Amazing Science

Researchers at Columbia Univ. built a 3D printable, synthetic soft muscle that can mimic nature’s biology — lifting 1000 times its own weight. The artificial muscle is 3 times stronger than natural muscle — and can push, pull, bend, twist, and lift weighty objects. The breakthrough enables a new generation of completely soft robots.

Today’s mechanisms that move robotics — called actuators — are bulky pneumatic (gas pressure) or hydraulic (fluid pressure) inflation systems made of elastomer skins — that expand when air or liquid is pushed into them. But those require external compressors + pressure regulating equipment. The team is led by award-winning roboticist Hod Lipson PhD — from the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia Univ.

We’ve had great strides in making robot software — but robot bodies are still primitive. This is a big piece of the puzzle. Just like biology, the new actuator can be shaped + re-shaped thousands of ways. We’ve overcome one of the final barriers to making life-like robots.

Marine biologists have described a third species of branching syllid worm -- and the second within the genus Ramisyllis -- living inside an undescribed species of the sponge genus Petrosia found in shallow waters at Sado Island, Japan.

Among over 20,000 species of annelids (ringed or segmented worms), only two branching species with a highly modified body-pattern were known until now: Syllis ramosa and Ramisyllis multicaudata. Both have unusual ramified bodies with one head and multiple branches and live inside the canals of host sponges.

“In 1879, Scottish physician and marine zoologist William Carmichael M’Intosh published the description of a ‘remarkable branched syllid,’ Syllis ramosa, collected during the Challenger Expedition, one of the most significant natural history expeditions from the nineteenth century,” explained lead author University of Göttingen’s Professor M. Teresa Aguado and colleagues.

“The worms were found inside the hexactinellid sponge Crateromorpha meyeri at 175 m deep near Cebu, in the Philippines. In relation to their lateral branches, McIntosh said: ‘the body of the annelid appears to have a furor for budding laterally, terminally, and wherever a broken surface occurs,’ which represented the first instance of an annelid species described with a randomly branching asymmetrical body.  The second known branching species, Ramisyllis multicaudata, was described from the coastal shallows of Darwin, Northern Australia, in 2012. That study demonstrated notable differences in biology and morphology between this species and Syllis ramosa and analyzed its phylogenetic relationships inside the family Syllidae.”

ESA's exoplanet mission Cheops has revealed that an exoplanet orbiting its host star within a day has a deformed shape more like that of a rugby ball than a sphere. This is the first time that the deformation of an exoplanet has been detected, offering new insights into the internal structure of these star-hugging planets.

The planet, known as WASP-103b is located in the constellation of Hercules. It has been deformed by the strong tidal forces between the planet and its host star WASP-103, which is about 200 degrees hotter and 1.7 times larger than the sun.

We experience tides in the oceans of Earth mainly due to the Moon tugging slightly on our planet as it orbits us. The sun also has a small but significant effect on tides, however it is too far from Earth to cause major deformations of our planet. The same cannot be said for WASP-103b, a planet almost twice the size of Jupiter with 1.5 times its mass, orbiting its host star in less than a day. Astronomers have suspected that such a close proximity would cause monumental tides, but up until now they haven't been able to measure them.

Using new data from ESA's Cheops space telescope, combined with data that had already been obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have now been able to detect how tidal forces deform exoplanet WASP-103b from a usual sphere into a rugby ball shape.

Cheops measures exoplanet transits—the dip in light caused when a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view. Ordinarily, studying the shape of the light curve will reveal details about the planet such as its size. The high precision of Cheops together with its pointing flexibility, which enables the satellite to return to a target and to observe multiple transits, has allowed astronomers to detect the minute signal of the tidal deformation of WASP-103b. This distinct signature can be used to unveil even more about the planet.

"It's incredible that Cheops was actually able to reveal this tiny deformation," says Jacques Laskar of Paris Observatory, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, and co-author of the research. "This is the first time such analysis has been made, and we can hope that observing over a longer time interval will strengthen this observation and lead to better knowledge of the planet's internal structure."

Scientists just collected the first measurements of violent eruptions from a dense, magnetic star that spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second.

This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than our sun, their eruptions are so brief and unpredictable that they're challenging for astrophysicists to find and study.

A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses at the end of its life. As the star dies in a supernova, protons and electrons in its core are crushed into a compressed solar mass that combines intense gravity with high-speed rotation and powerful magnetic forces, according to NASA. The result, a neutron star, is approximately 1.3 to 2.5 solar masses — one solar mass is the mass of our sun, or about 330,000 Earths — crammed into a sphere measuring just 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter. 

