An artist’s impression of the new pure and massive brown dwarf. Credit: John Pinfield

An international team has identified a record breaking brown dwarf (a star too small for nuclear fusion) with the ‘purest’ composition and the highest mass yet known. The object, SDSS J0104+1535, is a member of the so-called halo – the outermost reaches – of our Galaxy, made up of the most ancient stars. Brown dwarfs are intermediate between planets and fully-fledged stars. Their mass is too small for full nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium (with a consequent release of energy) to take place, but they are usually significantly more massive than planets.

Located 750 light years away in the constellation of Pisces, SDSS J0104+1535 is made of gas that is around 250 times purer than the Sun, so consists of ...

Flowchart of CancerLocator. Step 1: A set of solid tumor samples and healthy plasma samples collected from public databases and the literature are used to select the informative features (CpG clusters) that can differentiate tumor types or healthy plasma samples. Then the beta distributions of the methylation levels of these selected features for each tumor type or healthy plasma samples are learnt. Step 2: Given a plasma sample, the methylation profile of its cfDNAs is measured by whole-genome bisulfite sequencing, which is then used as input for cancer location prediction by CancerLocator

US Researchers have developed a computer program that can simultaneously detect cancer and identify where in the body the cancer is located, from a patient’s blood sample...

Brookhaven scientists identified how a zinc/copper (Zn/Cu) catalyst transforms carbon dioxide (two red and one grey balls) and hydrogen (two white balls) to methanol (one grey, one red, and four white balls), a potential fuel. Under reaction conditions, Zn/Cu transforms to ZnO/Cu, where the interface between the ZnO and Cu provides the active sites that allow the formation of methanol.

Results will guide design of improved catalysts for transforming pollutant to useful chemicals. Capturing CO2 and converting it to useful chemicals such as methanol could reduce both pollution and our dependence on petroleum products. So scientists are intensely interested in the catalysts that facilitate such chemical conversions...

In this study, astronomers used data from the Keck and Spitzer telescopes to trace the star forming and dusty regions of galaxies at about 10 billion years ago. The picture in the background shows the GOODS field, one of the five regions in the sky that was observed for this study. Credit: Mario De Leo-Winkler with images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage team.

A molecule found in car engine exhaust fumes that is thought to have contributed to the origin of life on Earth has made astronomers heavily underestimate the amount of stars that were forming in the early Universe, a University of California, Riverside-led study has found. That molecule is called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH). On Earth it is also found in coal and tar...