a difficult problem,” says Clark Colton, an MIT professor of chemical engineering and the senior author of the study....

A new nanostructured material with applications that could include reducing condensation in airplane cabins and enabling certain medical tests without the need for high tech laboratories has been developed by researchers at the University of Sydney. “The newly discovered material uses raspberry particles – so-called because of their appearance – which can trap tiny water droplets and prevent them from rolling off surfaces, even when that surface is turned upside down,” said Dr Andrew Telford from the University’s School of Chemistry and lead author of the research recently published in the journal, Chemistry of Materials....

Based on a series of simulations, researchers have begun to probe the heterogeneous structure of the universe by treating the distribution of galaxies as a collection of points—like the individual particles of matter that make up a material—rather than as a continuous distribution. This technique has enabled the application of mathematics developed for materials science to quantify the relative disorder of the universe, enabling a better understanding of its fundamental structure....

Quantum dots — tiny particles that emit light in a dazzling array of glowing colors — have the potential for many applications, but have faced a series of hurdles to improved performance. But an MIT team says that it has succeeded in overcoming all these obstacles at once, while earlier efforts have only been able to tackle them one or a few at a time. Quantum dots — in this case, a specific type called colloidal quantum dots — are tiny particles of semiconductor material that are so small that their properties differ from those of the bulk material: They are governed in part by the laws of quantum mechanics that describe how atoms and subatomic particles behave....

Ongoing Alzheimer’s research is focused on two key neurotoxic proteins: amyloid beta (Aβ) and tau. Although these proteins have been shown to be associated with AD, the levels of Aβ and tau do not consistently explain or correlate with the severity of cognitive decline for some people with the disease. Investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, set out to identify other proteins that may be directly involved with fundamental aspects of AD, like synaptic loss and neurodegeneration....

Its remains were discovered 30 years ago in Alberta, Canada, but paleontologists had assumed they belonged to an already known species of pterosaur discovered in Texas, USA, named Quetzalcoatlus. The study, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, reveals it is actually a new species and the first pterosaur to be discovered in Canada. Dr. David Hone, the lead author of the study from Queen Mary University of London, said: “This is a cool discovery, we knew this animal was here but now we can show it is different to other azhdarchids and so it gets a name....

A new study led by a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health has found that individuals with a higher sense of purpose in life may be at a lower risk of death from any cause, regardless of race/ethnicity or gender. Previous research has suggested that having a sense of purpose may be linked to a range of health benefits, including improved physical functioning and reduced risks of cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline....

It has already been established that natural aging impairs the function of our skeletal muscles. We also know that the number and the activity of the muscles’ stem cells decline with age. However, the reasons for this have not been fully understood. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the number of mutations that accumulate in the muscle’s stem cells (satellite cells). “What is most surprising is the high number of mutations....

The researchers, led by experts from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) and Birmingham (UK), believe their results indicate that we are near a “tipping point” where ocean warming driven by atmospheric CO2 could trigger catastrophic rises in sea levels due to melting ice sheets. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience. In the study, the scientists examined molecular fossils from core samples taken during ocean drilling projects....

Cluster headaches are intense and brief headaches that may occur repeatedly for days or even weeks. They can last anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours. “Around the world, headaches have an incredibly negative impact on people’s quality of life, both economically and socially,” said study author Caroline Ran, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “Our results show that people with cluster headaches not only have an increased risk of other illnesses, those with at least one additional illness missed four times as many days of work due to sickness and disability than those with just cluster headaches....