Matter in neutron stars is so densely packed that an amount the size of a sugar cube would weigh more than 1 billion tons (900 million metric tons), and a neutron star's gravitational pull is so intense that a passing marshmallow would hit the star's surface with the force of 1,000 hydrogen bombs, according to NASA.

Magnetars have magnetic fields that are 1,000 times stronger than those of other neutron stars, and they are more powerful than any other magnetic object in the universe. Our sun pales in comparison to these bright, dense stars even when they aren't erupting, study lead author Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, a research professor with the Institute for Astrophysics of Andalucía at the Spanish Research Council, said in the statement. "Even in an inactive state, magnetars can be 100,000 times more luminous than our sun," Castro-Tirado said. "But in the case of the flash that we have studied — GRB2001415 — the energy that was released is equivalent to that which our sun radiates in 100,000 years."

A giant energy flare

The magnetar that produced the brief eruption is located in the Sculptor Galaxy, a spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years from Earth, and is "a true cosmic monster," study co-author Victor Reglero, director of UV's Image Processing Laboratory, said in the statement. The giant flare was detected on April 15, 2020 by the Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) instrument on the International Space Station, researchers reported Dec. 22 in the journal Nature.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the ASIM pipeline detected the flare, enabling the researchers to analyze that brief, violent energy surge; the flare lasted just 0.16 seconds and then the signal decayed so rapidly that it was nearly indistinguishable from background noise in the data. The study authors spent more than a year analyzing ASIM's two seconds of data collection, dividing the event into four phases based on the magnetar's energy output, and then measuring variations in the star's magnetic field caused by the energy pulse when it was at its peak. It's almost as if the magnetar decided to broadcast its existence "from its cosmic solitude" by shouting into the void of space with the force "of a billion suns," Reglero said.

In late November 2021, more than 110 people gathered at a crowded Christmas party at a restaurant in Oslo, Norway. Most of the guests were fully vaccinated. One had returned from South Africa just a few days earlier and was unknowingly carrying the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. Ultimately, about 70% of the partygoers were infected. Scientists who traced this superspreader event concluded it was evidence that omicron was "highly transmissible" among fully vaccinated adults.

Just over a month later, omicron's speedy worldwide ascent now makes it abundantly clear that the party wasn't an isolated example. In country after country, the new variant has outcompeted its predecessor, the delta variant, with one case of omicron sparking at least three other new infections on average. Cases have soared to record highs in parts of Europe and now the U.S., where about half a million new infections have been recorded in a single day. "This is a game-changing virus, especially in the vaccinated population where people have had a level of invincibility," says Sumit Chanda, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research.

Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own. Not many were known until now, but a team of astronomers, using data from several European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and other facilities, have just discovered at least 70 new rogue planets in our galaxy. This is the largest group of rogue planets ever discovered, an important step towards understanding the origins and features of these mysterious galactic nomads.

“We did not know how many to expect and are excited to have found so many,” says Núria Miret-Roig, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France and the University of Vienna, Austria, and the first author of the new study published today in Nature Astronomy.

Rogue planets, lurking far away from any star illuminating them, would normally be impossible to image. However, Miret-Roig and her team took advantage of the fact that, in the few million years after their formation, these planets are still hot enough to glow, making them directly detectable by sensitive cameras on large telescopes. They found at least 70 new rogue planets with masses comparable to Jupiter’s in a star-forming region close to our Sun, located within the Scorpius and Ophiuchus constellations [1].

To spot so many rogue planets, the team used data spanning about 20 years from a number of telescopes on the ground and in space. “We measured the tiny motions, the colours and luminosities of tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky,” explains Miret-Roig. “These measurements allowed us to securely identify the faintest objects in this region, the rogue planets.”

The team used observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope located in Chile, along with other facilities. “The vast majority of our data come from ESO observatories, which were absolutely critical for this study. Their wide field of view and unique sensitivity were keys to our success,” explains Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, and project leader of the new research. “We used tens of thousands of wide-field images from ESO facilities, corresponding to hundreds of hours of observations, and literally tens of terabytes of data.”

The team also used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, marking a huge success for the collaboration of ground- and space-based telescopes in the exploration and understanding of our Universe. The study suggests there could be many more of these elusive, starless planets that we have yet to discover. “There could be several billions of these free-floating giant planets roaming freely in the Milky Way without a host star,” Bouy explains.

