Chemists from Utah State University, USA and Southern Federal University, Russia, computationally designed a new, metastable, ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum. Credit: Iliya Getmanskii, Southern Federal University, Russia

Scientists computationally design new metastable, ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum using density functional calculations with imposing periodic boundary conditions. If you drop an aluminum spoon in a sink full of water, the spoon will sink to the bottom. That’s because aluminum, in its conventional form, is denser than water says Utah State University chemist Alexander Boldyrev.

But if you restructure the common household metal at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline ...

Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) are of most concern to NASA. It is challenging to shield against GCRs. They come from exploding stars called supernovae. Credit: NASA

Charged particles may be small, but they matter to astronauts. NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) is investigating these particles to solve one of its biggest challenges for a human journey to Mars: space radiation and its effects on the human body. “One of our biggest challenges on a mission to Mars is protecting astronauts from radiation,” said NASA Space Radiation Element Scientist Lisa Simonsen, Ph.D.. “You can’t see it; you can’t feel it. You don’t know you’re getting bombarded by radiation.”

A common misconception of space radiation is that it’s similar to radiation on Earth. It’s actually quite different...

A protein called Cbf-beta plays a critical role in maintaining bone-producing cells. An examination of aged mice showed dramatically reduced levels of Cbf-beta in bone marrow cells, as compared to younger mice. Thus, the researchers propose, maintaining Cbf-beta may be essential to preventing human age-associated osteoporosis that is due to elevated creation of fat cells.

A major health problem in older people is age-associated osteoporosis that increases the risk of fractures. Often this is accompanied by an increase in fat cells in the bone marrow. University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have now detailed an underlying mechanism leading to that osteoporosis. When this mechanism malfunctions, progenitor cells stop creating bone-producing cells, and instead create fat cells...