The disks of dust and gas that surround young stars are the formation sites of planets. New images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.
This structure may mean that an infant version of our home planet, or possibly a more massive "super-Earth," is beginning to form there.
New research has found that wind carved massive mounds of more than a mile high on Mars over billions of years. Their location helps pin down when water on the Red Planet dried up during a global climate change event.
The research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, on March 31.
A new study from a group of researchers including San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane has detailed the first-ever temperature map of a super-Earth planet -- a rocky planet outside of our solar system.
The research was published online March 30 in Nature.
The thermal map of 55 Cancri e shows that the planet is very hot but still experiences a strong temperature difference between its dayside and its nightside, suggesting that processes found in planets within our solar system, such as high winds or lava flows, are at work on distant worlds.
Tempe, Ariz. -- A lack of adequate nutrition is blamed as one of many possible causes for colony collapse disorder or CCD -- a mysterious syndrome that causes a honey bee colony to die. Parasites, pesticides, pathogens and environmental changes are also stressors believed responsible for the decline of honey bees.
Since bees are critical to the world's food supply, learning how bees cope with these stressors is critical to understanding honey bee health and performance.
Splitting water into its hydrogen and oxygen parts may sound like science fiction, but it's the end goal of chemists and chemical engineers like Christopher Murray of the University of Pennsylvania and Matteo Cargnello of Stanford University.
They work in a field called photocatalysis, which, at its most basic, uses light to speed up chemical reactions. They've come a step closer to such a feat by tailoring the structure of a material called titania, one of the best-known photocatalysts, to hasten hydrogen production from biomass-derived compounds.
Mule deer mothers are in sync with their environment, with reproduction patterns that closely match the cycles of plant growth in their habitat. And new research using NASA satellite data shows that tracking vegetation from space can help wildlife managers predict when does will give birth to fawns.
TORONTO, March 30, 2016 - Nearly 10 per cent of teens in three Canadian provinces said they had gambled online in the past three months, according to a new study by researchers from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the University of Waterloo. It's the first Canadian-based study to find such high levels of online gambling among youth.
Large-scale disease elimination programs depend critically on the accuracy of data reported back from local implementation sites. WHO and some of its partners recently developed a data quality assessment (DQA) tool specific to efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). A study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases applying the tool to the lymphatic filariasis program in Ghana finds problems with the routinely reported data and suggests ways toward improving their accuracy.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Part of the future of solar energy, especially for residential use, may be small "community-based" systems in which neighbors join together in the construction and use of solar systems to optimize the energy produced in their neighborhood - and share in the benefits.
An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has obtained the most detailed 'fingerprint' of a rocky planet outside our solar system to date, and found a planet of two halves: one that is almost completely molten, and the other which is almost completely solid.
LAWRENCE -- The best way to reduce a child's chances of developing asthma might be making sure Mom had enough vitamin D during the second trimester, a new study from the University of Kansas shows.
The most cost-effective way to get Mom more vitamin D could be as simple as health recommendations that consider the benefits of soaking up a little more sun, a practical and cost-effective way to get a dose of D.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 12 of us in the U.S. suffers from asthma.
When evaluating the same black student, white teachers expect significantly less academic success than black teachers, a new study concludes. This is especially true for black boys.
When a black teacher and a white teacher evaluate the same black student, the white teacher is about 30 percent less likely to predict the student will complete a four-year college degree, the study found. White teachers are also 12 percent less likely to expect their black students will graduate high school.
(Vienna, March 30, 2016) Every year, tens of millions of individuals across Europe undergo endoscopic procedures to assist with the diagnosis and management of gastrointestinal diseases. However, significant variation in current endoscopy provision across Europe has been reported1, with back-to-back colonoscopy studies demonstrating that a concerning 22% of all adenomas are missed and that a three-to-six fold variation in adenoma detection is present between endoscopists2.
Physicists of MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences developed optical technology for the "correction" of light coming from distant stars, which will significantly improve the "seeing" of telescopes and therefore will enable us to directly observe exoplanets as Earth-twins. Their work has been published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems (JATIS).
The detector group at the Swiss Light Source at PSI has been one of the pioneers in the development of custom-made hybrid pixel array detectors (HPADs) for synchrotron applications. In a paper published recently [Jungmann-Smith et al. (2016). J. Synchrotron Rad. 23, 385-394; doi:10.1107/S1600577515023541], this group shows that it is now possible to develop HPADs with sufficient low noise to allow single-photon detection below 1 keV as well as to perform spectroscopic imaging. A commentary has also been written about the work [Graafsma (2016). J.