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Recently, an international team of scientists, including researchers at MIT, announced the detection of a new kind of astrophysical system: a collision between a black hole and a neutron star — two of the densest, most exotic objects in the universe. Scientists have detected signals of colliding black holes, and colliding neutron stars, but had not confirmed a merging of a black hole with a neutron star until now. In a study appearing today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists report observing not just one, but two such rare events, each of which gave off gravitational waves that reverberated across a large swath of the universe before reaching Earth in January 2020, just 10 days apart....

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health are leading a team that has made progress in comprehending the mechanism behind a type of dementia that strikes early in life. Researchers found that a genetic form of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is linked to the accumulation of certain lipids in the brain and that this accumulation is caused by a protein deficiency that disrupts cell metabolism....

Despite the availability of this highly visual screening process, treatment decisions for individual patients are still largely guided by traditional histology — pathologists assess colorectal cancer by examining slides of tumor samples under a microscope. Now, a team at Harvard Medical School has combined histology with cutting-edge single-cell imaging technologies to create large-scale 2D and 3D spatial maps of colorectal cancer. The maps, described in the scientific journal Cell, layer extensive molecular information on top of histological features to provide new information about the structure of the cancer, as well as how it forms, progresses, and interacts with the immune system....

Americans are drinking more caffeinated beverages than ever before, but Rutgers researchers found one group that tops the charts in caffeine consumption: adult smokers with mental illness. In a study published online ahead of print in the January issue of the journal Psychiatry Research, Jill M. Williams, director of the division of addiction psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, found not only do adult smokers with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia drink the most caffeine, they are at the highest risk of negative health consequences....

Compounds called cyclophospholipids would have held up against the planet’s harsh conditions, helping the first cells form and proliferate. Researchers must dissect the building blocks of our cells in order to really grasp how the body operates and enhance human health. However, while scientists continue to make significant advances in cellular biology, a crucial issue remains: How did cells develop billions of years ago? A new study, led by Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Ph....

NASA officials announced Wednesday, May 15, that the Kepler space telescope – the agency’s primary instrument for detecting planets beyond our solar system – had suffered a critical failure and could soon be shut down permanently. Scott Hubbard, a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford’s School of Engineering, served as director of NASA Ames Research Center during much of the building phase of the Kepler space telescope. He also worked on the project alongside William Borucki, the Kepler science principal investigator at Ames and the driving force behind the effort, for the decades leading up to formal approval of the mission....

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has driven human cells to copy its genetic code countless times over the past couple of years, and, in the process, errors have emerged. These genetic errors, or mutations, are the raw material for new variants. Scientists have found that nearly half of the genetic sequences within variants contain three mutations at positions called K417, E484, and N501. All of these changes tweak the same part of the virus, known as the receptor binding domain, which enables SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells by latching onto their ACE2 protein....

The greens and blues of the ocean color from NASA satellite data have provided new insights into how climate and ecosystem processes affect the growth cycles of phytoplankton—microscopic aquatic plants important for fish populations and Earth’s carbon cycle. At the bottom of the ocean’s food chain, phytoplankton account for roughly half of the net photosynthesis on Earth. Their photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide and plays a key role in transferring carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean....

1. Planning is Key There’s nothing wrong with grabbing a spontaneous shot if you see a beautiful Moon. But if you want to increase your odds of making a truly memorable photo, there are some ways to make your own luck. Scout out a good shooting location during daylight hours. Practice using your camera’s controls in advance. Give yourself plenty of time to set up. Bill Ingalls is NASA’s senior photographer and has traveled all over the world for more than 25 years photographing events for NASA....

SPT0615 is a massive cluster of galaxies, one of the farthest observed to cause gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object is deflected around mass between the object and the observer. Among the identified background objects, there is SPT0615-JD, a galaxy that is thought to have emerged just 500 million years after the Big Bang. This puts it among the very earliest structures to form in the Universe....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently provided the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma ray bursts are produced by the merger of two small, super-dense stellar objects. The evidence is in the detection of a new kind of stellar blast called a kilonova, which results from the energy released when a pair of compact objects crash together. Hubble observed the fading fireball from a kilonova last month, following a short gamma ray burst (GRB) in a galaxy almost 4 billion light-years from Earth....

Most definitely not a comet, Messier 95 is actually a barred spiral galaxy. The galaxy has a bar cutting through its center, surrounded by an inner ring currently forming new stars. Also, our own Milky Way is a barred spiral. As well as hosting this stellar nursery, Messier 95 is a known host of the dramatic and explosive final stages in the lives of massive stars: supernovae. In March 2016 a spectacular supernova named SN 2012aw was observed in the outer regions of one of Messier 95’s spiral arms....

This large “flying V” is actually two distinct objects — a pair of interacting galaxies known as IC 2184. Both the galaxies are seen almost edge-on in the large, faint northern constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe), and can be seen as bright streaks of light surrounded by the ghostly shapes of their tidal tails. These tidal tails are thin, elongated streams of gas, dust and stars that extend away from a galaxy into space....

Globular clusters are roughly spherical collections of extremely old stars, and around 150 of them are scattered around our galaxy. Hubble is one of the best telescopes for studying these, as its extremely high resolution lets astronomers see individual stars, even in the crowded core. The clusters all look very similar, and in Hubble’s images it can be quite hard to tell them apart – and they all look much like NGC 411, pictured here....

The wolves have been tracked since their reintroduction in 1995. The killings came just as the scientists were set to begin the wolf project’s annual winter survey of their predatory habits. The wolves were shot by licensed hunters outside the national park, during the legal wolf hunting season that started in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in the fall. Seven of these wolves were wearing radio collars to help the scientists track them....

Dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics. It is clear that it must exist, because without dark matter, for example, the motion of galaxies cannot be explained. But it has never been possible to detect dark matter in an experiment. Currently, there are many proposals for new experiments: They aim to detect dark matter directly via its scattering from the constituents of the atomic nuclei of a detection medium, i....

Only one in a hundred million stars makes the cut to be classified a Wolf-Rayet: ferociously bright, hot stars doomed to imminent collapse in a supernova explosion leaving only a dark remnant, such as a black hole. Rarest of all, even among Wolf-Rayets, are elegant binary pairs that, if the conditions are right, are able to pump out huge amounts of carbon dust driven by their extreme stellar winds. As the two stars orbit one another, the dust gets wrapped into a beautiful glowing sooty tail....

The first and only total solar eclipse of 2020 occurred on December 14, with the path of totality stretching from the equatorial Pacific to the South Atlantic and passing through southern Argentina and Chile. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16 (GOES-16) captured images of the shadow of the Moon crossing the surface of Earth. GOES-16 is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); NASA helps develop and launch the GOES series of satellites....

While some companies are already beginning to test vaccine formulations in small trials, there are a lot of potential hurdles to the finish line. It’s important to be exploring approaches from multiple angles, scientists say. “The reality of vaccine work is that a lot of them won’t turn out, so it’s better to have a deep bench,” said Aaron Esser-Kahn, an associate professor of molecular engineering whose lab has rapidly shifted to address the coronavirus pandemic....

As road traffic in cities around the world comes to a near standstill, Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite mission is providing key information about changes in concentrations of atmospheric pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide. However, there remains huge potential to use Earth observation data to shed new light on other societal and economic changes currently taking place. To see how Earth-observing missions could be further used to explore the effects of COVID-19, ESA has issued a new call for proposals....