Mysteriously bright glow of this summer’s ‘Cow’ event gained international interest. A Northwestern University-led international team is getting closer to understanding the mysteriously bright object that burst in the northern sky this summer.

On June 17, the ATLAS survey’s twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or “The Cow,” the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.

After combining several imaging sources, including ha...

Carrying extra body fat, especially around the middle, may be linked to brain shrinkage, according to a study published in the Jan. 9, 2019, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the study, researchers determined obesity by measuring body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio in study participants and found those with higher ratios of both measures had the lowest brain volume.

BMI is a weight-to-height ratio. It is determined by dividing a person’s weight by the square of their height. People with a BMI above 30.0 are considered obese...

Pulse pattern suggests distant black hole must be spinning at least at 50% the speed of light. On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole’s massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created a burst of X-ray activity near the center of the galaxy...

Transforming super-sensitive touch sensors, engineers and medical researchers build a way to wirelessly monitor blood flow after surgery. It is biodegradable, battery-free and wireless, so it is compact and doesn’t need to be removed and it can warn a patient’s doctor if there is a blockage.

“Measurement of blood flow is critical in many medical specialties, so a wireless biodegradable sensor could impact multiple fields including vascular, transplant, reconstructive and cardiac surgery,” said Paige Fox, assistant professor of surgery and co-senior author of the paper...