Water may have first formed 100–200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published in Nature Astronomy. The authors suggest that the formation of water may have occurred in the universe earlier than previously thought and may have been a key constituent of the first galaxies.

Water is crucial for life as we know it, and its components—hydrogen and oxygen—are known to have formed in different ways. Lighter chemical elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium were forged in the Big Bang, but heavier elements, such as oxygen, are the result of nuclear reactions within stars or supernova explosions. As such, it is unclear when water began to form in the universe.

Researcher Daniel Whalen and colleagues utilized computer models of two supernovae—the...

A team of physicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in Menlo Park, California, generated the highest-current, highest-peak-power electron beams ever produced. The team has published their paper in Physical Review Letters.

For many years, scientists have been finding new uses for high-powered laser light, from splitting atoms to mimicking conditions inside other planets. For this new study, the research team upped the power of electron beams, giving them some of the same capabilities.

The idea behind the newer, more powerful beams was pretty simple, the team acknowledges; it was figuring out how to make it happen that was difficult. The basic idea is to pack as much charge as possible into the shortest amount of time...

Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays are the highest-energy particles in the universe, whose energies are more than a million times what can be achieved by humans. But while the existence of UHECRs has been known for 60 years, researchers have not succeeded in formulating a satisfactory explanation for their origin that explains all the observations.

But a new theory introduced by New York University physicist Glennys Farrar provides a viable and testable explanation for how UHECRs are created.

“After six decades of effort, the origin of the mysterious highest-energy particles in the universe may finally have been identified,” says Farrar, a Collegiate Professor of Physics and Julius Silver, Rosalind S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor at NYU...

Each year, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), millions of people in the U.S. are affected by spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries, along with neuro-developmental and degenerative diseases such as ADHD, autism, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

Assistant Professor Pabitra Sahoo, of Rutgers University-Newark’s Department of Biological Sciences, has made it his life’s work to understand how our neurological system becomes damaged by these injuries and conditions, and when and how neurons in our central and peripheral nervous systems re...