By studying the newly found rogue planets, astronomers may find clues to how these mysterious objects form. Some scientists believe rogue planets can form from the collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to lead to the formation of a star, or that they could have been kicked out from their parent system. But which mechanism is more likely remains unknown.

Further advances in technology will be key to unlocking the mystery of these nomadic planets. The team hopes to continue to study them in greater detail with ESO’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and due to start observations later this decade. “These objects are extremely faint and little can be done to study them with current facilities,” says Bouy. “The ELT will be absolutely crucial to gathering more information about most of the rogue planets we have found.”

A new study shows it’s theoretically possible. The hypothesis could be tested soon with proposed Venus-bound missions.

It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbor. With an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide, and a surface hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a scorched and suffocating wasteland where life as we know it could not survive. The planet’s clouds are similarly hostile, blanketing the planet in droplets of sulfuric acid caustic enough to burn a hole through human skin. And yet, a new study supports the longstanding idea that if life exists, it might make a home in Venus’ clouds. The study’s authors, from MIT, Cardiff University, and Cambridge University, have identified a chemical pathway by which life could neutralize Venus’ acidic environment, creating a self-sustaining, habitable pocket in the clouds.

Within Venus’ atmosphere, scientists have long observed puzzling anomalies — chemical signatures that are hard to explain, such as small concentrations of oxygen and nonspherical particles unlike sulfuric acid’s round droplets. Perhaps most puzzling is the presence of ammonia, a gas that was tentatively detected in the 1970s, and that by all accounts should not be produced through any chemical process known on Venus.

In their new study, the researchers modeled a set of chemical processes to show that if ammonia is indeed present, the gas would set off a cascade of chemical reactions that would neutralize surrounding droplets of sulfuric acid and could also explain most of the anomalies observed in Venus’ clouds. As for the source of ammonia itself, the authors propose that the most plausible explanation is of biological origin, rather than a nonbiological source such as lightning or volcanic eruptions. As they write in their study, the chemistry suggests that “life could be making its own environment on Venus.” This tantalizing new hypothesis is testable, and the researchers provide a list of chemical signatures for future missions to measure in Venus’ clouds, to either confirm or contradict their idea.

“No life that we know of could survive in the Venus droplets,” says study co-author Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But the point is, maybe some life is there, and is modifying its environment so that it is livable.”

Life suspect

“Life on Venus” was a trending phrase last year, when scientists including Seager and her co-authors reported the detection of phosphine in the planet’s clouds. On Earth, phosphine is a gas that is produced mainly through biological interactions. The discovery of phosphine on Venus leaves room for the possibility of life. Since then, however, the discovery has been widely contested.

“The phosphine detection ended up becoming incredibly controversial,” Seager says. “But phosphine was like a gateway, and there’s been this resurgence in people studying Venus.” Inspired to look more closely, Rimmer began combing through data from past missions to Venus. In these data, he identified anomalies, or chemical signatures, in the clouds that had gone unexplained for decades. In addition to the presence of oxygen and nonspherical particles, anomalies included unexpected levels of water vapor and sulfur dioxide.

Rimmer proposed the anomalies might be explained by dust. He argued that minerals, swept up from Venus’ surface and into the clouds, could interact with sulfuric acid to produce some, though not all, of the observed anomalies. He showed the chemistry checked out, but the physical requirements were unfeasible: A massive amount of dust would have to loft into the clouds to produce the observed anomalies. Seager and her colleagues wondered if the anomalies could be explained by ammonia. In the 1970s, the gas was tentatively detected in the planet’s clouds by the Venera 8 and Pioneer Venus probes. The presence of ammonia, or NH3, was an unsolved mystery. “Ammonia shouldn’t be on Venus,” Seager says. “It has hydrogen attached to it, and there’s very little hydrogen around. Any gas that doesn’t belong in the context of its environment is automatically suspicious for being made by life.”

Livable clouds

If the team were to assume that life was the source of ammonia, could this explain the other anomalies in Venus’ clouds? The researchers modeled a series of chemical processes in search of an answer. They found that if life were producing ammonia in the most efficient way possible, the associated chemical reactions would naturally yield oxygen. Once present in the clouds, ammonia would dissolve in droplets of sulfuric acid, effectively neutralizing the acid to make the droplets relatively habitable. The introduction of ammonia into the droplets would transform their formerly round, liquid shape into more of a nonspherical, salt-like slurry.

