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Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system. These two images, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, capture the comet appearing near a background galaxy (left) and soon after its closest approach to the Sun (right). Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA) When astronomers see something in the universe that at first glance seems like one-of-a-kind, it's bound to stir up a lot of excitement and attention. Enter comet 2I/Borisov. This mysterious visitor from the depths of space is the first identified comet to arrive here from another star. We don't know from where or when the comet started heading toward our Sun, but it won't hang around for long. The Sun's gravity is slightly deflecting its trajectory, but can't capture it because of the shape of its orbit and high velocity of about 100,000 miles per hour. Telescopes around the world have been watching the fleeting visitor. NASA's Hubbl...

In August 2018, NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched to space, soon becoming the closest-ever spacecraft to the Sun. With cutting-edge scientific instruments to measure the environment around the spacecraft, Parker Solar Probe has completed three of 24 planned passes through never-before-explored parts of the Sun's atmosphere, the corona. On Dec. 4, 2019, four new papers in the journal Nature describe what scientists have learned from this unprecedented exploration of our star -- and what they look forward to learning next. These findings reveal new information about the behavior of the material and particles that speed away from the Sun, bringing scientists closer to answering fundamental questions about the physics of our star. In the quest to protect astronauts and technology in space, the information Parker has uncovered about how the Sun constantly ejects material and energy will help scientists re-write the models we use to understand and predict the space weather aroun...

Skating on frozen lake (stock image). The answer to the question of why ice is slippery lies in a film of water that is generated by friction, one that is far thinner than expected and much more viscous than usual water through its resemblance to the "snow cones" of crushed ice we drink during the summer. This phenomenon was recently demonstrated by researchers from the CNRS and ENS-PSL, with support from the École polytechnique, in a study that appeared in  Physical Review X  on 2019, November 4. The "slippery" nature of ice is generally attributed to the formation of a thin layer of liquid water generated by friction, which for instance allows an ice skater to "surf" on top of this liquid film. The properties of this thin layer of water had never been measured: its thickness remained largely unknown, while its properties, and even its very existence, were the subject of debate. What's more, since liquid water is known to be a poor lu...

Cystic fibrosis concept illustration (stock image). A phase three clinical trial that UT Southwestern participated in determined that a three-drug combination improved lung function and reduced symptoms in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients who have a single copy of the most common genetic mutation for the disease. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy based on the results of this international study, published today in the  New England Journal of Medicine . A companion investigation appearing simultaneously in The Lancet reported on people with one or two copies of the mutation. Dr. Raksha Jain, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, is corresponding author of the  NEJM  article and an investigator on The Lancet study. Dr. Jain is presenting both studies at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference in Nashville this week. CF is a chronic, progressive, and frequently fatal genetic...

A new way of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of air could provide a significant tool in the battle against climate change. The new system can work on the gas at virtually any concentration level, even down to the roughly 400 parts per million currently found in the atmosphere. Most methods of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of gas require higher concentrations, such as those found in the flue emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants. A few variations have been developed that can work with the low concentrations found in air, but the new method is significantly less energy-intensive and expensive, the researchers say. The technique, based on passing air through a stack of charged electrochemical plates, is described in a new paper in the journal  Energy and Environmental Science , by MIT postdoc Sahag Voskian, who developed the work during his PhD, and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering. The device is essentially a large, sp...

A widely-used gas that is currently produced from fossil fuels can instead be made by an 'artificial leaf' that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and which could eventually be used to develop a sustainable liquid fuel alternative to petrol. The carbon-neutral device sets a new benchmark in the field of solar fuels, after researchers at the University of Cambridge demonstrated that it can directly produce the gas -- called syngas -- in a sustainable and simple way. Rather than running on fossil fuels, the artificial leaf is powered by sunlight, although it still works efficiently on cloudy and overcast days. And unlike the current industrial processes for producing syngas, the leaf does not release any additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The results are reported in the journal   Nature Materials . Syngas is currently made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and is used to produce a range of commodities, such as fuels, pharmaceu...

Exoplanets illustration; elements furnished by NASA (stock image). Earth-like planets may be common in the universe, a new UCLA study implies. The team of astrophysicists and geochemists presents new evidence that the Earth is not unique. The study was published in the journal  Science  on Oct. 18. "We have just raised the probability that many rocky planets are like the Earth, and there's a very large number of rocky planets in the universe," said co-author Edward Young, UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry. The scientists, led by Alexandra Doyle, a UCLA graduate student of geochemistry and astrochemistry, developed a new method to analyze in detail the geochemistry of planets outside of our solar system. Doyle did so by analyzing the elements in rocks from asteroids or rocky planet fragments that orbited six white dwarf stars. "We're studying geochemistry in rocks from other stars, which is almost unheard of," Young said. ...

Researchers studied fossilized Moroccan Ampyx trilobites, which lived 480 million years ago and showed that the trilobites had probably been buried in their positions -- all oriented in the same direction. Scientists deduced that these Ampyx processions may illustrate a kind of collective behavior adopted in response to cyclic environmental disturbances. Though our understanding of the anatomy of the earliest animals is growing ever more precise, we know next to nothing about their behaviour. Did group behaviour arise recently or is it primeval? To answer this question, researchers from the CNRS, the University of Poitiers, UBO, Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University*, Cadi Ayyad University (Marrakech, Morocco), and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) studied fossilized Moroccan Ampyx trilobites, which lived 480 million years ago. They showed that the trilobites had probably been buried in their positions -- all oriented in the same direction, in orderly lines, maintaining close co...

Woman looking at blue light from at computer screen (stock image). Prolonged exposure to blue light, such as that which emanates from your phone, computer and household fixtures, could be affecting your longevity, even if it's not shining in your eyes. New research at Oregon State University suggests that the blue wavelengths produced by light-emitting diodes damage cells in the brain as well as retinas. The study, published today in  Aging and Mechanisms of Disease , involved a widely used organism, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, an important model organism because of the cellular and developmental mechanisms it shares with other animals and humans. Jaga Giebultowicz, a researcher in the OSU College of Science who studies biological clocks, led a research collaboration that examined how flies responded to daily 12-hour exposures to blue LED light -- similar to the prevalent blue wavelength in devices like phones and tablets -- and found that th...

Roundworm  Caenorhabditis elegans  (stock image). The brain's neural activity -- long implicated in disorders ranging from dementia to epilepsy -- also plays a role in human aging and life span, according to research led by scientists in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. The study, published Oct. 16 in  Nature , is based on findings from human brains, mice and worms and suggests that excessive activity in the brain is linked to shorter life spans, while suppressing such overactivity extends life. The findings offer the first evidence that the activity of the nervous system affects human longevity. Although previous studies had suggested that parts of the nervous system influence aging in animals, the role of neural activity in aging, especially in humans, remained murky. "An intriguing aspect of our findings is that something as transient as the activity state of neural circuits could have such far-ranging consequences for physiology and ...

Type 2 diabetes New research from King's College London published in  EBioMedicine , has found that a newly tested medical device, called Sleeveballoon, mimics the effects of traditional bariatric surgery in rodents and produces impressive results on body weight, fatty liver and diabetes control. Sleeveballoon is a device that combines a balloon with a connected sleeve, which covers the initial parts of the small intestine. It is inserted into the stomach and bowel during minimally invasive surgery under general anaesthetic. In this study, researchers compared the effects of the Sleeveballoon and traditional bariatric surgery on 30 rodents fed with a high-fat diet, achieving very similar results. Results were also compared to sham-operated rats, with the new device reducing food intake by 60% and resulting in a 57% reduction in fat mass. The effect on diabetes was similarly impressive with blood glucose levels dropping by 65%. "Gastric bypass surgery is a hi...

Illustration of prehistoric human with animal skeleton (stock image). Tel Aviv University researchers, in collaboration with scholars from Spain, have uncovered evidence of the storage and delayed consumption of animal bone marrow at Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv, the site of many major discoveries from the late Lower Paleolithic period some 400,000 years ago. The research provides direct evidence that early Paleolithic people saved animal bones for up to nine weeks before feasting on them inside Qesem Cave. The study, which was published in the October 9 issue of  Science Advances , was led by Dr. Ruth Blasco of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations and Centro Nacional de Investigación Sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) and her TAU colleagues Prof. Ran Barkai and Prof. Avi Gopher. It was conducted in collaboration with Profs. Jordi Rosell and Maite Arilla of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and Institut Català de Paleoecologia Human...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie on May 12, 2019. If you could travel back in time 3.5 billion years, what would Mars look like? The picture is evolving among scientists working with NASA's Curiosity rover. Imagine ponds dotting the floor of Gale Crater, the 100-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) ancient basin that Curiosity is exploring. Streams might have laced the crater's walls, running toward its base. Watch history in fast forward, and you'd see these waterways overflow then dry up, a cycle that probably repeated itself numerous times over millions of years. That is the landscape described by Curiosity scientists in a  Nature Geoscience  paper published today. The authors interpret rocks enriched in mineral salts discovered by the rover as evidence of shallow briny ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying. The deposits serve as a watermark created by climate fluctuations as the Martian environment transitioned from a wette...