Artist impression of Abell 2597 showing the central supermassive black hole expelling cold, molecular gas — like the pump of a giant intergalactic fountain.
Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry

Plumes of cold molecular gas spray out by black hole a billion light-years from Earth. Galaxy evolution can be chaotic and messy, but it seems that streams of cold gas spraying out from the region around supermassive black holes may act to calm the storm. This is according to an international team of scientists who have provided the first clear and compelling evidence of this process in action.

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) of telescopes, the team, which includes researchers from Cardiff University, has observed a supermassive black hole acting like a ‘monumental fountain’...

Estimates of the Heritability of Human Longevity Are Substantially Inflated due to Assortative Mating. Genetics, 2018; 210 (3): 1109 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.118.301613

Study of huge Ancestry.com pedigree set suggests similar life spans between spouses may have inflated previous estimates of life span heritability. Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own...

Nanocardboard is made out of an aluminum oxide film with a thickness of tens of nanometers, forming a hollow plate with a height of tens of microns. Its sandwich structure, similar to that of corrugated cardboard, makes it more than ten thousand times as stiff as a solid plate of the same mass. A square centimeter of nanocardboard weighs less than a thousandth of a gram and can spring back into shape after being bent in half.
Credit: University of Pennsylvania

Engineers have demonstrated a new material they call ‘nanocardboard,’ an ultrathin equivalent of corrugated paper cardboard. A square centimeter of nanocardboard weighs less than a thousandth of a gram and can spring back into shape after being bent in half...

This is the physiography of the Gale Crater shown in a HiRISE map.
Credit: NASA

The presence of water on Mars has been theorized for centuries. Early telescopes revealed ice caps, and early astronomers noted channels that were hypothesized to be natural rivers or creature-created canals. Over the past two decades, rovers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity have sent back invaluable data to scientists who are trying to interpret the planet’s surface and uncover evidence of past or present water.

Since its landing on the “Red Planet” in August of 2012, Curiosity Rover has traveled about 20 kilometers within Gale Crater...