Once ammonia dissolved in sulfuric acid, the reaction would trigger any surrounding sulfur dioxide to dissolve as well. The presence of ammonia then could indeed explain most of the major anomalies seen in Venus’ clouds. The researchers also show that sources such as lightning, volcanic eruptions, and even a meteorite strike could not chemically produce the amount of ammonia required to explain the anomalies. Life, however, might. In fact, the team notes that there are life-forms on Earth — particularly in our own stomachs — that produce ammonia to neutralize and make livable an otherwise highly acidic environment. “There are very acidic environments on Earth where life does live, but it’s nothing like the environment on Venus ­— unless life is neutralizing some of those droplets,” Seager says.

Scientists may have a chance to check for the presence of ammonia, and signs of life, in the next several years with the Venus Life Finder Missions, a set of proposed privately funded missions, of which Seager is principal investigator, that plan to send spacecraft to Venus to measure its clouds for ammonia and other signatures of life. “Venus has lingering, unexplained atmospheric anomalies that are incredible,” Seager says. “It leaves room for the possibility of life.”

Reference: “Production of ammonia makes Venusian clouds habitable and explains observed cloud-level chemical anomalies” by William Bains, Janusz J. Petkowski, Paul B. Rimmer and Sara Seager, 20 December 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110889118

A poor weather forecast at the Guiana Space Center in South America has forced officials to delay the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by one day to Dec. 25, Christmas morning, mission managers said Tuesday. The 32-minute launch window Saturday opens at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT). Ground crews at the jungle spaceport in French Guiana planned to transfer the European Ariane 5 rocket with the Webb telescope on top to the ELA-3 launch zone Wednesday. That rollout, expected to take about two hours, has been delayed to Thursday.

Managers from Arianespace, the Ariane 5’s launch operator, met with representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the French space agency, CNES, for a launch readiness review Tuesday in French Guiana. The meeting covered the status of the Ariane 5 launcher, Webb, and the launch range at the French-run Guiana Space Center. Officials gave the go-ahead at the end of the review to continue launch preparations, targeting a liftoff opportunity Friday morning. But managers decided to delay the launch by 24 hours after a weather briefing later Tuesday.

Heavy rain storms often batter the tropical spaceport on the northeastern coast of South America, but rainfall itself is not a constraint for an Ariane 5 launch. The main concerns watched by the Ariane 5 team include the risk of lightning and high-altitude winds.

Arianespace used an Ariane 5 ECA rocket, designated VA256, to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, a flagship observatory developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. JWST is the largest space telescope ever built, with a deployable mirror measuring 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and four scientific instruments to observe the universe in infrared wavelengths. The mission will study the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets. The Ariane 5 ECA rocket will launch JWST on a trajectory toward its operating position at the L2 Lagrange point nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Delayed from Oct. 31, November, Dec. 18, Dec. 22, Dec. 24.

Webb often gets called the replacement for Hubble, but we prefer to call it a successor. After all, Webb is the scientific successor to Hubble; its science goals were motivated by results from Hubble. Hubble's science pushed us to look to longer wavelengths to "go beyond" what Hubble has already done. In particular, more distant objects are more highly redshifted, and their light is pushed from the UV and optical into the near-infrared. Thus observations of these distant objects (like the first galaxies formed in the Universe, for example) requires an infrared telescope.

This is the other reason that Webb is not a replacement for Hubble; its capabilities are not identical. Webb will primarily look at the Universe in the infrared, while Hubble studies it primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths (though it has some infrared capability). Webb also has a much bigger mirror than Hubble. This larger light collecting area means that Webb can peer farther back into time than Hubble is capable of doing. Hubble is in a very close orbit around the earth, while Webb will be 1.5 million kilometers (km) away at the second Lagrange (L2) point.

Webb will observe primarily in the infrared and will have four science instruments to capture images and spectra of astronomical objects. These instruments will provide wavelength coverage from 0.6 to 28 micrometers (or "microns"; 1 micron is 1.0 x 10-6 meters). The infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum goes from about 0.75 microns to a few hundred microns. This means that Webb's instruments will work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range (in particular in the red and up to the yellow part of the visible spectrum).

The instruments on Hubble can observe a small portion of the infrared spectrum from 0.8 to 2.5 microns, but its primary capabilities are in the ultra-violet and visible parts of the spectrum from 0.1 to 0.8 microns.

