NASA capsule flies over Apollo landing sites, heads home

Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth's crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. Researchers had previously identified patches of melt at a similar depth. But a new study led by The University of Texas at Austin revealed for the first time the layer's global extent and its part in plate tectonics.

If you replace the standard hydrogen atoms in ice with a heavier variant, something odd happens. The volume occupied by the molecules increases by 0.1%. Leiden chemist Jörg Meyer and his colleagues have created a theoretical model that describes this behavior. Their research appeared on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Imperial researchers have observed magma taking an unexpected route beneath volcanoes, shedding light on the processes behind eruptions. The findings were based on data from a tectonic plate boundary in the Eastern Caribbean region. The results help us understand what drives the type and rate of volcanic eruptions, as well as the make-up of erupted magma. They could also help us understand why some volcanoes are more active than others, and why volcanic activity changes over time.

White dwarfs comprise a class of faint stars representing the endpoint of the evolution of intermediate- and low-mass stars. The mass of a white dwarf is the order of that of the sun, but a radius comparable to that of the Earth. A pair of white dwarfs in orbit around their common center of gravity is called a double white dwarf (DWD).

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have finished testing the high-gain antenna for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. When it launches by May 2027, this NASA observatory will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Pictured above in a test chamber, the antenna will provide the primary communication link between the Roman spacecraft and the ground. It will downlink the highest data volume of any NASA astrophysics mission so far.

A world-first study reverses the idea that the bulk of life in the ocean is fueled by photosynthesis via sunshine, revealing that many ocean microbes in fact get their energy from hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It has always been a mystery how microbes growing in deepest parts of the sea...

An international team of researchers has uncovered what might be a critical step in the chemical evolution of molecules in cosmic "stellar nurseries." In these vast clouds of cold gas and dust in space, trillions of molecules swirl together over millions of years. The collapse of these interstellar clouds eventually gives rise to young stars and planets.

University of Canterbury (UC) researchers have summarized the threats that future rocket launches would pose to Earth's protective ozone layer, in a new review article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand. The ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays from...

A team of physicists affiliated with several institutions in France has developed a way to use muon detectors to create 3D images of difficult-to-access objects, such as a reactor inside a nuclear plant. The research is published in the journal Science Advances. Prior work has shown that muon detectors can...

An international team of astronomers has confirmed the existence of K2-415b, an Earth-sized exoplanet circling an M dwarf star, just 72 light years away from Earth. The group has also collected some statistics regarding both the star and its planet and have posted the results on the arXiv preprint server.

Using various space telescopes, astronomers have performed X-ray observations of a radio pulsar known as PSR J1420−6048. Results of the observational campaign, published January 27 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the nature of this source and its pulsar wind nebula. Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating...

Winter is coming to an end; the last nights of below zero temperatures are here. In the morning, one still spots the occasional icicle on a gutter or car bumper. When you look at these icicles carefully, you may notice that they show a characteristic pattern of ripples—always around one centimeter wide. What causes these ripples? Using an icicle machine of their own design, physicists and chemists from the University of Amsterdam investigated this question, and discovered that salt plays an important part in the formation process of the ripples.

Unique physical/chemical properties and synergetic multi-functions have given Janus films great potential in sensing, actuation, advanced separation, energy conversion and storage, etc. Combining the unique advantages of carbon nanomaterials in electrical conductivity, intrinsic mechanical flexibility, chemical and thermal stability, and ease of assembly, carbon-based Janus films have attracted increasing attention from researchers.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope's first images of galaxy clusters, researchers have, for the very first time, been able to examine very compact structures of star clusters inside galaxies, so-called clumps. In a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers from Stockholm University have studied the first phase of star formation in distant galaxies.

Microorganisms help to keep the water of lakes clean. In the process, they also detoxify the nitrogen compound ammonium, which is introduced into water bodies by fertilizers, for example, and is also produced naturally by metabolic processes. An international team led by the German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures...

"Citizen Science" gives interested citizens the chance to actively engage in scientific research. A citizen-science project conducted by AWI in the Arctic now shows just how successful this can be. In the course of five years, citizens who went on sailing cruises to the Arctic surveyed and collected plastic debris that had washed up on the shores of Svalbard.

Chemically, carbon dioxide is incredibly simple—it is just one carbon atom linked with two oxygen atoms. Together they create a colorless gas that makes up just a tiny fraction of the Earth's atmosphere, about 0.04%. That gas is critical to life on earth because plants use sunlight and carbon...

Researchers have pinpointed two intervals when ice and ocean conditions would have been favorable to support early human migration from Asia to North America late in the last ice age, a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows. The findings align with a...

Widespread tree scorch in the Pacific Northwest that became visible shortly after multiple days of record-setting, triple-digit temperatures in June 2021 was more attributable to heat than to drought conditions, Oregon State University researchers say. In a paper published in Tree Physiology, a team led by Christopher Still of the...

A galaxy has been discovered that mirrors the very early version of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy, dubbed the "Sparkler," is embedded in a system of globular clusters and satellite galaxies, and appears to be swallowing them as it grows. The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.