How does a star affect the makeup of its planets? And what does this mean for the habitability of distant worlds? Carnegie’s Luke Bouma is exploring a new way to probe this critical question—using naturally occurring space weather stations that orbit at least 10% of M dwarf stars during their early lives. He is presenting his work at the 247th American Astronomical Society meeting.

The paper is also published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

We know that most M dwarf stars—which are smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our ...

Fungal infections kill millions of people each year, and modern medicine is struggling to keep up. But researchers at McMaster University have identified a molecule that may help turn the tide—butyrolactolA, a chemical compound that targets a deadly, disease-causing fungi called Cryptococcus neoformans.

Infections caused by Cryptococcus are extremely dangerous. The pathogen, which can cause pneumonia-like symptoms, is notoriously drug-resistant, and it often preys on people with weakened immune systems, like cancer patients or those living with HIV. And the same can be said about other fungal pathogens, like Candida auris or Aspergillus fumigatus—both of which, like Cryptococcus, have been declared priority pathogens by the World Health Organization.

Despite the threat, thou...

AI might know where you’re going before you do. Researchers at Northeastern University used large language models, the kind of advanced artificial intelligence normally designed to process and generate language, to predict human movement.

How RHYTHM predicts human movement
RHYTHM, their innovative tool, “can revolutionize the forecasting of human movements,” forecasting “where you’re going to be in the next 30 minutes or the next 25 hours,” said Ryan Wang, an associate professor and vice chair of research in civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern.

The hope is that RHYTHM will improve domains like transportation and traffic planning to make our lives easier, but in extreme cases, RHYTHM could even be deployed to respond to natural dis...

Solar physicists say they have found a key source of intense gamma rays unleashed when Earth’s nearest star produces its most violent eruptions.

In findings published in Nature Astronomy, scientists at NJIT’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR) have pinpointed a previously unknown class of high-energy particles in the sun’s upper atmosphere responsible for generating the long-puzzling radiation signals observed during major solar flare events for decades.

The signals were traced back to a localized region in the solar corona during a powerful X8...