Pasadena, CA-- Quasars are supermassive black holes that sit at the center of enormous galaxies, accreting matter. They shine so brightly that they are often referred to as beacons and are among the most-distant objects in the universe that we can currently study. New work from a team led by Carnegie's Eduardo Bañados has discovered 63 new quasars from when the universe was only a billion years old. (It's about 14 billion years old today.)
Heavens
From the printing press to the jet engine, mechanical machines with moving parts have been a mainstay of technology for centuries. As U.S. industry develops smaller mechanical systems, they face bigger challenges -- microscopic parts are more likely to stick together and wear out when they make contact with each other.
To help make microscopic mechanical (micromechanical) systems perform reliably for advanced technologies, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are getting get back to basics, carefully measuring how parts move and interact.
Tropical Depression 16W in the northwestern Pacific Ocean was spotted by the Terra satellite on September 08, 2016. The storm is currently moving northwest toward the island of Guam at 8 mph. It is slowly intensifying as it establishes a steady west-northwest track. Its speed is also expected to intensify in the next few days. Currently TD16W is located 220 miles west-northwest of Guam. There are no threatened landmasses at this time.
Philadelphia, PA, September 8, 2016 - With population estimates of 9 billion people worldwide by 2050, the intensification of agriculture practices in recent decades has been necessary. Significant environmental concerns exist with the intensification of agriculture, however. In dairy farming, particularly on pasture-based dairies, leaching of nitrate-N (NO3-N) to groundwater is a primary concern, leading to certain countries placing limits on herd size on a fixed land area (i.e., stocking rate) to avoid loss of nutrients to groundwater.
The inside of a present day plant or animal cell quite closely resembles a busy city. Like an urban metropolis with different districts interlinked by a traffic network, a cell has distinct compartments connected to each other by a dynamic transport system.
One set of such interlinked compartments - the Golgi complex - is essential for many cellular functions, and a question that has long puzzled scientists is: how did such a complex compartment and traffic system arise within a cell?
A study by animal welfare specialists has provided new evidence that using electronic containment systems to restrict where pet cats venture does not result in long-term wellbeing problems.
Researchers of Aalto University have made a breakthrough in controlling the motion of multiple objects on a vibrating plate with a single acoustic source. By playing carefully constructed melodies, the scientists can simultaneously and independently move multiple objects on the plate towards desired targets. This has enabled scientists, for instance, writing words consisting of separate letters with loose metal pieces on the plate by playing a melody.
MIT researchers and their colleagues are designing an imaging system that can read closed books.
In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- In the first study of its kind, public health researchers show that young adults who reported having negative experiences on Facebook -- including bullying, meanness, misunderstandings or unwanted contacts -- were at significantly higher risk of depression, even accounting for many possible confounding factors.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide are urging doctors and patients to refrain from using a specific steroid treatment to treat infertility in women unless clinically indicated, because of its links to miscarriage, preterm birth and birth defects.
ULXs, which are remarkably bright X-ray sources, were thought to be powered by black holes. But in 2014, the X-ray space telescope "NuSTAR" detected unexpected periodic pulsed emissions in a ULX named M82 X-2. The discovery of this object named "ULX-pulsar" has puzzled astrophysicists. Black holes can be massive enough to provide the energy needed to create ULXs, but black holes shouldn't be able to produce pulsed emissions. In contrast, "pulsars," a kind of neutron star, are named for the pulsed emissions they produce, but they are much fainter than ULXs.
The thesis entitled Computational intelligent methods for trusting in social networks, produced by the computer engineer David Núñez in the Computational Intelligence Group at the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Computing, falls within the framework of the European research project Social and Smart (SandS). A part of the project is focussing its attention on user interaction with smart domestic appliances linked to a smart module.
Satellite imagery showed that Post-Tropical Cyclone Hermine was just a swirl of clouds with no rainfall off the coast of southeastern Massachusetts on Thursday, Sept. 8. Just two days earlier, the GPM satellite saw that Hermine was still generating some rainfall.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the U.S. Southwest and captured infrared data on the clouds associated with former Tropical Cyclone Newton.
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard Aqua gathered infrared data of Newton's remnant clouds on Sept. 8 at 4:35 p.m. EDT. The image showed a large area of cold cloud top temperatures near minus 27.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 33.1 degrees Celsius/ 240 Kelvin) over Arizona and New Mexico. Those cold cloud tops were high into the troposphere and the associated storms were generating rainfall over the region.
New research by the University of Surrey published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has shone light on a globular cluster of stars that could host several hundred black holes, a phenomenon that until recently was thought impossible.