Why are infrared observations important to astronomy? Stars and planets that are just forming lie hidden behind cocoons of dust that absorb visible light. (The same is true for the very center of our galaxy.) However, infrared light emitted by these regions can penetrate this dusty shroud and reveal what is inside.

At left are infrared and visible light images from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Monkey Head Nebula, a star-forming region. A jet of material from a newly forming star is visible in one of the pillars, just above and left of centre in the right-hand image. Several galaxies are seen in the infrared view, much more distant than the columns of dust and gas.

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. The battery could enable a wide variety of wearable electronic devices, and might even be used to make 3D-printed batteries in virtually any shape.

The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts. In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today.

MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev (now an assistant professor at National University of Singapore), former MIT postdoc Jung Tae Lee (now a professor at Kyung Hee University), and Benjamin Grena SM '13, Ph.D. '17 (currently at Apple) are the lead authors on the paper. Other co-authors are MIT professors Yoel Fink, Ju Li, and John Joannopoulos, and seven others at MIT and elsewhere.

Researchers, including members of this team, have previously demonstrated fibers that contain a wide variety of electronic components, including light emitting diodes (LEDs), photosensors, communications, and digital systems. Many of these are weavable and washable, making them practical for use in wearable products, but all have so far relied on an external power source. Now, this fiber battery, which is also weavable and washable, could enable such devices to be completely self-contained.

The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.

Scientists have found four enormous cavities, or bubbles, at the center of a galaxy cluster using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This unusual set of features may have been caused by eruptions from two supermassive black holes closely orbiting each other.

Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe held together by gravity. They are a mixture of hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies, enormous amounts of hot gas, and unseen dark matter. The hot gas that pervades clusters contains much more mass than the galaxies themselves, and glows brightly in X-ray light that Chandra detects. An enormous galaxy is usually found at the center of a cluster.

A new Chandra study of the galaxy cluster known as RBS 797, located about 3.9 billion light-years from Earth, uncovered two separate pairs of cavities extending away from the center of the cluster. These types of cavities have been seen before in other galaxy clusters. Scientists think they are the result of eruptions from regions near a supermassive black hole in the middle of the massive central galaxy. As matter flies away from the black hole as jets in opposing directions, it blows cavities in the hot gas. The revelation in RBS 797 is that there are two sets of jets directed perpendicular to each other.

“We think we know what a pair of cavities represents, but what is going on when a galaxy cluster has two pairs in very different directions?” said Francesco Ubertosi of the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the Chandra study.

Astronomers previously observed the pair of cavities in the east-west direction in RBS 797, but the pair in the north-south direction was only detected in a new, much longer Chandra observation. The deeper image uses almost five days of Chandra observing time, compared to about 14 hours for the original observation. The National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array had already observed evidence for two pairs of jets as radio emission, which line up with the cavities. 

How was this quartet of cavities created? The most likely answer, according to Ubertosi and his colleagues, is that RBS 797 contains a pair of supermassive black holes that have launched jets in perpendicular directions at almost the same time. “Our best idea is that one pair of supermassive black holes has led to a pair of a pair of cavities,” said Myriam Gitti, a co-author also of the University of Bologna. “While we think supermassive black holes can form binary systems, it is extremely rare that both of them are observed in an active phase – in this sense the discovery of two close active black holes inflating cavities in RBS 797 is extraordinary.” 

For 124 patients, four cancer types and two immunotherapy agents, the new model reliably predicted the immune responses and final tumor burden across all cancers and drug combinations examined.

Immunotherapy has shown great promise in the fight against cancer. By activating the body’s own immune system to identify and attack its cancer cells, these next generation therapies offer the potential for highly targeted and efficacious cancer treatment with fewer negative side effects than traditional cancer therapies. Immunotherapies also may work more effectively on certain types of cancer that are known to respond poorly to other treatment methods.

Despite the substantial advances, immunotherapy still presents notable challenges. While these therapies have been highly effective against certain types of cancer, more than 50 percent of cancer patients fail to respond to immunotherapies. Among patients who do respond, it often occurs more slowly than more traditional treatment regimens, making it challenging to determine when to alter the clinical approach. Several promising biomarkers for immunotherapy response have been identified to help alleviate this issue, but they are often specific to a certain family of drug and disease combinations and may require extensive and invasive diagnostic testing.

