The planet’s night side likely hosts iron clouds, titanium rain, and winds that dwarf Earth’s jetstream. MIT astronomers have obtained the clearest view yet of the perpetual dark side of an exoplanet that is “tidally locked” to its star. Their observations, combined with measurements of the planet’s permanent day side, provide the first detailed view of an exoplanet’s global atmosphere.

“We’re now moving beyond taking isolated snapshots of specific regions of exoplanet atmospheres, to study them as the 3D systems they truly are,” says Thomas Mikal-Evans, who led the study as a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The planet at the center of the new study, which appears...

In two publications in Nature Medicine, a European-Israeli team of researchers show how major disturbances occur in the gut microbiome of patients suffering from heart disease. Given this latest evidence from microbiome research, one of the senior lead researchers, Professor Oluf Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen, calls for stronger and more focused public health initiatives to prevent or delay these common diseases that are a leading cause of premature death worldwide through plant-based and energy-controlled diet, avoidance of smoking and compliance with daily exercise.

The human gut contains trillions of bacteria, collectively called the gut microbiome, which may have positive and negative effects on human health...

Researchers have applied the tools of neuroscience to study when and how an artificial neural network can overcome bias in a dataset. They found that data diversity, not dataset size, is key and that the emergence of certain types of neurons during training plays a major role in how well a neural network is able to overcome dataset bias.

Artificial intelligence systems may be able t...

A team of astronomers has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date. “Because of their small size, brown dwarf binary systems are usually very close together,” said Emma Softich, an undergraduate astrophysics student at the Arizona State University (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration and lead author of the study. “Finding such a widely separated pair is very exciting.”

The gravitational force between a pair of brown dwarfs is lower than for a pair of stars with the same separation, so wide brown dwarf binaries are more likely to break up over time, making this pair of brown dwarfs an ex...