A study from an international team led by researchers from Nagoya University in Japan and the University of New Hampshire in the United States has revealed the importance of the Earth’s upper atmosphere in determining how large geomagnetic storms develop. Their findings reveal the previously underestimated importance of the Earth’s atmosphere. Understanding the factors that cause geomagnetic storms is important because they can have a direct impact on the Earth’s magnetic field such as causing unwanted currents in the power grid and disrupting radio signals and GPS. This research may help predict the storms that will have the greatest consequences.

Scientists have long known that geomagnetic storms are associated with the activities of the Sun...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, partnering with colleagues in Australia, have identified a novel bacterial protein that can keep human cells healthy even when the cells have a heavy bacterial burden. The discovery could lead to new treatments for a wide array of diseases relating to mitochondrial dysfunction, such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. Mitochondria are organelles that supply most of the chemical energy needed to power cells’ biochemical reactions.

The study is published in the journal PNAS. The researchers analyzed more than 130 proteins released by Coxiella burnetii when this bacterium invades host cells, and found at least one to be capable of prolonging cell longevity by acting directly on mitochondria.

After invading host cells, C...

Lasers are essential tools for observing, detecting, and measuring things in the natural world that we can’t see with the naked eye. But the ability to perform these tasks is often restricted by the need to use expensive and large instruments.

In a newly published cover-story paper in the journal Science, researcher Qiushi Guo demonstrates a novel approach for creating high-performance ultrafast lasers on nanophotonic chips. His work centers on miniaturizing mode-lock lasers—a unique laser that emits a train of ultrashort, coherent light pulses in femtosecond intervals, which is an astonishing quadrillionth of a second.

Ultrafast mode-locked lasers are indispensable to unlocking ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team, including astronomer Alexander de la Vega of the University of California, Riverside, has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date.

Until now it was believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way could not be observed before the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, reached half of its current age.

The research, published in Nature this week, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain.

“This galaxy, named ceers-2112, formed soon after the Big Bang,” said co-author de la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy...