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In a world hungry for cheaper, more efficient renewable energy, Australian researchers have served up a treat. Work led by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science has shown that the two-dimensional (2D) thin films used in some perovskite solar cells closely resemble a sandwich. Perovskite is an exciting material at the forefront of solar energy research and design. Previously, scientists thought these 2D perovskite films had a ‘gradient’ structure, in which certain components were found deep in the material, with other complementary elements only located nearer to the surface, like topping on a cracker....

It’s a dramatic scale of the change that is clearly visible from space. The right side of the image pair below shows a major rice-producing area east of Willows on September 16, 2022; the left side shows the same area on September 4, 2021. Tens of thousands of acres of farmland that would normally be green as farmers prepare for harvest were instead brown and idle in 2022. Both natural-color satellite images were acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8....

In August 2019 a team of scientists and conservationists broke new ground in saving the northern white rhinoceros from extinction. They harvested eggs from the two remaining females, artificially inseminated those using frozen sperm from deceased males, and created two viable northern white rhino embryos. With great support from the Kenyan Government and in the presence of Hon Najib Balala, – Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife – the team repeated the procedure on December 17, 2019, and was able to create a new embryo over Christmas....

Amorphous solids such as glass–despite being brittle and having constituent particles that do not form ordered lattices–can possess surprising strength and rigidity. This is even more unexpected because amorphous systems also suffer from large anharmonic fluctuations. The secret is an internal network of force-bearing particles that span the entire solid which lends strength to the system. This branching, dynamic network acts like a skeleton that prevents the material from yielding to stress even though it makes up only a small fraction of the total particles....

Scientists reaffirm 2019 climate emergency declaration and again call for transformative change based on updated trends. In 2019, a coalition of more than 11,000 scientists from across the globe declared a climate emergency and established a set of vital signs for the Earth in order to measure effective climate action. Now, twenty months later, a new study published on July 28, 2021, in BioScience finds that those vital signs reflect the consequences of unrelenting “business-as-usual” on climate change....

Adding salt to a road before a winter storm changes when ice will form. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have applied this basic concept to develop a new method of heating and cooling. The technique, which they have named “ionocaloric cooling,” is described in a paper published on December 23, 2022, in the journal Science. Ionocaloric cooling takes advantage of how energy, or heat, is stored or released when a material changes phase – such as changing from solid ice to liquid water....

Drawing on data from the depths of the Earth to deep space, the University of California, Davis, Professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, and postdoctoral researcher Curtis Williams used neon isotopes to show how the planet formed. “We’re trying to understand where and how the neon in Earth’s mantle was acquired, which tells us how fast the planet formed and in what conditions,” Williams said. Neon is actually a stand-in for where gases such as water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen come from, Williams said....

An increasing number of honey bee colonies in the U.S. have seen the dwindling of their adult bees. According to a national survey, beekeepers lost nearly 40% of their honey bee colonies last winter, the highest rate reported since the survey began 13 years ago. The engineered bacteria live in the guts of honey bees and act as biological factories, pumping out medicines protecting the bees against two major causes of colony collapse: Varroa mites and deformed wing virus....

Researchers at Rice University believe that they have discovered a solution to the problem of predicting the shape of asymmetrical crystals by assigning arbitrary latent energies to their surfaces or, in the case of two-dimensional materials, edges. Yes, it seems like cheating, but in the same way a magician finds a select card in a deck by narrowing the possibilities, a little algebraic sleight-of-hand goes a long way to solve the problem of predicting a crystal’s shape....

Now, a research collaboration involving scientists in the Chemical Sciences Division at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has zeroed in on a low-temperature chemical mechanism that may have driven the formation of multiple-ringed molecules – the precursors to more complex chemistry now found in the moon’s brown-orange haze layer. The study, co-led by Ralf Kaiser at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and published in the October 8 edition of the journal Nature Astronomy, runs counter to theories that high-temperature reaction mechanisms are required to produce the chemical makeup that satellite missions have observed in Titan’s atmosphere....

