Gas-giant planets orbiting close to other stars have powerful magnetic fields, many times stronger than our own Jupiter, according to a new study by a team of astrophysicists. It is the first time the strength of these fields has been calculated from observations.

The team, led by Wilson Cauley of the University of Colorado, also includes associate professor Evgenya Shkolnik of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Expl...

A study puts a sequence to the events which gave rise to our Galaxy. The universe 13,000 million years ago was very different from the universe we know today. It is understood that stars were forming at a very rapid rate, forming the first dwarf galaxies, whose mergers gave rise to the more massive present-day galaxies, including our own. However the exact chain of the events which produced the Milky Way was not known until now.

Exact measurements of position, brightness and distance for around a million stars of our galaxy within 6,500 light years of the sun, obtained with the Gaia space telescope, have allowed a team from the IAC to reveal some of its early stages...

Scientists have developed a wastewater treatment process that uses a common agricultural byproduct to effectively remove pollutants and environmental hormones, which are known to be endocrine disruptors.

The performance of the catalyst that is currently being used to process sewage and wastewater drops significantly with time. Because high efficiency is difficult to achieve given the conditions, the biggest disadvantage of the existing process is the high cost involved...

By keeping the brain in sync, these long-hypothesized but never-found neurons help rodents to detect subtle sensations. By measuring the fast electrical spikes of individual neurons in the touch region of the brain, Brown University neuroscientists have discovered a new type of cell that keeps time so regularly that it may serve as the brain’s long-hypothesized clock or metronome.

This type of neuron spikes rhythmically, and in a synchronized manner, independent of external sensations, said Chris Moore, a professor of neuroscience at Brown and the associate director of the Carney Institute for Brain Science...