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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently used its powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to peer into the very center of our Milky Way Galaxy, revealing stunning details in a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C (Sgr C) like never before, which includes approximately 500,000 in this single image. Sgr C is located approximately 300 light-years from the exact center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*, which is a supermassive black hole. For context, the Milky Way is approximately 105,000 light-years across, so Sgr C being only 300 light-years from the center of the Milky Way is extremely close.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” said Dr. Rubén Fedriani, who is a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain and a co-investigator of the project. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

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A recent study published in Communications Earth & Environment examines how lunar samples collected and returned by Apollo astronauts contain traces of hydrogen produced by the solar wind. The samples, labeled 79221, were collected during surface activities on Apollo 17 in 1972, and holds the potential to help scientists and engineers better understand how hydrogen within these samples can be used for future space exploration, specifically pertaining to in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).

The practice of ISRU involves using resources directly available at a location without the need of resupply from an outside source. In this case, future lunar astronauts would want to use resources already present on the Moon for their survivability needs rather than having constant resupply from the Earth, which can be both costly and risky.

“Hydrogen has the potential to be a resource that can be used directly on the lunar surface when there are more regular or permanent installations there,” said Dr. Katherine D. Burgess, who is a geologist in the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Materials Science and Technology Division and lead author of the study. “Locating resources and understanding how to collect them prior to getting to the Moon is going to be incredibly valuable for space exploration.”

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The team developed its new method of age determination by harnessing two of the most powerful and accurate techniques already employed by astronomers to study stars. They found that one, known as isochronous measurement, can be used to determine precisely when stars are born. The other, known as dynamical tracking, provides information about when stars leave their cosmic nests.

Synchronizing these two differing cosmic clocks revealed to the team that stars snuggle up to their stellar siblings for around 5.5 million years after birth.

“Our work paves the way for future research into star formation and provides a clearer picture of how stars and star clusters evolve,” Núria Miret-Roig, team leader and an astrophysicist at the University of Vienna, said in a statement. “This is an important step in our endeavor to understand the formation of the Milky Way and other galaxies.”

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Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) have a long history of service in space exploration. Since the first was tested in space in 1961, RTGs have gone on to be used by 31 NASA missions, including the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages (ALSEPs) delivered by the Apollo astronauts to the lunar surface. RTGs have also powered the Viking 1 and 2 missions to Mars, the Ulysses mission to the Sun, Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Pioneer, Voyager, and New Horizons missions to the outer Solar System – which are currently in (or well on their way to) interstellar space.

In recent years, RTGs have allowed the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to continue the search for evidence of past (and maybe present) life on Mars. In the coming years, these nuclear batteries will power more astrobiology missions, like the Dragonfly mission that will explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. In recent years, there has been concern that NASA was running low on Plutonium-238, the key component for RTGs. Luckily, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently delivered a large shipment of plutonium oxide, putting it on track to realize its goal of regular production of the radioisotopic material.

The recent shipment of 0.5 kg (over 1 lb) of plutonium oxide from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory to its Los Alamos National Laboratory is critical to realize NASA’s planned future missions. It is also the largest shipment since the DOE issued its report to Congress in 2010 – “Startup Plan for Plutonium-238 Production for Radioisotope Power Systems.” As per this plan, this delivery is a significant step toward achieving the goal of a sustained annual production rate of 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) by 2026.

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A new artificial intelligence benchmark called GAIA aims to evaluate whether chatbots like ChatGPT can demonstrate human-like reasoning and competence on everyday tasks.

Created by researchers from Meta, Hugging Face, AutoGPT and GenAI, the benchmark “proposes real-world questions that require a set of fundamental abilities such as reasoning, multi-modality handling, web browsing, and generally tool-use proficiency,” the researchers wrote in a paper published on arXiv.

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Despite substantial work, we are still unsure which brain regions are involved and how they are impacted when consciousness is disrupted.

States of unconsciousness, such as those that occur during sleep or while under the effect of anesthesia, have been the focus of countless past neuroscience studies. While these works have identified some brain regions that are active and inactive when humans are unconscious, the precise contribution of each of these regions to consciousness remains largely unclear.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the activity of different regions of the cortex, the outer layer of the mammalian , during different states of unconsciousness, namely sleep and . Their paper, published in Neuron, identifies distinct cortical networks that are engaged during different states of unconsciousness.

“We have always been interested in trying to understand better how in the brain gives rise to consciousness,” Dr. Rina Zelmann, the lead researcher for the study, told Medical Xpress. “This is a huge and difficult question to answer. In this project, we started with seemingly simple questions, such as: What happens in the human brain when we are unconscious? And, what happens when we cannot be awakened?”

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An important #AI report for breast cancer leading to the potential of sparing chemotherapy for many. The 1st comprehensive analysis of both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue in hundreds of thousands of patient tissues->HiPS score https://nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02643-7

Deep learning enables comprehensive and interpretable scoring for breast cancer prognosis prediction, outperforming pathologists in multicenter validation and providing insight on prognostic biomarkers.

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Optothermal nanotweezers are an innovative optical design method that has revolutionized classical optical techniques to capture a broad range of nanoparticles. While the optothermal temperature field can be employed for in situ regulation of nanoparticles, challenges remain in identifying their potential for regulating bionanoparticles.

To observe the synergistic effects of optothermal manipulation and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based biodetection, the researchers developed a combination of CRISPR-powered optothermal nanotweezers abbreviated as CRONT.

In a new report in Light: Science & Applications, Jiajie Chen and a research team in optoelectronics engineering, , and physics, accomplished this by harnessing diffusiophoresis and thermo-osmotic flows for optothermal excitation by successfully enriching DNA functionalized gold nanoparticles, CRISPR-associated proteins, and DNA strands.

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