Humans have left evidence of their passing through America’s great rift for more than 10 millennia.
“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” said Dr. Scott Bolton, who is the principal investigator of Juno. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”
Loki Patera was first imaged by NASA’s Voyager 1 in 1979, revealing a very active surface and the most active of the four Galilean moons. The reason for Io’s immense volcanic activity is due to tidal heating, which occurs from Io’s somewhat elliptical orbit around the much larger Jupiter, which causes Io to orbit closer and farther away to Jupiter throughout its small orbit. This results in Jupiter’s massive gravity stretching and expanding the small moon, leading to friction within Io’s core, and eventually to heat. Since this process is ongoing, this means Io has been volcanically active for eons and could be volcanically active eons from now, as well.
From UC santa barbara & caltech towards large language models as copilots for theorem proving in lean.
From UC santa barbara & caltech.
Towards large language models as copilots for theorem proving in lean.
P Song, K Yang, A Anandkumar [UC Santa Barbara & California Institute of Technology] (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.
- The goal of this work is to…
Mathematicians have the tools to explore worlds of 2, 3 and 5+ dimensions. But the fourth dimension remains mysterious and elusive. Topologists are trying to change that, one problem at a time.
Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.
In the 1920s, Erwin Schrödinger wrote an equation that predicts how particles-turned-waves should behave. Now, researchers are perfectly recreating those predictions in the lab.
After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.
Cutting-edge research introduces ultra-light, flexible solar cells for sustainable, long-term energy independence.
Now that we can generate clean, renewable energy from the wind and sun, one of the most pressing questions facing the clean energy transition is how to effectively store that energy for future use. For one city in Finland, the answer is a giant underground cavern.
Vantaan Energia has announced that it will construct a massive underground seasonal thermal energy storage facility for the city of Vantaa, the country’s fourth-most-populous municipality. The facility will be twice the size of Madison Square Garden, New Atlas reported.
“The world is undergoing a huge energy transition,” Vantaan Energia CEO Jukka Toivonen said. “Wind and solar power have become vital technologies in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. The biggest challenge of the energy transition so far has been the inability to store these intermittent forms of energy for later use. Unfortunately, small-scale storage solutions, such as batteries or accumulators, are not sufficient; large, industrial-scale storage solutions are needed.”
Forget painting the town red. Revelers wanting to escape the heat may be adopting a new turn of phrase following the recently revealed results of a real-world study.
As detailed by Phys.org, NTU Singapore researchers found that using “cool paint coatings” in urban areas resulted in pedestrians feeling 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit cooler — helping to mitigate the dreaded heat island effect.
“This is a minimally intrusive solution for urban cooling that has an immediate effect, compared to other options that often require major urban redevelopment to deploy,” lead author Dr. E V S Kiran Kumar Donthu told the outlet.
“We want to better understand what causes cancer to resist or respond to immunotherapy to help design more effective strategies for patients,” said senior author Gregory Beatty, MD, PhD, an associate professor of hematology-oncology and the director of clinical and translational research for the Penn Pancreatic Cancer Research Center. “Our findings show that liver cells—with their release of SAA proteins—effectively serve as an immune checkpoint regulating anticancer immunity, making them a promising therapeutic target.”
The study builds on previous research from the team, including co-lead authors Meredith Stone, PhD, a research associate, and Jesse Lee, a graduate student, into liver inflammation in cancer: In a 2019 study, they showed how it promotes pancreatic tumor metastasis to that organ. In 2021, researchers from the Beatty Lab observed that systemic inflammation, involving many of the same molecules implicated in liver metastasis, is associated with worse responses to immunotherapies in pancreatic cancer patients.
The latest study was designed to investigate in more detail how liver inflammation may block the effects of these immune-boosting therapies.