A pair of researchers, one with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the other with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CIT, has found a way to estimate how long it will take already launched space vehicles to arrive at other star systems. The pair, Coryn Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia have written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

Back in the 1970s, NASA sent four unmanned space probes out into the solar system—Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2—which, after completion of their missions, kept going—all four are on their way out of the solar system or have already departed...

A device that can separate and recombine pairs of electrons may offer a way to study an unusual form of superconductivity, according to RIKEN physicists. This superconducting state would involve exotic particles, Majorana fermions that could prove useful in developing quantum computers.

In conventional superconductors, electrical current flows with no resistance due to electrons teaming up to make ‘Cooper pairs’. A superconductor touching a normal conductor can sometimes induce superconductivity in that conductor through Cooper pairs from the superconductor penetrating the normal conductor.

Now, Sadashige Matsuo of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collea...

“We’re facing a tremendous epidemic with teen anxiety and depression, and we wanted to find an early marker that predicted the development of anxiety, depression and attentional symptoms,” said the study’s lead author, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli. She’s a professor of psychology and director of the Northeastern University Biomedical Imaging Center, in Boston.

In a small sample of less than 100 children without known mental health concerns, the research team found that connections in certain areas of the brain seen at age 7 could help predict mental health concerns that developed four years later.

“The study could have great clinical implications,” Whitfield-Gabrieli said...

Novel spinal therapy/delivery approach prevented disease onset in neurodegenerative ALS disease model in adult mice and blocked progression in animals already showing disease symptoms.

Writing in Nature Medicine, an international team headed by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe a new way to effectively deliver a gene-silencing vector to adult amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) mice, resulting in long-term suppression of the degenerative motor neuron disorder if treatment vector is delivered prior to disease onset, and blockage of disease progression in adult animals if ...