These changes and delays in farmers’ plans this year made the United States Department of Agriculture’s job of tracking and estimating crop production with farmer surveys and ground observations a challenge. To meet it, they turned to the joint NASA — U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 8 satellite to fill in the missing pieces. Since 2008, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, or NASS, has drawn on Landsat data to monitor dozens of crops in the lower 48 states as part of NASS’s Cropland Data Layer program....

Since Herschel proposed his theory, astronomers have come to understand that what he was seeing was a galaxy. NGC 4618, classified as a barred spiral galaxy, has the special distinction among other spiral galaxies of only having one arm rotating around the center of the galaxy. Located about 21 million light-years from our galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici, NGC 4618 has a diameter of about one-third that of the Milky Way....

Our own galaxy, for example, is part of the Local Group, which in turn is part of the giant Laniakea Supercluster. It was thanks to Hubble that we were able to study massive galactic superstructures such as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall; a giant galaxy cluster that contains billions of galaxies and extends 10 billion light-years across — making it the biggest known structure in the Universe. This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing program called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey)....

UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation, and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure — resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud....

Seeing a spiral almost in profile, as Hubble has here, can provide a vivid sense of its three-dimensional shape. Through most of their expanse, spiral galaxies are shaped like a thin pancake. At their cores, though, they have bright, spherical, star-filled bulges that extend above and below this disk, giving these galaxies a shape somewhat like that of a flying saucer when they are seen edge-on. NGC 3717 is not captured perfectly edge-on in this image; the nearer part of the galaxy is tilted ever so slightly down, and the far side tilted up....

This image, speckled with blue, white, and yellow light, shows part of the spiral galaxy IC 5052. Surrounded in the image by foreground stars in our own galaxy, and distant galaxies beyond, it emits a bright blue-white glow that highlights its narrow, intricate structure. It is viewed side-on in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock), in the southern sky. When spiral galaxies are viewed from this angle, it is very difficult to fully understand their properties and how they are arranged....

Like finding a silver needle in the haystack of space, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the spiral galaxy IC 2233, one of the flattest galaxies known. Typical spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are usually made up of three principal visible components: the disk where the spiral arms and most of the gas and dust is concentrated; the halo, a rough and sparse sphere around the disk that contains little gas, dust or star formation; and the central bulge at the heart of the disk, which is formed by a large concentration of ancient stars surrounding the Galactic Center....

This image shows a heart-shaped calving front of a glacier in northwest Greenland, as seen during an Operation IceBridge flight on March 27, 2017. Learn more about Operation IceBridge.

As COVID-19 makes its way around the world, scientists are working around the clock to analyze the virus to find new treatments and cures and predict how it will propagate through the population. Some of their most powerful tools are supercomputers and particle accelerators, including those at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory affiliated with the University of Chicago. X-rays for the cure To make drugs that work against COVID-19, we first need to find a biochemical “key”—an inhibitor molecule that will nestle perfectly into the nooks and crannies of one or more of the 28 proteins that make up the virus....

Now, a new study describes a strategy to overcome these limitations based on several insights. The research was led by scientists from the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. First, the investigation team recognized that certain targeted drugs called “covalent inhibitors” form stable attachments with the disease-related proteins they target inside cancer cells. They also knew that once inside cells, proteins are naturally broken down and presented as small pieces (peptides) on cell surfaces by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules....

After being installed on the International Space Station, two small instruments designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California were powered up on January 7 and began collecting data on Earth’s ocean winds and atmospheric water vapor – critical information required for weather and marine forecasts. Within two days, the Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR) and Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems (TEMPEST) instruments had gathered enough data to begin producing maps....

Responsive material changes its behavior based on earlier conditions. Inspired by living systems, a new material has been developed that changes its electrical behavior based on previous experience, effectively giving it a basic form of adaptive memory. Such adaptive materials could play a vital role in the next generation of medical and environmental sensors, as well as in soft robots or active surfaces. The breakthrough was achieved by researchers at Aalto University in Finland....

Results from a large clinical trial in the United States and South America indicate that AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, AZD1222, is well-tolerated and protects against symptomatic COVID-19 disease, including severe disease or hospitalization. The independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) overseeing the trial identified no safety concerns related to the vaccine. The United Kingdom-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca developed the vaccine and led the trial as regulatory sponsor. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the U....

A Japanese company has developed a kind of cellophane, named Aura Pack, that helps keep fruits and vegetables fresh. The freshness-preserving effect is achieved by controlling the evaporation of water and excess respiration. Vegetables have a water content of at least 90%. As long as water isn’t lost, they stay crisp and fresh. By using Belle Green Wise’s film, it’s harder for water to evaporate. Vegetables take in oxygen and release CO2....

At the start of the 20th century, the Colorado River flowed free from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico, where it supported a unique delta habitat. But that changed over the past 80 years as the population of the Southwest U.S. swelled: Today, the river supplies water to 40 million people and 4 million acres of crops along its route. Now, the river does not really reach the Sea of Cortez in Mexico....

The study, published in the journal PNAS, chronicles the effort — and failure — to eradicate invasive European green crabs from a California estuary. The crabs increased 30-fold after about 90 percent had been removed. The study is the first experimental demonstration in a coastal ecosystem of a dramatic population increase in response to full eradication. “A failure in science often leads to unexpected direction s,” said lead author Edwin (Ted) Grosholz, a professor and ecologist with the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy....

“This result could be key to unraveling fundamental questions for humankind, such as what organic compounds existed during the formation of the solar system and how they contributed to the birth of life on Earth,” says Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University’s Institute of Low Temperature Science. Scientists have already detected some of the basic organic molecules necessary for the beginnings of life in comets, asteroids, and interstellar molecular clouds: giant gaseous clouds dispersed between stars....

Scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves with both the LIGO and Virgo detectors. This new finding is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, and highlights the scientific potential of a three-detector network of gravitational-wave detectors. The three-detector observation was made on August 14, 2017 at 10:30:43 UTC....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. Understanding the physical process by which the cracks form illuminates the biology of the crocodile and allows researchers to track the interplay between physical and genetic forces during embryonic development. “This is a completely different mechanism than is normally used in development,” states Michel Milinkovitch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and lead author. On most reptiles’ bodies, each scale develops from a discrete developmental unit, called a scale primordium....

Magnesium deficiency is associated with a variety of diseases, such as infections and cancer. Previous studies have shown that cancerous growths spread faster in the bodies of mice when the animals received a low-magnesium diet – and that their defense against flu viruses was also impaired. However, there has so far been little research into how exactly this mineral affects the immune system. Now, researchers led by Professor Christoph Hess, from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel and the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, have discovered that T cells can eliminate abnormal or infected cells efficiently only in a magnesium-rich environment....