Amazing Science

Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it's opening up the Universe as never before.

On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was seen as never before. From 165,000 light-years away, the first signals from a recently destroyed star — a core-collapse supernova — arrived on Earth. Humans had witnessed supernovae before, both within the Milky Way and in galaxies beyond our own, but this one was special. The first hint of its arrival didn't come in the form of light, but rather in a signal never measured before: in the form of neutrinos.

It wasn't until hours later that the light arrived, corresponding to the extra time it took the shock wave occurring in the star's interior to reach the surface. Whereas light interacts with the material composing the progenitor star, neutrinos simply pass right through it, giving them a significant head start. For the first time, an astronomical event beyond our Solar System had emitted both light and particles that were observed on Earth. The era of Multi-Messenger Astronomy was born. Although it's still a term that few non-astronomers are familiar with, it truly is the future of studying the Universe.

Originally, astronomy was confined to a very narrow regime: the only signals we were capable of receiving were in the form of visible light. Since that's what our eyes had adapted to see, those were the tools we had at our disposal to examine the Universe. For countless millennia, human eyes viewed the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, and the fuzzy, distant nebulae we now know to be galaxies as they slowly but surely migrated across the sky.

Even after the invention of the telescope, astronomy was still confined to what we could perceive in visible light. All the telescope did, essentially, was to enhance our light-gathering power by using mirrors and/or lenses to increase the light-collecting area far beyond the limits of even the most thoroughly dilated pupil. Instead of thousands of stars, these tools would reveal hundreds of thousands, millions, and eventually billions of them.

Shrouded in mystery since their discovery, the phenomenon of black holes continues to be one of the most mind-boggling enigmas in our universe.

In recent years, many researchers have made strides in understanding black holes using observational astronomy and an emerging field known as gravitational wave astronomy, first hypothesized by Albert Einstein, which directly measures the gravitational waves emitted by black holes.

Through these findings on black hole gravitational waves, which were first observed in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington, researchers have learned exciting details about these invisible objects and developed theories and projections on everything from their sizes to their physical properties.

Still, limitations in LIGO and other observation technologies have kept scientists from grasping a more complete picture of black holes, and one of the largest gaps in knowledge concerns a certain type of black hole: those of intermediate-mass, or black holes that fall somewhere between supermassive (at least a million times greater than our sun) and stellar (think: smaller, though still 5 to 50 times greater than the mass of our sun).

That could soon change thanks to new research out of Vanderbilt on what's next for gravitational wave astronomy. The study, led by Vanderbilt astrophysicist Karan Jani and featured today as a letter in Nature Astronomy, presents a compelling roadmap for capturing 4- to 10-year snapshots of intermediate-mass black hole activity.

The terahertz frequency range — which sits in the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light — offers the potential for high-bandwidth communications, ultrahigh-resolution imaging, precise long-range sensing for radio astronomy, and much more.

But this section of the electromagnetic spectrum has remained out of reach for most applications. That is because current sources of terahertz frequencies are bulky, inefficient, have limited tuning or have to operate at low temperature.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with MIT and the U.S. Army, have developed a compact, room temperature, widely tunable terahertz laser.

The research was published today (November 15, 2019) in the journal Science.  “This laser outperforms any existing laser source in this spectral region and opens it up, for the first time, to a broad range of applications in science and technology,” said Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS and co-senior author of the paper.

“There are many needs for a source like this laser, things like short range, high bandwidth wireless communications, very high-resolution radar, and spectroscopy,” said Henry Everitt, Senior Technologist with the U.S. Army CCDC Aviation & Missile Center and co-senior author of the paper.

2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements. Here, we discuss the history of the periodic table as well as the designated year.

Researchers, inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink—no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged or punctured.

Could this lead to an unsinkable ship? A wearable flotation device that will still float after being punctured? Electronic monitoring devices that can survive in long term in the ocean? All of the above, says Chunlei Guo, professor of optics and physics, whose lab describes the structure in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces

.The structure uses a groundbreaking technique the lab developed for using femtosecond bursts of lasers to “etch” the surfaces of metals with intricate micro- and nanoscale patterns that trap air and make the surfaces superhydrophobic, or water repellent.

New technique makes it easier to build stable “tissues”

3D-printed tissues and organs could revolutionize transplants, drug screens, and lab models—but replicating complicated body parts such as gastric tracts, windpipes, and blood vessels is a major challenge. That’s because these vascularized tissues are hard to build up in traditional solid layer-by-layer 3D printing without constructing supporting scaffolding that can later prove impossible to remove.

