ALMA telescope conducts largest survey yet of distant galaxies in the early universe. Massive galaxies were already much more mature in the early universe than previously expected. This was shown by an international team of astronomers who studied 118 distant galaxies with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Most galaxies formed when the universe was still very young. Our own galaxy, for example, likely started forming 13.6 billion years ago, in our 13.8 billion-year-old universe. When the universe was only ten percent of its current age (1-1.5 billion years after the Big Bang), most of the galaxies experienced a “growth spurt...

Astronomers have found compelling evidence that planets start to form while infant stars are still growing. The high-resolution image obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows a young proto-stellar disk with multiple gaps and rings of dust. This new result, just published in Nature, shows the youngest and most detailed example of dust rings acting as cosmic cradles, where the seeds of planets form and take hold.

An international team of scientists led by Dominique Segura-Cox at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany targeted the proto-star IRS 63 with the ALMA radio observatory...

Perovskites show potential for valleytronics applications. Engineers at Rice University and Texas A&M University have found a 2D material that could make computers faster and more energy-efficient.

Their material is a derivative of perovskite — a crystal with a distinctive structure — that has the surprising ability to enable the valleytronics phenomenon touted as a possible platform for information processing and storage.

The lab of materials scientist Jun Lou of Rice’s Brow...

People with cancer who exercise generally have a better prognosis than inactive patients. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found a likely explanation of why exercise helps slow down cancer growth in mice: Physical activity changes the metabolism of the immune system’s cytotoxic T cells and thereby improves their ability to attack cancer cells. The study is published in the journal eLife.

“The biology behind the positive effects of exercise can provide new insights into how the body maintains health as well as help us design and improve treatments against cancer,” says Randall Johnson, professor at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study’s corresponding author.

Prior research has shown that physical activity can p...