Heavens

Three reports that discuss the future demands facing the VA Health Care System, the current resources in the system and how care is provided to veterans outside the federal system have been released by the RAND Corporation.

Amsterdam, February 8, 2016 - 200,000 fish bones discovered in and around a pit in Sweden suggest that the people living in the area more than 9000 years ago were more settled and cultured than we previously thought. Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests people were storing large amounts of fermented food much earlier than experts thought.

Messages from around the world are to be beamed into space at the speed of light as part of a cultural project to create a celestial time capsule.

In autumn 2016, dispatches from the public will be converted into radio waves and broadcasted towards the North Star, Polaris, this autumn, reaching their destination in 434 years.

The interstellar message in a bottle will comprise of people's responses to a single question: how will our present environmental interactions shape the future?

Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars have the same three layers? New research suggests that the answer is yes - they will have interiors very similar to Earth.

"We wanted to see how Earth-like these rocky planets are. It turns out they are very Earth-like," says lead author Li Zeng of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Stars are born inside a rotating cloud of interstellar gas and dust, which contracts to stellar densities thanks to its own gravity. Before finding itself on the star, however, most of the cloud lands onto a circumstellar disk forming around the star owing to conservation of angular momentum.The manner in which the material is transported through the disk onto the star, causing the star to grow in mass, has recently become a major research topic in astrophysics.

When we look at the night sky, we see stars as tiny points of light eking out a solitary existence at immense distances from Earth. But appearances are deceptive. More than half the stars we know of have a companion, a second nearby star that can have a major impact on their primary companions. The interplay within these so-called binary star systems is particularly intensive when the two stars involved are going through a phase in which they are surrounded by a common envelope consisting of hydrogen and helium.

Okay, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, here are two words that can help your investment in a startup business succeed: direct flights.

A new study co-authored by an MIT professor shows that venture capitalists do help startup firms by closely monitoring their development, and that the availability of direct airplane flights between the two parties helps improve that oversight.

MIT researchers have developed a low-power chip for processing 3-D camera data that could help visually impaired people navigate their environments. The chip consumes only one-thousandth as much power as a conventional computer processor executing the same algorithms.

An international team led by a researcher from Hiroshima University has succeeded in revealing the detailed structure of a massive ionized gas outflow streaming from the starburst galaxy NGC 6240. The team used the Suprime-Cam mounted on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope on Maunakea in Hawaii.

Naloxone hydrochloride is a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. First responders (peers, family, police, etc.) may prefer nasal sprays to injectable naloxone, which has led to widespread use of improvised naloxone kits with atomisers for nasal delivery of the drug. On 18 November 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a nasal naloxone product to replace those improvised kits.

Based on endoscopic findings, the condition can be divided into chronic sinusitis with or without nasal polyps. Nasal polyps originate in the sinuses and obstruct the sinus and nasal passages. An international team of researchers decided to test dupilumab, a human antibody which already demonstrated clinical efficacy for asthma and atopic dermatitis.

Study conducted in the United States and Europe

Bursts of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy are not likely to be signals of dark matter but rather other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, according to two new studies, one from a team based at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another based in the Netherlands.

How did life begin? This is one of the most fundamental questions scientists puzzle over. To address it, they have to look not just back to the primordial Earth, but out into space. Now, scientists propose in the Journal of the American Chemical Society a new set of cosmic chemical reactions that could have contributed to the formation of life on our planet.

Today, wireless power transfer (WPT) systems enable to charge electronic devices without plugging them into the wall, but rather by placing them on a special charging pad. However, the transfer distance and efficiency of such systems fall short of market expectations. In a new study, a group of scientists from ITMO University and Giricond Research Institute put forward a novel WPT system that can maintain up to 80% transfer efficiency across a distance of 20 centimeters. The results were experimentally tested with a light diode, which the scientists managed to turn on wirelessly.

California is committed to 33 percent energy from renewable resources by 2020. With that deadline fast approaching, researchers across the state are busy exploring options. Solar energy is attractive but for widespread adoption, it requires transformation into a storable form. This week in ACS Central Science, researchers report that nanowires made from multiple metal oxides could put solar ahead in this race.