After more than a decade of planning, construction, and testing, the new Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) has seen first light with the instrument MUSE, capturing amazingly sharp views of planetary nebulae and galaxies. The coupling of the AOF and MUSE forms one of the most advanced and powerful technological systems ever built for ground-based astronomy. The Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF) is a long-term project on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to provide an adaptive optics system for the instruments on Unit Telescope 4 (UT4), the first of which is MUSE (the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer)....

The study, supported by NASA ABoVE and conducted in coordination with the Permafrost Carbon Network and more than 50 collaborating institutions, was published today in the prestigious Nature Climate Change journal. It warns that winter carbon dioxide loss from the world’s permafrost regions could increase by 41 percent if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current pace. “High-latitude cold regions, including the Arctic, are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with the greatest warming occurring during the winter....

Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest that the water in our Solar System formed billions of years before the Sun. The new observations were published on March 8 in the journal Nature....

In order to understand how our own Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved, astronomers rely on observing distant galaxies. As their light takes billions of years to reach us, telescopes can be used as time machines, as long as we have a clear indicator to pinpoint the distance to the objects being observed. As with closer galaxies, stars and planets, astronomers use the technique of spectroscopy to analyse their light, dispersing it into a spectrum....

New ALMA observations are significantly deeper and sharper than previous surveys at millimeter wavelengths. They clearly show how the rate of star formation in young galaxies is closely related to their total mass in stars. They also trace the previously unknown abundance of star-forming gas at different points in time, providing new insights into the “Golden Age” of galaxy formation approximately 10 billion years ago. The new ALMA results will be published in a series of papers appearing in the Astrophysical Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

About thirty years ago, scientists predicted that if it ever became possible to observe a microlensing flash from two well-separated vantage points, a parallax measurement would pin down the distance of the dark object. The Spitzer Space Telescope is currently orbiting the Sun at the distance of the Earth but trailing the Earth at a location about one-quarter of the way around in its orbital path. A year ago, CfA astronomer Jennifer Yee led a team to make the first parallax microlensing measurement of a small stellar object using both Spitzer and ground-based telescopes....

About 250 million light-years away, there’s a neighborhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies. “This rare, ‘Frankenstein’ galaxy formed and is able to survive because it lies in a quiet little suburban neighborhood of the universe, where none of the hubbub of the more crowded parts can bother it,” said study co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, California....

For a long time, experts have been puzzled by the bi-modal distribution of jet velocities, with some being incredibly fast and others being slow, and a noticeable absence of velocities in between. However, researchers at Bar-Ilan University have revisited the data and seem to have finally solved this perplexing puzzle. In many different galactic and extragalactic systems, emission of matter is commonly observed in the form of jets. The speed at which this spectacle occurs greatly varies....

With scientists beginning to more seriously consider constructing bases on celestial bodies such as the moon, the idea of space mining is growing in popularity. After all, if someone from Los Angeles was moving to New York to build a house, it would be a lot easier to buy the building materials in New York rather than buy them in Los Angeles and lug them 2,800 miles. Considering the distance between Earth and the moon is about 85 times greater, and that getting there requires defying gravity, using the moon’s existing resources is an appealing idea....

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to show the scene in near natural color. The images were taken with Cassini’s wide-angle camera on September 14, 2017, at a distance of approximately 394,000 miles (634,000 kilometers) from Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on September 15, 2017. The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency), and the Italian Space Agency....

A study involving some 11,000 dogs carried out at the University of Helsinki demonstrated that the gender, age, and breed of the dog, as well as any behavioral problems and certain environmental factors, are connected to hyperactive and impulsive behavior and inattention (ADHD). “Our findings can help to better identify, understand and treat canine hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. Moreover, they indicated similarity with human ADHD, consolidating the role of dogs in ADHD-related research,” says Professor Hannes Lohi, head of a canine gene research group at the University of Helsinki....

The image was taken at 13:57:56 UTC by the Mercury Transfer Module’s Monitoring Camera 3, when the spacecraft was 1573 km from Venus. Closest approach of 552 km took place shortly before, at 13:51:54 UTC. The cameras provide black-and-white snapshots in 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. The image has been lightly processed to enhance contrast and use the full dynamic range. A small amount of optical vignetting is seen in the bottom left of the image....

Zinc oxide and oregano essential oil are compounds that have good antimicrobial activity against two prominent bacteria renowned for causing food poisoning – Staphylococcus and Escherichia coli. The YPACK team discovered an optimal ratio of the active ingredients that showed successful short-term (15 days) and medium-term (up to 48 days) antibacterial effects in ‘open’ and ‘closed’ systems for food products where the packaging is opened and closed several times, for example ham slices or bread....

In a paper published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology[1] today (March 31, 2020) the researchers show that the test, which could eventually be used in national cancer screening programs, has a 0.7% false positive rate for cancer detection, meaning that less than 1% of people would be wrongly identified as having cancer. As a comparison, about 10% of women are wrongly identified as having cancer in national breast cancer screening programs, although this rate can be higher or lower depending on the number and frequency of screenings and the type of mammogram performed....

The team’s paper, “Bone-Inspired Microarchitectures Achieve Enhanced Fatigue Life,” was published on November 18, 2019, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For decades, scientists studying osteoporosis have used X-ray imaging to analyze the structure of bones and pinpoint strong and weak spots. Density is the main factor that is usually linked to bone strength, and in assessing that strength, most researchers look at how much load a bone can handle all at once....

A new way to self-assemble particles has been created by a team of physicists. This advance offers new promise for building complex and innovative materials at the microscopic level. Self-assembly, introduced in the early 2000s, gives scientists a means to “pre-program” particles, which allows for the construction of materials without further human intervention. This is basically the microscopic equivalent of Ikea furniture that can assemble itself. The breakthrough, reported today, September 28, in the journal Nature, centers on emulsions—droplets of oil immersed in water—and their use in the self-assembly of foldamers....

Materials that can slow the cooling of highly energetic hot carriers could capture extra energy from the Sun. Two-dimensional solar materials may offer a way to extract more energy from sunlight. By tuning the structure of a 2D perovskite solar material, researchers from KAUST and the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown they can prolong the lifetime of highly energetic hot carriers generated by light striking the material. The approach could offer a way to capture solar energy more efficiently....

For the study, which is published in the Journal of Occupational Health, investigators calculated risks for three adverse outcomes: early abortive outcomes (miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, and molar pregnancy), stillbirth, and no live birth (pregnancy with no record of live birth thereafter, which include early abortive outcomes and stillbirth). Overall, 18.0%, 0.7%, and 39.8% of pregnancies ended in early abortive outcomes, stillbirths, and no live births, respectively. The risk of early abortive outcomes and stillbirths was higher in non-employed women than in employed women, while no live births were more frequent in employed women....

In a new study, published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), and collaborators from other institutes, analyzed 69 genomes from the East Asian mandarin family, alongside their mainland Asian relatives, to reveal a far-ranging story of isolation, long-distance travel, and hybridization. The story starts in the Hunan Province of southern China, which is the center of wild mandarin diversity and the genetic source of most well-known mandarins....

During its mission of over a decade, the Dawn spacecraft has studied the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have formed early in the history of the solar system. The mission’s goal is to characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation.