Researchers from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder are diving into the dusty environment that surrounds the sun — a search that could help to reveal how planets like Earth come into being.

The pursuit comes by way of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a pioneering mission that has taken scientists closer to Earth’s home star than any spacecraft to date. Over two years, the probe has circled the sun six times, hitting maximum speeds of roughly 290,000 miles per hour.

In the process, the Parker team has learned a lot about the microscopic grains of dust that lie just beyond the sun’s atmosphere, said David Malas...

Two studies led by UT Southwestern researchers shed new light on how the brain encodes time and place into memories. The findings, published recently in PNAS and Science, not only add to the body of fundamental research on memory, but could eventually provide the basis for new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury, TBI, or Alzheimer’s disease.

About a decade ago, a group of neurons kno...

Researchers at Hiroshima University in Japan have blended together various polymer and molecular semiconductors as photo-absorbers to create a solar cell with increased power efficiencies and electricity generation. These types of solar cells, known as organic photovoltaics (OPV), are devices that generate electricity when light is incident upon their photo-absorbers. The efficiency of a solar cell is determined by comparing how much electricity is generated to how much light is incident upon the cell...

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune’s distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.

In their paper, published in the Nov...