Researchers publish scenario that explains 2016 discovery by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the California Institute of Technology have an answer to a mystery that’s puzzled the Mars research community since NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a mineral called tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016.

Tridymite is a high-temperature, low-pressure form of quartz that is extremely rare on Earth, and it wasn’t immediately clear how a concentrated chunk of it ended...

Patients are 20% less likely to die of sepsis because a new AI system developed at Johns Hopkins University catches symptoms hours earlier than traditional methods, an extensive hospital study demonstrates.

The system, created by a Johns Hopkins researcher whose young nephew died from sepsis, scours medical records and clinical notes to identify patients at risk of life-threatening complications. The work, which could significantly cut patient mortality from one of the top causes of hospital deaths worldwide, is published today in Nature Medicine and npj Digital Medicine.

“It is the first instance where AI is implemented at the bedside, used by thousands of providers, and where we’re seeing lives saved,” said Suchi Saria, founding research director of the Malone Center for Engin...

A material known as cubic boron arsenide has two major advantages over silicon, research shows. It provides high mobility to both electrons and holes, and it has excellent thermal conductivity. It is, the researchers say, the best semiconductor material ever found.

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and in its pure form the material has become the foundation of much of modern technology, from solar cells to computer chips. But silicon’s properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal.

For one thing, although silicon lets electrons whizz through its structure easily, it is much less accommodating...

An international team of 23 researchers led by Maria Dainotti, Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has analyzed archive data for powerful cosmic explosions from the deaths of stars and found a new way to measure distances in the distant Universe.

With no landmarks in space, it is very difficult to get a sense of depth. One technique astronomers use is to look for “standard candles,” objects or events where the underlying physics dictate that the absolute brightness (what you would see if you were right next to it) is always the same...