Biologists used crystallography performed at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source to reveal the new virus’s unusual protein structure. A team of HIV researchers, cellular biologists, and biophysicists who banded together to support COVID-19 science determined the atomic structure of a coronavirus protein thought to help the pathogen evade and dampen response from human immune cells. The structural map – which is now published in the journal PNAS, but has been open-access for the scientific community since August – has laid the groundwork for new antiviral treatments tailored specifically to SARS-CoV-2, and enabled further investigations into how the newly emerged virus ravages the human body....

Better designed vaccines for insect-spread viruses like dengue and Zika are likely after researchers discovered models of immature flavivirus particles were originally misinterpreted. Researchers from The University of Queensland and Monash University have now determined the first complete 3D molecular structure of the immature flavivirus, revealing an unexpected organization. UQ researcher Associate Professor Daniel Watterson said the team was studying the insect-specific Binjari virus when they made the discovery. “We were using Australia’s safe-to-handle Binjari virus, which we combine with more dangerous viral genes to make safer and more effective vaccines,” Dr....

Reducing global air pollution can prevent millions of premature deaths according to an international team of scientists, led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. The most significant contribution would be the rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, which is currently being discussed mainly to abate climate change. The researchers used a global atmospheric chemistry and climate model, linked to the latest estimates of health effects in order to study the combined impact of decarbonisation on public health, precipitation and the climate....

The figure has eluded planetary scientists for decades, because the gas giant has no solid surface with landmarks to track as it rotates, and it has an unusual magnetic field that hides the planet’s rotation rate. The answer, it turned out, was hidden in the rings. During Cassini’s orbits of Saturn, instruments examined the icy, rocky rings in unprecedented detail. Christopher Mankovich, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, used the data to study wave patterns within the rings....

Astronomers believe that matter in intergalactic space is distributed in a vast network of interconnected filamentary structures known as the cosmic web. Nearly all the atoms in the Universe reside in this web, vestigial material left over from the Big Bang. A team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have made the first measurements of small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic web just 2 billion years after the Big Bang....

The NASA COVID-19 Dashboard features data collected by Earth-observing satellites, instruments aboard the International Space Station, and sensitive ground-based networks. The global maps are searchable by several categories of observable change, including economic indicators, such as shipping and construction activity, and environmental factors, such as water quality and climate variations. Investigate the data layers yourself or take a guided tour of how NASA Earth scientists are studying – and learning about – the pandemic’s effects on the Earth system....

The universe 13,000 million years ago was very different from the universe we know today. It is understood that stars were forming at a very rapid rate, forming the first dwarf galaxies, whose mergers gave rise to the more massive present-day galaxies, including our own. However, the exact chain of events which produced the Milky Way was not known until now. Exact measurements of position, brightness, and distance for around a million stars of our galaxy within 6,500 light-years of the sun, obtained with the Gaia space telescope, have allowed a team from the IAC to reveal some of its early stages....

These findings, published in the February 6, 2020 issue of Nature, illustrate the power of a single protein to change the brain and drive behavior. They also demonstrate how a cluster of cells in one brain area integrates information from the outside world with the animal’s own internal state. “Pheromones act as powerful scent messages to signal the presence of danger, food or prospective mates,” said Ebru Demir, Ph.D., the paper’s first author....

According to the researchers, the results of the trial suggest that rocatinlimab has the potential to change the genetic makeup of a person’s eczema in the long term and potentially sustain lasting results even after the therapy is discontinued. The drug works by inhibiting OX40, an immune molecule that plays a key role in activating inflammatory cells, which contributes to the development of eczema and other inflammatory diseases. “Atopic dermatitis, the most common type of eczema, is a debilitating chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects 1 in 10 Americans and millions of people worldwide,” said Emma Guttman, MD, Ph....

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered signs of star formation perilously close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. If confirmed, this would be the first time that star formation was observed so close to the galactic center. The center of our galaxy, 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, is home to a monstrous black hole with a mass of four million suns....