Heavens

HANOVER, N.H. - Using the power of the light around us, Dartmouth College researchers have significantly improved their innovative light-sensing system that tracks a person's behavior continuously and unobtrusively in real time.

The eight scientists from the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy had already started making calculations when the discovery by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was announced in February. Their results, published recently in Physical Review Letters, unfold as a hypothesis suggesting a solution for an abiding mystery in astrophysics.

An ancient space rock discovered in a Swedish quarry is a type of meteorite never before found on Earth, scientists reported June 14 in the journal Nature Communications.

"In our entire civilization, we have collected over 50,000 meteorites, and no one has seen anything like this one before," said study co-author Qing-zhu Yin, professor of geochemistry and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis. "Discovering a new type of meteorite is very, very exciting."

Gravitational waves from a second pair of colliding black holes has validated the landmark discovery from earlier this year that confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. Rochester Institute of Technology scientists contributed to the initial breakthrough and to the second discovery announced today by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

The new window onto the universe just opened a little bit wider. For the second time in history, an international team of scientists and engineers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists and a laser scientist, has detected gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime -- and a pair of colliding black holes.

Northwestern University astrophysicists have predicted history. In a new study, the scientists show their theoretical predictions last year were correct: The historic merger of two massive black holes detected Sept. 14, 2015, could easily have been formed through dynamic interactions in the star-dense core of an old globular cluster.

Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality. These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been found in meteorites on Earth and comets in our Solar System. None, however, has been detected in the vast reaches of interstellar space, until now.

Chiral molecules--compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands--are crucial to life as we know it. Living things are selective about which "handedness" of a molecule they use or produce. For example, all living things exclusively use the right-handed form of the sugar ribose (the backbone of DNA), and grapes exclusively synthesize the left-handed form of the molecule tartaric acid.

A new study reports the first detection of chiral molecules in space, paving the way to understanding why chirality is "biased" on Earth. Our planet is home to a puzzle involving chiral molecules, those that, despite being mirror images of each other, don't exactly match; imagine a left-handed and right-handled glove, for example. They aren't interchangeable. Life on Earth is made of groups of such molecules that overwhelmingly share just one type of handedness, a phenomenon known as homochirality. The amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies, for example, are all left-handed.

URBANA, Ill. - Invasive plants are often characterized as highly aggressive, possessing the power to alter and even irreversibly change the ecosystems they invade. But a recent University of Illinois study shows that one such invader, garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), actually becomes less aggressive over time.

"One of the things we've seen over the last 20 to 30 years is that garlic mustard becomes less of an issue, and actually balances out over time," says University of Illinois and USDA Agricultural Research Service ecologist Adam Davis.

Plant pollens vary in quality as food sources for bees, and pollen from the sunflower family (the family that includes dandelions, daisies, and thistles) is known to have some unpleasant qualities. Bees fed exclusively sunflower pollen often develop poorly, slowly, or not at all. Yet many bee species collect pollen exclusively from this family; in fact, specialization on sunflower pollen has evolved multiple times in bees. Research by Dakota Spear and colleagues suggests that parasites could be part of the explanation.

The protoplanetary disc around the young star TW Hydrae is the closest known example to Earth, at a distance of only about 170 light-years. As such it is an ideal target for astronomers to study discs. This system closely resembles what astronomers think the Solar System looked like during its formation more than four billion years ago.

The so-called artificial pancreas -- an automated insulin delivery system for people type 1 diabetes mellitus -- uses an advanced control algorithm to regulate how much insulin a pump should deliver and when. Regulating glucose is challenging because levels respond to a wide-array of variables, including food, physical activity, sleep, stress, hormones, metabolism and more.

Penn State College of Medicine faculty are helping shape the "third science" of medical education by defining what health systems science is and how student perception of it should be addressed in designing curriculum.

An ancient basin hidden beneath the Greenland ice sheet, discovered by researchers at the University of Bristol, may help explain the location, size and velocity of Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland's fastest flowing outlet glacier.

The research also provides an insight into what past river drainage looked like in Greenland, and what it could look like in the future as the ice sheet retreats.