Jan Egedal, professor of physics at UW-Madison who lead an exploration of magnetic reconnection, stands beside a chamber used for experiments in that exotic phenomenon. Magnetic reconnection seems to be involved in some of the most violent explosions in the universe; the recent study was the clearest view of the magnetic reconnection ever measured in space. The results “blew my mind,” he says. Credit: David Tenenbaum/UW-Madison

Space physicists at University of Wisconsin-Madison have just released unprecedented detail on a bizarre phenomenon that powers the northern lights, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, CMEs (the biggest explosions in our solar system)...

Astronomers using ALMA have uncovered chemical ‘fingerprints’ of methanol, dimethyl ether, and methyl formate in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The latter two molecules are the largest organic molecules ever conclusively detected outside the Milky Way. The far-infrared image on the left shows the full galaxy. The zoom-in image shows the star-forming region observed by ALMA. It is a combination of mid-infrared data from Spitzer and visible (H-alpha) data from the Blanco 4-meter telescope. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); Herschel/ESA; NASA/JPL-Caltech; NOAO

The nearby dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a chemically primitive place...

The new method overcomes obstacles in designing D versions of complex helical peptides. Credit: Michael Garton, University of Toronto

Mirror-image version of existing drugs would last longer in the body thanks to their ability to avoid breakdown by enzymes in the stomach and bloodstream. For patients, this means less frequent drug injections and more medicines could potentially be made available as pills. Designing these drugs has been tricky, however. Now a team of researchers led by Philip Kim, a professor of computer science and molecular genetics in the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, has developed a new technology for making mirror-image peptides, which bind and activate receptors on the surface of cells.

They created mirror-image versio...

Illustration showing spacecraft of ESA’s Cluster mission (top) and NASA’s THEMIS mission (bottom) flying through Earth’s magnetosheath, the highly turbulent boundary region between the solar wind and the magnetosphere around our planet. Credit: European Space Agency

For the first time, scientists have estimated how much energy is transferred from large to small scales within the magnetosheath, the boundary region between the solar wind and the magnetic bubble that protects our planet. Based on data collected by ESA’s Cluster and NASA’s THEMIS missions over several years, the study revealed that turbulence is the key, making this process a hundred times more efficient than in the solar wind.

It is the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind that creates the intricate s...