Metal oxides are promising candidates for cheap and stable photoelectrodes for solar water splitting, producing hydrogen with sunlight. Unfortunately, metal oxides are not highly efficient in this job. A known remedy is a treatment with heat and hydrogen. An international collaboration has now discovered why this treatment works so well, paving the way to more efficient and cheap devices for solar hydrogen production. Credit: HZB

The fossil fuel age is bound to end, for several strong reasons. The gas has a huge energy density, it can be stored or processed further, e. g. to methane, or directly provide clean electricity via a fuel cell. If it is produced using sunlight alone, hydrogen is completely renewable with zero carbon emissions...

Sandia National Laboratories’ Guillaume Loisel poses with Sandia’s Z machine, where hands-on experiments contradicted a long-standing assumption about the X-ray spectra from the vicinity of black holes in space. Loisel is the lead author of a paper on the experimental results, published in Physical Review Letters. Credit: Randy Montoya, Sandia National Laboratories

Small cracks in basic theories. A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine. Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance and then theorized about...

Astronomers observed the magnetic field of a galaxy five billion light-years away. The galaxy provides important insight into how magnetism in the universe formed and evolved. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA, Hubble Heritage Team, (STScI/AURA), ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI). Additional Processing: Robert Gendler

A chance combination of a gravitational lens and polarized waves coming from a distant quasar gave astronomers the tool needed to make a measurement important to understanding the origin of magnetic fields in galaxies. The scientists used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study a star-forming galaxy that lies directly between a more-distant quasar and Earth...

David Chan, MD, PhD, will present “Elimination of paternal mitochondria in mammalian embryos” as part of the “Moving Mitochondria: Networks and Quality Control” symposium on Monday, August 28, from 10:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in the U.S. Grant Hotel.

Mammal embryos shed paternal mitochondria within days of fertilization, perhaps to ensure the offspring a healthy life, a new study shows. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology will present their findings today at the American Physiological Society’s Physiological Bioenergetics: Mitochondria from Bench to Bedside conference in San Diego.

Both parents supply mitochondria – the “energy center” of cells – to form an embryo, but previous research has shown that the father’s contributions are short lived...