A team of researchers, led by Houston Methodist's Zhihui Wang, PhD, associate research professor of mathematics in medicine and Vittorio Cristini, PhD, professor of mathematics in medicine and have developed, analyzed and validated a mathematical model that can quantify the sensitivity of a cancer cell type to a specific immunotherapeutic drug. The new analytic tool employs inputs that are already being measured in cancer patients to help optimize treatment approaches based on the individual’s specific disease and immune health, thus enhancing the chances for selecting successful treatments from a wide variety of cancer-immunotherapy drug combinations. The model establishes a framework for engineering personalized treatment strategies., The specifics of the mathematical model were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in collaboration with researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

In the middle of his landmark book On the Origin of Species, Darwin had a crisis of faith. In a bout of honesty, he wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.” While scientists are still working out the details of how the eye actually evolved, we are also still stuck on the question of how intelligence emerges in biology. How can a biological system ever generate coherent and goal-oriented behavior from the bottom up when there is no external designer? In fact, intelligence—a purposeful response to available information, often anticipating the future—is not restricted to the minds of some privileged species. It is distributed throughout biology, at many different spatial and temporal scales. There are not just intelligent people, mammals, birds and cephalopods.

Intelligent, purposeful problem-solving behavior can be found in parts of all living things: single cells and tissues, individual neurons and networks of neurons, viruses, ribosomes and RNA fragments, down to motor proteins and molecular networks. Arguably, understanding the origin of intelligence is the central problem in biology—one that is still wide open. In this piece, we argue that progress in developmental biology and neuroscience is now providing a promising path to show how the architecture of modular systems underlies evolutionary and organismal intelligence.

Biologists are trained to focus on the mechanisms of living systems and not on their purpose. As biologists, we are supposed to work out the “how” rather than the “why,” pursuing causality rather than goals. The “why” is not only always present but is precisely what drives specific “how”s to be chosen, enabling organisms to survive by selecting and exploiting specific mechanisms out of an astronomically large space of possibilities. In the case of the human eye, for example, the optical properties of the lens only make sense if they help focus the light on the retina. If you don’t ask why the lens is transparent, you will never understand its function, no matter how long you study how it becomes transparent.

The temperature of a planet’s atmosphere decreases with increasing altitude, unless a shortwave absorber that causes a temperature inversion exists. Ozone plays this role in the Earth’s atmosphere. In the atmospheres of highly irradiated exoplanets, the shortwave absorbers are predicted to be titanium oxide and vanadium oxide. Using high-resolution transmission spectroscopy, astronomers have now detected titanium oxide in the atmosphere of the ultrahot Jupiter WASP-189b. Moreover, they have detected metals, including neutral and singly ionized iron and titanium, as well as chromium, magnesium, vanadium and manganese.

On January 24th, 2022, Webb fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final post-launch course correction to Webb’s trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth. The final mid-course burn added only about 3.6 miles per hour (1.6 meters per second) – a mere walking pace – to Webb’s speed, which was all that was needed to send it to its preferred “halo” orbit around the L2 point.

“Webb, welcome home!” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Congratulations to the team for all of their hard work ensuring Webb’s safe arrival at L2 today. We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new views of the universe this summer!”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

• webb.nasa.gov
• nasa.gov/webb
• webbtelescope.org
• stsci.edu/jwst (for astronomers)

Researchers show how intelligent aliens might draw nearly-limitless power from a black hole using a Dyson sphere.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been conducted for nearly 60 yr. A Dyson sphere, a spherical structure that surrounds a star and transports its radiative energy outwards as an energy source for an advanced civilization, is one of the main targets of SETI to identify intelligent aliens around galactic energy sources.

Recently, astronomers analyzed whether building a Dyson sphere around a black hole is effective. They considered six energy sources: (i) the cosmic microwave background, (ii) the Hawking radiation, (iii) an accretion disc, (iv) Bondi accretion, (v) a corona, and (vi) relativistic jets. To develop future civilizations (for example, a Type II civilization), 4×1026W(1L⊙)4×1026W(1L⊙) is expected to be needed. Among (iii) to (vi), the largest luminosity can be collected from an accretion disc, reaching 105L⊙105L⊙⁠, enough to maintain a Type II civilization. Moreover, if a Dyson sphere collects not only the electromagnetic radiation but also other types of energy (e.g. kinetic energy) from the jets, the total collected energy would be approximately 5 times larger.

