New research published by Michigan State University astrophysicists could help scientists answer a century-old question: Where did galactic cosmic rays come from?

Cosmic rays—high-energy particles moving close to the speed of light—originated from somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, but exactly where has been a mystery since they were discovered in 1912. Shuo Zhang, MSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and her group led two studies that shed new light on where cosmic rays might have come from...

Mold in houses is unsightly and may cause unpleasant odors. More important though, mold has been linked to a range of health effects—especially triggering asthma.

However, is mold exposure linked to a serious lung disease in children, unrelated to asthma? As we’ll see, this link may not be real, or if it is, it’s so rare to not be a meaningful risk. Yet we still hear mold in damp homes described as “toxic.”

Indeed, moldy homes can harm people’s health, but not necessarily how you might think.

What is mold?
Mold is the general term for a variety of fungi. The mold that people have focused on in damp homes is “black mold.” This forms unsightly black patches on walls and other parts of damp-affected buildings.

Black mold is not a single fung...

The reliable manipulation of the speed at which light travels through objects could have valuable implications for the development of various advanced technologies, including high-speed communication systems and quantum information processing devices...

For years, astronomers have predicted a dramatic fate for our galaxy: a head-on collision with Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor. This merger—expected in about 5 billion years—has become a staple of astronomy documentaries, textbooks and popular science writing.

But in our new study published in Nature Astronomy, led by Till Sawala from the University of Helsinki, we find the Milky Way’s future might not be as certain previously assumed.

By carefully accounting for uncertainties in existing measurements, and including the gravitational influence of other nearby galaxies, we found there is only about a 50% chance the Milky Way and Andromeda will ...