Mars’s Rare Disappearing Solar Wind Event explained

Mars's rare disappearing solar wind event explained
Illustration of Martian ionosphere and magnetosphere pre-, during and post-disappearing solar wind event. Credit: Ram et al., 2024.

Mars’s atmosphere and climate are impacted by interactions with solar wind, a stream of plasma comprised of protons and electrons that flows from the sun’s outermost atmosphere (corona), traveling at speeds of 400–1,000 kilometers per second.

As these charged particles interact with the planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere, we may see spectacular auroras over polar regions on Earth. Given Mars’s lack of a global magnetic field, auroras here are instead diffused across the planet.

However, sometimes this solar wind can “disappear” in rare events when there is a gap in the solar wind path as the sun increases its solar activity...

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Xenon Gas could Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease: Mouse study

Three researchers in a research lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital pose next to a machine used to deliver Xenon gas
From left: Anesthesiologist Christopher Connor will work with principal investigator Howard Weiner to deliver Xenon gas as part of a BWH clinical trial that builds on Alzheimer’s disease prevention research led by Oleg Butovsky.

Xenon gas inhalation reduced neurodegeneration and boosted protection in preclinical models of Alzheimer’s disease. Most treatments being pursued today to protect against Alzheimer’s disease focus on amyloid plaques and tau tangles that accumulate in the brain, but new research from Mass General Brigham and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis points to a novel — and noble — approach: using Xenon gas...

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A New Optical Memory Platform for Super Fast Calculations

Bright colors and different shapes meant to illustrate a photonic array
Photo Credit
Brian Long
Artist’s concept illustration of a photonic memory array

For decades there has been near constant progress in reducing the size, and increasing the performance, of the circuits that power computers and smartphones. But Moore’s Law is ending as physical limitations – such as the number of transistors that can fit on a chip and the heat that results from packing them ever more densely – are slowing the rate of performance increases. Computing capacity is gradually plateauing, even as artificial intelligence, machine learning and other data-intensive applications demand ever greater computational power.

Novel technologies are needed to address this challenge...

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This Tiny Galaxy is Answering Some Big Questions

Stars against a black space background
This image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the Leo P dwarf galaxy (stars at lower right represented in blue). Leo P is a star-forming galaxy located about 5 million light years away in the constellation Leo. A team of scientists collected data from about 15,000 stars in Leo P to deduce its star formation history.
Kristen McQuinn/NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

Leo P, a small galaxy and a distant neighbor of the Milky Way, is lighting the way for astronomers to better understand star formation and how a galaxy grows.

In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers led by Kristen McQuinn, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers Unive...

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