Hubble witnesses Shock Wave of Colliding Gases in Running Man Nebula

Hubble imaged a small section of the Running Man Nebula, which lies close to the famed Orion Nebula and is a favorite target for amateur astronomers to observe and photograph.
Credits: NASA, ESA, J. Bally (University of Colorado at Boulder), and DSS; Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Mounded, luminous clouds of gas and dust glow in this Hubble image of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH45. Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a newborn star collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves. In this image, blue indicates ionized oxygen (O II) and purple shows ionized magnesium (Mg II)...

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Research sheds new light on effects of Dietary Restriction

Research at MDI Biological Laboratory sheds new light on effects of dietary restriction
C. elegans. Credit: MDI Biological Laboratory

In new research, Aric N. Rogers, Ph.D., who studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has discovered that muscle may be a protected tissue under conditions of dietary restriction, or DR.

Dietary restriction, in which calories are restricted without malnutrition, is one of the most robust anti-aging interventions. When confronted with a scarcity of nutrients, an organism conserves resources by lowering the translation, or production, of proteins, which is one of the most energetically expensive processes in the cell. Proteins serve as the building blocks for tissues and organs and perform vital physiological functions.

The conservation of cellular resources through red...

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This AI Tool lets you visualize how Climate Change could affect your Home

climate change
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new tool with cutting-edge image recognition AI lets you visualize the future effects of climate change on any place in the world—including your own home.

The project, titled “This Climate Does Not Exist,” lets you enter the address of your current home or your favorite travel destination and see what it could look like years later once climate change has taken its toll.

You can see how Disneyland will look like covered in smog, the way extreme smog blanketed Beijing in 2014. You can see what your childhood home will look like after it is flooded by rising sea levels, the way floods devastated Indonesia in 2020 after widespread deforestation.

Extreme weather events due to climate change are already impacting corners of the globe.

In a separate ...

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Hubble finds Flame Nebula’s Searing Stars may Halt Planet Formation

Hubble imaged a small portion of the Flame Nebula, which is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex along with the Horsehead Nebula.
Credits: NASA, ESA, K. Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), ESO, DSS2, and D. De Martin; Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

The Flame Nebula or NGC 2024 is a large star-forming region in the constellation Orion that lies about 1,400 light-years from Earth. Hubble studied this nebula to look for protoplanetary disks, or “proplyds”—disks of gas and dust around stars that may one day form new solar systems.

Hubble found four confirmed proplyds and four possible proplyds in the nebula, but the proplyds are being worn away by the intense radiation of nearby stars and may never have the chance to form planets as a result.

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