We use plastics in almost every aspect of our lives. These materials are cheap to make and incredibly stable. The problem comes when we’re done using something plastic—it can persist in the environment for years. Over time, plastic will break down into smaller fragments, called microplastics, that can pose significant environmental and health concerns.

The best-case solution would be to use bio-based plastics that biodegrade instead, but many of those bioplastics are not designed to degrade in backyard composting conditions...

The origin of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is mysterious in many ways. It has a metallic core, like Earth, but its core makes up a much larger fraction of its volume—85% compared to 15% for Earth.

The NASA Discovery-class MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) mission, and first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, captured measurements revealing that the planet also strongly differs chemically from Earth. Mercury has relatively less oxygen, indicating that it formed from different building blocks in the early solar system. However, it has proven difficult to precisely pin down Mercury’s oxidation state from available data.

In a new st...

A potential therapeutic for one of the major chronic diseases of aging. Mopping up free radicals with antioxidants was the rage in the 1970’s; people were taking large, sometimes massive doses of various general antioxidants, including vitamins and minerals, to try to remove harmful byproducts of energy metabolism. The method was supposed to blunt the effects of aging and stave off chronic disease. The strategy didn’t work, and in some cases, it caused harm because untargeted antioxidants also compromised beneficial cellular signaling pathways. Over time, this area of research went on the shelf as mitochondrial theories of disease and aging fell into disfavor.

But research at the Buck offers a new way to deal with free radicals: rather than mop them up, take a pill that selectively...

Charged cosmic rays, high-energy clusters of particles moving through space, were first described in 1912 by physicist Victor Hess. Since their discovery, they have been the topic of numerous astrophysics studies aimed at better understanding their origin, acceleration and propagation through space, using satellite data or other experimental methods.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) collaboration, a large research group analyzing data collected by a large magnetic spectrometer in space, recently gathered new insight about the properties and composition of specific types of cosmic rays...