Considering the emission from a Dyson sphere, their analysis shows that the Dyson sphere around a stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way (⁠10kpc away from us) should be detectable in the ultraviolet (10−400nm)(10−400nm)⁠, optical (400−760nm)(400−760nm)⁠, near-infrared (⁠760nm−5μm760nm−5μm⁠), and mid-infrared (⁠5−40μm5−40μm⁠) wavelengths via the waste heat radiation using current telescopes such as Galaxy Evolution Explorer Ultraviolet Sky Surveys.

Performing model fitting to observed spectral energy distributions and measuring the variability of radial velocity may help astronomers to identify these possible artificial structures.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the spiral galaxy NGC 105, which lies roughly 215 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While it looks like NGC 105 is plunging edge-on into a collision with a neighboring galaxy, this is just the result of the chance alignment of the two objects in the night sky. NGC 105’s elongated neighbor is actually far more distant and remains relatively unknown to astronomers. These misleading conjunctions occur frequently in astronomy — for example, the stars in constellations are at vastly different distances from Earth, and only appear to form patterns thanks to the chance alignment of their component stars.

The Wide Field Camera 3 observations in this image are from a vast collection of Hubble measurements examining nearby galaxies which contain two fascinating astronomical phenomena — Cepheid variables and cataclysmic supernova explosions. Whilst these two phenomena may appear to be unrelated — one is a peculiar class of pulsating stars and the other is the explosion caused by the catastrophic final throes of a massive star’s life — they are both used by astronomers for a very particular purpose: measuring the vast distances to astronomical objects.

Both Cepheids and supernovae have very predictable luminosities, meaning that astronomers can tell precisely how bright they are. By measuring how bright they appear when observed from Earth, these “standard candles” can provide reliable distance measurements. NGC 105 contains both supernovae and Cepheid variables, giving astronomers a valuable opportunity to calibrate the two distance measurement techniques against one another.

Astronomers recently carefully analyzed the distances to a sample of galaxies including NGC 105 to measure how fast the Universe is expanding — a value known as the Hubble constant. Their results don’t agree with the predictions of the most widely-accepted cosmological model, and their analysis shows that there is only a 1-in-a-million chance that this discrepancy was caused by measurement errors. This discrepancy between galaxy measurements and cosmological predictions has been a long-standing source of consternation for astronomers, and these recent findings provide persuasive new evidence that something is either wrong or lacking in our standard model of cosmology.

Machine learning algorithms provide a way to detect misinformation based on writing style and how articles are shared. On topics as varied as climate change and the safety of vaccines, you will find a wave of misinformation all over social media. Trust in conventional news sources may seem lower than ever, but researchers are working on ways to give people more insight on whether they can believe what they read. Researchers have been testing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that could help filter legitimate news. But how trustworthy is AI when it comes to stopping the spread of misinformation?

Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Tennessee collaborated to study the role of AI in helping people identify whether the news they’re reading is legitimate or not. The research paper, “Tailoring Heuristics and Timing AI Interventions for Supporting News Veracity Assessments,” was published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports.  It discussed how crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) can be used to identify misinformation for fresh news and specific heuristics, which are rules of thumb used to process information and consider its veracity. In other words, heuristics are essentially “shortcuts for decisions,” explained Dorit Nevo, an associate professor at RPI’s Lally School of Management and a lead author for the paper.

The study found that AI would be successful in flagging false stories only if the reader did not already have an opinion on the topic, Nevo said. When study subjects were set in their beliefs, confirmation bias kept them from reassessing their views.

Mathematical simulations show the new approach may offer faster, cheaper, and more accurate detection, including identifying new variants.

A novel approach to testing for the presence of the virus that causes Covid-19 may lead to tests that are faster, less expensive, and potentially less prone to erroneous results than existing detection methods. Though the work, based on quantum effects, is still theoretical, these detectors could potentially be adapted to detect virtually any virus, the researchers say.

The new approach is described in a paper published on December 16, 2021, in the journal Nano Letters, by Changhao Li, an MIT doctoral student; Paola Cappellaro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics; and Rouholla Soleyman and Mohammad Kohandel of the University of Waterloo.

Existing tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus include rapid tests that detect specific viral proteins, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that take several hours to process. Neither of these tests can quantify the amount of virus present with high accuracy. Even the gold-standard PCR tests might have false-negative rates of more than 25 percent. In contrast, the team’s analysis shows the new test could have false negative rates below 1 percent. The test could also be sensitive enough to detect just a few hundred strands of the viral RNA, within just a second.

