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...

Antiinflammatory Therapy with Canakinumab for Atherosclerotic Disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 2017; DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1707914

Inflammatory hypothesis confirmed: Landmark randomized clinical trial of high-risk patients finds that a drug targeting inflammation reduced risk of major adverse cardiovascular events. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital today announced results of a clinical trial culminating from 25 years of cardiovascular research work. Paul M...