New Haven, Conn. - An intergalactic gas cloud is sometimes a dish best served cold.
In a new study to be published June 9, 2016 in the journal Nature, a Yale-led team of astronomers found a supermassive black hole about to devour clouds of cold, clumpy gas hurtling toward it. Prior to this, scientists believed that supermassive black holes in the largest galaxies fed on a slow, steady diet of hot, ionized gas from the galaxy's halo.
COLUMBIA, Mo. - In previous generations, when professional sports franchises had athletes who were considered to be all-star caliber on their teams, those teams would experience a "star effect," which would result in long-term increases in publicity, fan interest, and merchandise and ticket sales. Now, University of Missouri researchers have analyzed the Twitter usage of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, athletes and fans and discovered that the "star effect" had no long-term impacts on MLB teams' Twitter following and fan engagement.
Among elite athletes, practice accounts for a scant 1 percent of the difference in their performances--and starting sports at an early age does not necessarily provide athletes an upper hand--according to new research.
"While practice is necessary for elite athletes to reach a high level of competition, after a certain point, the amount of practice essentially stops differentiating who makes it far and who makes it to the very top," said Brooke Macnamara, assistant professor of psychological sciences at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the study.
Pythons and boas are distantly related, but new research indicates that they have evolved convergent physical characteristics when living in similar habitats--meaning that they evolved similar solutions to similar problems.
For the research, investigators collected data on the head shape of 1,073 python and boa specimens from different habitats. Parallel adaptations to similar lifestyles resulted in the independent evolution of similar characteristics.
LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, has successfully tested a key technology needed to build a space-based observatory for detecting gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in the fabric of space, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, were first seen last year by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
Tropical Depression 1E or TD1E continued to hug the coast of southwestern Mexico as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and caught a look at the extent of the slow moving storm's clouds.
On June 6, 2016, NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible light image of Tropical Depression 1E over southwestern Mexico and Guatemala. In the image, the center of circulation appeared to be right over the coast. On June 7, 2016, the depression appeared disorganized over the Gulf Of Tehuantepec.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - A well-insulated home with a high-efficiency air conditioner and programmable thermostat are only as effective as the person using it.
A new study led by Michigan State University and published in the current issue of Procedia Engineering shows that people living in green dwellings who don't maximize their technology can lose half of the energy savings available to them.
Warm weather means beach vacations and pool-dipping for many of us. It also signals a season of slathering on sunscreen to avoid getting burned. Someday, those products could be enhanced with lignin, a natural material in plants and a major waste product of the paper industry. Scientists report their findings on what kind of lignin works well for this purpose in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.
BROOKLYN, New York - In a world of 7 billion cell phones, wireless service providers are always searching for ways to maximize the efficiency of wireless spectrum to improve service. The so-called "half duplex" radios that comprise today's cellular base stations perform two functions: They send signals and receive signals. Yet, despite a decade of dizzying advances in speed, they still can only perform one of these functions at a time.
The National Hurricane Center issued the last advisory on Post-Tropical Cyclone Colin at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC). At that time the center of Post-Tropical Cyclone Colin was located near 36.5 degrees north latitude and 72.2 degrees west longitude. That put the center of Colin about 205 miles (330 km) east-northeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The post-tropical cyclone was moving toward the northeast near 40 mph (65 kph) and that general motion is expected to continue through Wednesday night, June 8, 2016.
For the first time, scientists used methods of network science to solve a fundamental astrophysical problem -- explaining the so-called "initial mass function", a distribution of stars by mass in galaxies and starclusters. The study has been published in the recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal: http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/824/1/17
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have developed a new algorithm that could help astronomers produce the first image of a black hole.
The algorithm would stitch together data collected from radio telescopes scattered around the globe, under the auspices of an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope. The project seeks, essentially, to turn the entire planet into a large radio telescope dish.
Research has found that hearing loss has wide-ranging impacts not only on older people's ability to communicate, but also on their ability to move about and participate in different hobbies and activities. This has been revealed in studies funded by the Academy of Finland whose results have been published in international scientific journals.
An effective treatment that can prevent HIV infection and reduce the human and financial costs of the preventable condition is taking too long to be commissioned and made available on the NHS, warns Deborah Gold, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, in an article published by The BMJ today.
Compelling evidence of the effectiveness of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention has been known for over five years, but "we are still waiting for the NHS to embrace this potentially revolutionary intervention," explains Gold.
PULLMAN, Wash.--A Washington State University biologist has found what he calls "very strong support" for an 86-year-old hypothesis about how nutrients move through plants. His two-decade analysis of the phenomenon has resulted in a suite of techniques that can ultimately be used to fight plant diseases and make crops more efficient.