One potential solution is replacing these support structures with liquid—a specially designed fluid matrix into which liquid designs could be injected before the “ink” is set and the matrix is drained away. But past attempts to make such aqueous structures have literally collapsed, as their surfaces shrink and their structures crumple into useless blobs.

So, researchers from China turned to water-loving, or hydrophilic, liquid polymers that create a stable membrane where they meet, thanks to the attraction of their hydrogen bonds. The researchers say various polymer combinations could work; they used a polyethylene oxide matrix and an ink made of a long carbohydrate molecule called dextran. They pumped their ink into the matrix with an injection nozzle that can move through the liquid and even suck up and rewrite lines that have already been drawn. The resulting liquid structures can hold their shape for as long as 10 days before they begin to merge, the team reported last month in Advanced Materials.

Using their new method, the researchers printed an assortment of complex shapes—including tornadoesque whirls, single and double helices (above), branched treelike shapes, and even one that resembles a goldfish. Once printing is finished, the shapes are set by adding polyvinyl alcohol to the inky portion of the structure. That means, the scientists say, that complex 3D-printed tissues made by including living cells in the ink could soon be within our grasp.

Wyss Institute, Harvard Medical School study offers hope for single genetic treatment for multiple age-related ills.

New research from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) suggests that it may be possible someday to tend to multiple ailments with one treatment.

In the Wyss study, a single administration of an adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based gene therapy, which delivered combinations of three longevity-associated genes to mice, dramatically improved or completely reversed multiple age-related diseases, suggesting that a systems-level approach to treating such diseases could improve overall health and lifespan. The research is reported in PNAS.

“The results we saw were stunning and suggest that holistically addressing aging via gene therapy could be more effective than the piecemeal approach that currently exists,” said first author Noah Davidsohn, a former research scientist at the Wyss Institute and HMS who is now chief technology officer of Rejuvenate Bio. “Everyone wants to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible, and this study is a first step toward reducing the suffering caused by debilitating diseases.”

The study was conducted in the lab of Wyss core faculty member George Church as part of Davidsohn’s postdoctoral research into the genetics of aging. Davidsohn, Church, and their co-authors homed in on three genes that had been shown to confer increased health and lifespan benefits in mice that were genetically engineered to overexpress them: FGF21, sTGFβR2, and αKlotho. They hypothesized that providing extra copies of those genes to nonengineered mice via gene therapy would similarly combat age-related diseases and bring health benefits.

The team created separate gene therapy constructs for each gene using the AAV8 serotype as a delivery vehicle, and injected them into mouse models of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart failure, and renal failure both individually and in combination with the other genes to see whether there was a positive synergistic effect.

FGF21 caused complete reversal of weight gain and Type 2 diabetes in obese, diabetic mice following a single gene therapy administration, and its combination with sTGFβR2 reduced kidney atrophy by 75 percent in mice with renal fibrosis. Heart function in mice with heart failure improved by 58 percent when they were given sTGFβR2 alone or in combination with either of the other two genes, showing that a combined therapeutic treatment of FGF21 and sTGFβR2 could successfully treat all four age-related conditions, therefore improving health and survival. Administering all three genes together resulted in slightly worse outcomes, likely from an adverse interaction between FGF21 and αKlotho, which remains to be studied.

Doctors in Australia say they have identified a second case of twins apparently created from one egg and two sperm, a boy-girl combination in whom the mother’s DNA is identical in both babies but the father’s DNA varies in each twin. They’re being called semi-identical twins and a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that such twins are extraordinarily rare. The only other reported case was uncovered in 2007.

Virtually all twins are either fraternal (where two eggs and two sperm have created two separate embryos) or identical (where one embryo splits in two before resuming normal development for each child). “This is confirming there is this third type of twinning where it’s not fraternal and it’s not identical. It’s this strange place in between,” chief author Dr Michael Terrence Gabbett of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane told Reuters in a telephone interview. Each sperm cell contains half the father’s DNA. But it’s not identical from sperm to sperm because each man is a mixture of the genetic material from his parents, and each time a slightly different assortment of that full DNA set gets divided to go into a sperm.

For example, some sperm will contain a copy of the father’s Y chromosome that makes the child develop into a boy and some will carry the father’s X chromosome, which makes the child a girl.

In the case of the Australian twins, who live in Brisbane and are now four-and-a-half years old, the mother’s egg was fertilized with one sperm carrying an X chromosome and one with a Y. Because an ultrasound taken early in the pregnancy showed that both fetuses shared the same placenta, doctors assumed the fetuses were identical twins.

