Category Uncategorized

ALMA and ESA’s Rosetta mission, have revealed the presence of the organohalogen Freon-40 in gas around both an infant star and a comet.

Dashing hopes that molecule may be marker of life. Using data captured by ALMA in Chile and from the ROSINA instrument on ESA’s Rosetta mission , a team of astronomers has found faint traces of the chemical compound [Freon-40] – (CH3Cl), also known as methyl chloride and chloromethane, around both the infant star system IRAS 16293-2422, about 400 light-years away, and the famous comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) in our own Solar System. The new ALMA observation is the first detection ever of a stable organohalogen in interstellar space.

Organohalogens consist of halogens, such as chlorine and fluorine, bonded with carbon and sometimes other eleme...

GFRAL-expressing neurons (yellow cells) are found exclusively in the brainstem (pictured), and form the ’emergency circuit’ of body weight regulation. Credit: NGM Bio

Insights enable the discovery of multiple drug candidates for obesity and cachexia. Scientists at NGM Bio have revealed deep insights into the role that a little-understood human hormone plays in regulating body weight. Named Growth and Differentiation Factor 15 (GDF15), this hormone is typically active only when the body experiences acute or prolonged stress, including following exposure to tissue-damaging toxins, such as chemotherapy, or during chronic disease, such as obesity or cancer...

Scanning electron microscope images show an anode of asphalt, graphene nanoribbons and lithium at left and the same material without lithium at right. The material was developed at Rice University and shows promise for high-capacity lithium batteries that charge up to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries. Credit: Tour Group/Rice University

Lab finds asphalt-nanoribbon anode more efficient, resistant to dendrites. A touch of asphalt may be the secret to high-capacity lithium metal batteries that charge 10 to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries, according to Rice University scientists. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles...

Scientists used models along with earlier findings from the MESSENGER mission to shed light on how certain types of comets influence the micrometeoroids that preferentially impact Mercury on the dawn side of the planet. Here, data from the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, instrument is overlain on the mosaic from the Mercury Dual Imaging System, or MDIS. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning micro-meteor showers...