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The MWA's view of the sky; the object is marked with a white star. (Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker/ICRAR/Curtin and the GLEAM Team) Something in Earth's cosmic neighborhood is emitting weird signals of a kind we've never seen before. Just 4,000 light-years away, something is flashing radio waves. For roughly 30 to 60 seconds, every 18.18 minutes, it pulses brightly, one of the most luminous objects in the low-frequency radio sky. It matches the profile of no known astronomical object, and astronomers are gobsmacked. They have named it GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3. "This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our...

mysterious object that is just 4,000 light years away from Earth is unlike anything ever seen before in space, astronomers have said. They think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf – collapsed cores of stars – with an ultra-powerful magnetic field, also known as a magnetar. As it spins through the cosmos, the 'spooky' object sends out a beam of radiation, and for one minute in every 20 it is one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Observations show it releasing a giant burst of energy three times an hour. Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker,...

This illustration provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory depicts a target pellet inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP ============================================================================== With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit—at least for a fraction of a second—a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence...

Frogs, unlike their salamander cousins, cannot regenerate lost limbs, but a fascinating new experiment suggests it’s possible for frogs to partially regrow their missing body parts under the right conditions. A paper published today in Science Advances describes a new treatment that made it possible for African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) to partially grow back their amputated hind limbs. The treatment consisted of five different drugs and a wearable device, called “BioDome.” Exposure to this chemical cocktail for just 24 hours facilitated a regenerative period that last for 18 months, according to the research, led by researchers from Tufts University...

NASA The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history. At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes in order to reach the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2, where it will have access to nearly half the sky at any given moment. "Webb, welcome home!" said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. "We're one step closer to uncovering the mysteries...

Explanation: Which direction is this comet heading? Judging by the tail, one might imagine that Comet Leonard is traveling towards the bottom right, but a full 3D analysis shows it traveling almost directly away from the camera. With this perspective, the dust tail is trailed towards the camera and can only be seen as a short yellow-white glow near the head of the comet. The bluish ion tail, however, is made up of escaping ions that are forced directly away from the Sun by the solar wind -- but channeled along the Sun's magnetic field lines. The Sun's magnetic field...

For years an obscure doctor hailing from Australia’s hardscrabble west coast watched in horror as ulcer patients fell so ill that many had their stomach removed or bled until they died. That physician, an internist named Barry Marshall, was tormented because he knew there was a simple treatment for ulcers, which at that time afflicted 10 percent of all adults. In 1981 Marshall began working with Robin Warren, the Royal Perth Hospital pathologist who, two years earlier, discovered the gut could be overrun by hardy, corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. Biopsying ulcer patients and culturing the organisms in the lab,...

From almost the moment the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, a string of unearthed e-mails — the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its Jan. 11 letter — is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the...

New research suggests giving extra cash to low-income mothers can change their infants’ brain development. Brain measurements at age 1 showed faster activity in key brain regions in infants whose low-income families received $300-plus monthly for a year, compared with those who got $20 each month, U.S. researchers reported Monday. The same type of brain activity has been linked in older children to learning skills and other development, although it’s unclear whether the differences found will persist or influence the infants’ future. The researchers are investigating whether the payments led to better nutrition, less parent stress or other benefits to...

Explanation: Seen from ice moon Tethys, rings and shadows would display fantastic views of the Saturnian system. Haven't dropped in on Tethys lately? Then this gorgeous ringscape from the Cassini spacecraft will have to do for now. Caught in sunlight just below and left of picture center in 2005, Tethys itself is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter and orbits not quite five saturn-radii from the center of the gas giant planet. At that distance (around 300,000 kilometers) it is well outside Saturn's main bright rings, but Tethys is still one of five major moons that find themselves within the boundaries...