But when an ultrasound eight weeks later revealed that one child was male and the other female, something considered impossible for identical twins, the Gabbett team knew something extraordinary had happened. The researchers say it appears that after fertilization, the DNA from the egg and two sperm divided, then got divvied up to create three embryos. Two of these had enough egg DNA and sperm DNA to make viable embryos. The remaining embryo, with only sperm DNA, was not viable.

The twin boy and girl were found to have 100% of their mother’s DNA in common, but were only 78% identical in the paternal DNA they carry.

It sounds like a junior high school riddle—”What lives 3,000 feet below the ocean surface, is about the size of a marble, and looks like the back side of a pig?” MBARI marine biologists have pondering this riddle for years, having seen a number of these strange, round organisms during deep dives in Monterey Canyon.

MBARI biologist Karen Osborn and her colleagues recently came up with an answer to this riddle by combining modern DNA analysis with traditional methods of scientific observation. What they discovered was a new species of deep-sea worm, but a worm like no other. In a recent scientific paper, they gave this little creature a Latin name: Chaetopterus pugaporcinus.

Although this animal looks unlike any adult worm known to science, coauthor Greg Rouse noticed that it had some features in common with the larvae (young) of a group of worms called chaetopterids. However, as Osborn and her coauthors wrote, “If the specimens described here are larvae, they are remarkable for their size, which . . . is five to ten times larger than any known chaetopterid larvae.” The animals also lacked certain body parts typically found on chaetopterid larvae.

At this point, the researchers began to suspect that they might have an adult worm on their hands (or in their sampling containers). However, all known adult chaetopterid worms have elongated, segmented bodies, and spend their lives inside parchment-like tubes attached to the seafloor. The concentric ovals are body segments that have been flattened against a single central segment that has ballooned out to form the bulk of the worm’s body.

Looking closely at specimens of the new worm, the researchers found that although the worms had segmented bodies, one of their middle segments was inflated like a balloon, giving the animals a distinctive gum-ball shape. All the other segments were compressed up against the front and back of the inflated segment, like a cartoon character whose nose and hind-parts have been flattened in an unfortunate accident.

Even after the scientists figured out that they had found a new chaetopterid worm, there was no easy way to classify the creature because of its unique features. Chaetopterid worms are a pretty motley bunch in the first place, with dozens of species living in a wide variety of seafloor habitats. As Osborn put it, Chaetopterus is “a genus fraught with taxonomic controversy.”

Only two spacecraft have ever escaped our solar system to dip into interstellar space. Now NASA wants to go back—and soon.

Interstellar space exploration has long been the stuff of science fiction, a technological challenge that many engineers believe humans just aren’t up to yet. But an ongoing study by a group of NASA-affiliated researchers is challenging this assumption. The researchers have a vision for a mission that could be built with existing technology. Indeed, the group says that if their mission is selected by NASA it could fly as soon as 2030.

“This is humanity’s first explicit step into interstellar space,” says Pontus Brandt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who is working on the interstellar probe study. The lab kicked off its Interstellar Probe study last summer at the behest of NASA’s Heliophysics division. A year in, they are now hashing out the nitty-gritty engineering details of such a mission. At the end of 2021, Brandt and his colleagues will submit it for inclusion in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Heliophysics decadal survey, which determines sun-related mission priorities for the next 10 years.

The basic idea for the interstellar mission is to launch a spacecraft weighing less than 1,700 pounds on NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket, which is expected to be ready by 2021. That will get it traveling across our solar system like any other probe. To give it another boost, it will then use a gravity assist to sling the craft to speeds well over 100,000 miles per hour. The team at the Applied Physics Lab is currently considering two types of gravity assists—a “plain vanilla” assist that swings the probe around Jupiter and another that swings it around the sun.

Using the sun is advantageous, because the spacecraft can reach far higher speeds than it can from a Jupiter assist. But the spacecraft would have to pass several times closer to the sun than the Parker Solar Probe, which recently became the closest human-made object to pass by the star. This requires some serious heat shielding, but at a certain point the heat shield becomes so bulky that it reduces the spacecraft’s speed the closer it gets to the sun.

The task for Brandt and his colleagues will be to find the sweet spot that takes the craft to interstellar space as fast as possible.

“It’s time we have a vision we can actually execute,” says Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory. “Up to now, people haven’t thought about this as an engineering problem. They kick the can down the road, saying, ‘Well, we just need a little bit more new technology.’”