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the Covid-19 antiviral pill from Pfizer, adding a new weapon against the pandemic as the Omicron wave crashes into the U.S.

Pfizer ‘s drug, called Paxlovid, decreased the risk of hospitalization and death in a trial of unvaccinated, high-risk adults by 89% when taken within three days of when symptoms began.

The FDA said that the pill was authorized for treatment of mild-to-moderate Covid-19 in adults and children aged 12 and up at high risk for progressing to severe Covid-19. The drug is not authorized for post-exposure prevention, or in people who are hospitalized, and treatment must be started within five days of when symptoms begin. Pfizer shares were up 1.9% after the announcement.

Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have recently been exploring a fascinating idea, that of creating humanoid robots that can fly. To efficiently control the movements of flying robots, objects or vehicles, however, researchers require systems that can reliably estimate the intensity of the thrust produced by propellers, which allow them to move through the air.

As thrust forces are difficult to measure directly, they are usually estimated based on data collected by onboard sensors. The team at IIT recently introduced a new framework that can estimate thrust intensities of flying multi-body systems that are not equipped with thrust-measuring sensors. This framework, presented in a paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, could ultimately help them to realize their envisioned flying humanoid robot.

"Our early ideas of making a flying humanoid robot came up around 2016," Daniele Pucci, head of the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence lab that carried out the study, told TechXplore. "The main purpose was to conceive robots that could operate in disaster-like scenarios, where there are survivors to rescue inside partially destroyed buildings, and these buildings are difficult to reach because of potential floods and fire around them."

The key objective of the recent work by Pucci and his colleagues was to devise a robot that can manipulate objects, walk on the ground and fly. As many humanoid robots can both manipulate objects and move on the ground, the team decided to extend the capabilities of a humanoid robot to include flight; rather than developing an entirely new robotic structure.

"Once provided with flight abilities, humanoid robots could fly from one building to another avoiding debris, fire and floods," Pucci said. "After landing, they could manipulate objects to open doors and close gas valves, or walk inside buildings for indoor inspection, for instance looking for survivors of a fire or natural disaster."

Initially, Pucci and his colleagues tried to provide iCub, a renowned humanoid robot created at IIT, with the ability to balance its body on the ground, for instance standing on a single foot. Once they achieved this, they started working on broadening the robot's locomotion skills, so that it could also fly and move in the air. The team refer to the area of research they have been focusing on as 'aerial humanoid robotics."

"To the best of our knowledge, we produced the first work about flying humanoid robots," Pucci said. "That paper was obviously testing flight controllers in simulation environments only, but given the promising outcomes, we embarked upon the journey of designing iRonCub, the first jet-powered humanoid robot presented in our latest paper."

The omicron variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 evades immunity from past infection or from two doses of a vaccine, according to a new research report from England published recently. The study was conducted by the COVID-19 research team at Imperial College London, and used data from the health authorities on all PCR-confirmed cases of the virus in England based on tests conducted between Nov. 29 and Dec. 11 2021. The study found that the risk of reinfection with omicron is 5.4 times greater than that associated with the delta variant, which is still the dominant one in the U.S.

A COVID-19 recovery offers about 19% protection against omicron, while two vaccine doses offer 20% protection, researchers found. A booster dose raises that number to 55% to 80%. Researchers found that omicron cases were doubling every two days up to Dec. 11, and that its R number, or rate of reproduction, was above 3 in that period. That means that each person with COVID is likely to infect more than three others. The distribution by age, region and ethnicity also differs from delta, with omicron infecting far more people aged 18 to 29, residents in London and those of African ethnicity. “London is substantially ahead of other English regions in Omicron frequency,” the report found.

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) will be the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Webb’s flight into orbit will take place on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Webb is the next great space science observatory, designed to answer outstanding questions about the Universe and to make breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy. Webb will see farther into our origins – from the formation of stars and planets, to the birth of the first galaxies in the early Universe.

During the first month in space, on its way to the second Lagrange point (L2), Webb will undergo a complex unfolding sequence. Key steps in this sequence are unfolding Webb’s sunshield – a five-layer, diamond-shaped structure the size of a tennis court – and the iconic 6.5-meter wide mirror, consisting of a honeycomb-like pattern of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated mirror segments.

Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service. As well as launch services, ESA contributes to two of the four science instruments (NIRSpec and MIRI), and provides personnel to support mission operations.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

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