Integrity. Dignity. Community.Three simple words that ring like bells.In March of 1963, a great man came to Washington, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and changed the world by speaking from his heart about his dream. Simple words that continue to resonate through time.We all stand on the shoulders of giants. The simple truths are what matter most. Honest words, spoken from the heart, can change the world.I am a physician and a scientist, highly trained and experienced in developing vaccines and other medicines, but I have also been a carpenter and a farm hand. In my life,...

In a quest to map out a quantum theory of gravity, researchers have used logical rules to calculate how much Einstein’s theory must change. The result matches string theory perfectly. 4 ========================================================================== Quantum gravity researchers use α to denote the size of the biggest quantum correction to Einstein’s general relativity. Recently, three physicists calculated a number pertaining to the quantum nature of gravity. When they saw the value, “we couldn’t believe it,” said Pedro Vieira, one of the three. Gravity’s quantum-scale details are not something physicists usually know how to quantify, but the trio attacked the problem using an approach...

The Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory designed to unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Credit: NASA A team of astrophysicists has created a simulated image that shows how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could conduct a mega-exposure similar to but far larger than Hubble’s celebrated Ultra Deep Field Image. This Hubble observation transformed our view of the early universe, revealing galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the big bang. “Roman has the unique ability to image very large...

The White House argued Thursday that the sense of emergency surrounding the coronavirus pandemic would continue, despite some Democrats downplaying the level of concern over the virus. During the daily briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reacted to a comments from Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis, who said in December that the “medical emergency” surrounding the virus was “over” because of vaccines.

This immunologist has a 97 percent success rate for convincing COVID-vax-hesitant people to get the shot. She can teach you how to support the wary people in your life.n the spring of 2020, Eva Allen barely left her home. She was living in New Orleans with her young daughter and the pandemic was raging out of control. “I home schooled and had food delivered,” she says. “I was doing everything I could to keep my child safe.” Over the next ten months, more than a dozen of Allen’s friends and family contracted the virus. A cousin ended up on a...

Javier Apfeld approached the question like a worm detective. Except, instead of solving a wiggly creature's murder, the biologist was trying to understand why worms didn't die, despite a deadly toxin's common presence in the environments in which they live. The verdict: The worms know how to detect and dodge the chemical threat. A trick they use, as Apfeld and colleagues describe in a new paper published in PLOS Pathogens, is that they know how to get by with a little help from their food. And, says Apfeld, an assistant professor of biology at Northeastern, understanding the worms' methods could...

Taking aim at a distant asteroid, SpaceX fired a small NASA probe into space early Wednesday, setting up a head-on 15,000 mph impact next September to test the feasibility of nudging a threatening body off course long before it could crash into Earth. The $330 million Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, the first test flight in a NASA planetary defense initiative, "will be historic," said Tom Statler, mission program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "For the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space." Perched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the DART mission...

The asteroid, known as 7482 (1994 PC1), is set to fly by the planet at 1:51 p.m. PT, traveling at a speed of about 43,754 mph, according to NASA. “Near-Earth #asteroid 1994 PC1 (~1 km wide) is very well known and has been studied for decades by our #PlanetaryDefense experts,” With a diameter of approximately 3,451 feet, the asteroid is more than twice the size of the Empire State Building. And while there’s no threat that the asteroid will hit our planet, NASA still considers it a “potentially hazardous object” due to a combination of size and distance from Earth....

The asteroid's orbit gets quite close to our moon's. (NASA/JPL) ************************************************************************** In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance from Earth to the Moon, and just a shade over the distance to the anti-sunward Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point, soon to be the home of the James Webb Space Telescope. Fortunately, both Earth and said...

Image of asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 taken during a flyby of Earth in 1997. (Sormano Astronomical Observatory) ===================================================================== A large, rocky asteroid is going to fly by Earth next week. At 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) long, it's roughly two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building, and it's been classed a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" due to its size and its regular close visits to our planet. But don't worry, this month's visit is going to have a very safe clearance, with the asteroid zipping by at a distance of 1.93 million kilometers (~1.2 million miles) away...