NASA’s interstellar probe has a more modest goal compared to other interstellar mission proposals, like Breakthrough Starshot, which aims to send a thumbnail-sized craft to another star. Instead, NASA wants to launch a probe that will last for 50 years and travel 92 billion miles—about 1,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun. To put this in perspective, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to make it to interstellar space, are currently around 13 billion miles away from Earth. It took those spacecraft nearly four decades to cover this distance, but NASA’s new interstellar probe could make it there in less than 15 years.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first time an optical-frequency comb was used to measure the atomic hydrogen 1S-2S optical transition frequency, which was achieved at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. Menlo Systems, which was founded soon afterwards as a spin-off from MPQ, has been commercializing and pioneering the technology ever since.

Today, optical frequency combs (OFCs) are routinely employed in applications as diverse as time and frequency metrology, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and fundamental physics. The German company’s fibre-based systems, and its proprietary “figure 9” laser mode-locking technology, have set the precedent for the most stable, reliable, robust, and compact optical frequency combs available on the market today.

An optical frequency comb exploits laser light that comprises up to 106 equidistant, phase-stable frequencies to measure other unknown frequencies with exquisite precision, and with absolute traceability when compared against a radiofrequency standard.

The most common and versatile approach to create an OFC is to stabilize an ultrafast mode-locked laser, in which pulses of light bounce back and forth in an optical cavity. The frequency spectrum of the resulting pulse train is a series of very sharp peaks that are evenly spaced in frequency, like the teeth of a comb.

Through the so-called self-referencing technique, the first tooth of the comb – called the carrier-to-envelope offset frequency – is well fixed to a certain position. When the spacing of the comb teeth is referenced to a known frequency, such as the radiofrequency generated by a cesium atomic clock or a hydrogen maser, the absolute frequency of a light source can be accurately measured by interfering it with the nearest tooth on the comb with respect to the OFC reference. The device thus provides a way of making very accurate spectroscopic measurements of atomic and molecular transitions, and offers a versatile and unique way of comparing atomic clocks.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the existence of so-called "buckyballs"—complex carbon molecules with a soccer-ball-like structure—throughout interstellar space. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Arizona has proposed a mechanism for their formation in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Carbon 60, or C60 for short, whose official name is Buckminsterfullerene, comes in spherical molecules consisting of 60 carbon atoms organized in five-membered and six-membered rings. The name "buckyball" derives from their resemblance to the architectural work of Richard Buckminster Fuller, who designed many dome structures that look similar to C60. Their formation was thought to only be possible in lab settings until their detection in space challenged this assumption.

For decades, people thought interstellar space was sprinkled with lightweight molecules only: mostly single atoms, two-atom molecules and the occasional nine or 10-atom molecules. This was until massive C60 and C70 molecules were detected a few years ago.

Researchers were also surprised to find that that they were composed of pure carbon. In the lab, C60 is made by blasting together pure carbon sources, such as graphite. In space, C60 was detected in planetary nebulae, which are the debris of dying stars. This environment has about 10,000 hydrogen molecules for every carbon molecule.

In a provocative paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy argues that the universe may curve around and close in on itself like a sphere, rather than lying flat like a sheet of paper as the standard theory of cosmology predicts. The authors reanalyzed a major cosmological data set and concluded that the data favors a closed universe with 99% certainty — even as other evidence suggests the universe is flat.

The data in question — the Planck space telescope’s observations of ancient light called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — “clearly points towards a closed model,” said Alessandro Melchiorri of Sapienza University of Rome. He co-authored the new paper with Eleonora di Valentino of the University of Manchester and Joseph Silk, principally of the University of Oxford.

In their view, the discordance between the CMB data, which suggests the universe is closed, and other data pointing to flatness represents a “cosmological crisis” that calls for “drastic rethinking.” However, the team of scientists behind the Planck telescope reached different conclusions in their 2018 analysis. Antony Lewis, a cosmologist at the University of Sussex and a member of the Planck team who worked on that analysis, said the simplest explanation for the specific feature in the CMB data that di Valentino, Melchiorri and Silk interpreted as evidence for a closed universe “is that it is just a statistical fluke.” Lewis and other experts say they’ve already closely scrutinized the issue, along with related puzzles in the data.

“There is no dispute that these symptoms exist at some level,” said Graeme Addison, a cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the Planck analysis or the new research. “There is only disagreement as to the interpretation.”

The olfactory bulbs (OBs) are the first site of odor representation in the mammalian brain, and their unique ultrastructure is considered a necessary substrate for spatiotemporal coding of smell. Given this, we were struck by the serendipitous observation at MRI of two otherwise healthy young left-handed women, yet with no apparent OBs. Standardized tests revealed normal odor awareness, detection, discrimination, identification, and representation.

Functional MRI of these women’s brains revealed that odorant-induced activity in piriform cortex, the primary OB target, was similar in its extent to that of intact controls. Finally, review of a public brain-MRI database with 1,113 participants (606 women) also tested for olfactory performance, uncovered olfaction without anatomically defined OBs in ∼0.6% of women and ∼4.25% of left-handed women. Thus, humans can perform the basic facets of olfaction without canonical OBs, implying extreme plasticity in the functional neuroanatomy of this sensory system.

The powerful gene-editing technique known as CRISPR has raised a lot of hope in recent years for its potential to offer new ways to treat many diseases, including cancer. But until now, scientists have released very little information about results of tests in patients.

Now, researchers revealed data from the first study involving U.S. cancer patients who received cells genetically modified with CRISPR. The highly anticipated results, while quite preliminary, seem to be encouraging, scientists say. "This is a very important first step," says Dr. Edward Stadtmauer, a professor in oncology at the University of Pennsylvania and the study's principal investigator. "We hope this is the beginning of the next generation of engineering cells to help many different diseases and many different tumors."

Stadtmauer stresses that the trial was not designed to determine whether the approach actually works — only whether it is safe and feasible. "This treatment is not ready for prime time," he says. "But it is definitely very promising."

Other researchers agree. "I'm just so excited about this," says Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to the discovery and development of CRISPR techniques.

"It's an important step on the path toward using CRISPR-Cas genome editing in patients and shows the potential of this technology to be a safe and effective therapy," Doudna says. Dr. Michel Sadelain, who is doing related research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, says he's glad to see the editing of genes move into the clinic this way, though he stresses that patients will have to be followed much longer to gain confidence that the approach is truly safe.

When dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the planet was on a completely different side of the galaxy. A new animation by NASA scientist Jessie Christiansen shows just how long the dinosaurs' reign lasted, and how short the era of humans has been in comparison, by tracing our solar system's movement through the Milky Way.

Our sun orbits the galaxy's center, completing its rotation every 250 million years or so. So Christiansen's animation shows that last time our solar system was at its current point in the galaxy, the Triassic Period was in full swing and dinosaurs were just beginning to emerge. Many of the most iconic dinosaurs roamed Earth when the planet was in a very different part of the Milky Way.

Christiansen got the idea to illustrate this history when she was leading a stargazing party at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Attendees were astonished when she mentioned that our solar system had been across the galaxy when dinosaurs roamed. 

"That was the first time I realized that those time scales — archaeological, fossil record time scales and astronomical time scales — actually kind of match along together," Christiansen told Business Insider. "Then I had this idea that I could map out dinosaur evolution through the galaxy's rotation."

A clever new study shows that blue whales lean on their memory to guide their epic migrations.

The blue whales of the North Pacific spend their winters in their breeding grounds off California and Costa Rica. Come spring, they swim up the coast of North America toward the food-rich summer waters of the Pacific Northwest. They could make the journey in two months (and they do, on the reverse trip back south). Instead, they take twice that time, pausing to gorge themselves on blooms of krill that appear along the way. It’s a leisurely season-long tour of a continent-wide buffet line.

Scientists can get a good sense of this changing buffet by measuring the concentrations of chlorophyll in different patches of ocean. This green pigment reflects the amount of plankton, which in turn is eaten by krill. The more chlorophyll there is, the more food a blue whale might find.

By comparing chlorophyll counts to whale movements, Abrahms and her team expected to see that “they follow the timing of their prey, as it becomes available,” she says. But they were surprised to learn that the animals very rarely tracked contemporary waves of krill. Instead, their movements were strongly correlated with 10-year historical averages of chlorophyll. Put it this way: You could predict a blue whale’s movements with far more accuracy by looking at where their food has been than where their food currently is.

Most estimates of global mean sea-level rise this century fall below 2 m (7 ft). This quantity is comparable to the positive vertical bias of the principle digital elevation model (DEM) used to assess global and national population exposures to extreme coastal water levels, NASA’s SRTM. CoastalDEM is a new DEM utilizing neural networks to reduce SRTM error.

Scientists now show – employing CoastalDEM—that 190 M people (150–250 M, 90% CI) currently occupy global land below projected high tide lines for 2100 under low carbon emissions, up from 110 M today, for a median increase of 80 M. These figures triple SRTM-based values. Under high emissions, CoastalDEM indicates up to 630 M people live on land below projected annual flood levels for 2100, and up to 340 M for mid-century, versus roughly 250 M at present. We estimate one billion people now occupy land less than 10 m above current high tide lines, including 250 M below 1 m.