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Staying updated with the most recent advances in science has never been easier. ThePhysicist gathers news about the most recent advances in the world of scientific research and analyses them regularly.
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"It's amazing when I get a chance to see the space station fly over. I am very fortunate to be able to say that my hands were on a lot of the hardware that is up there. I’m very proud to have been part of the International Space Station program.” — Liliana Villarreal, Artemis Landing and Recovery Director, Exploration Ground Systems

NASA has awarded the Reliance Consolidated Models VI (RECOM VI) contract to Advanced Technologies Inc. and Eagle Aviation Technologies, LLC, both of Newport News, Virginia, to support the fabrication of aerospace model systems and developmental test hardware managed by the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced Monday Charity Weeden will serve as associate administrator for the agency’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS), effective immediately. Weeden succeeds Bhavya Lal, who left the agency in July, and Ellen Gertsen, who had been serving as the office’s acting leader since then.

After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Uta

Scientists have long understood that parts of cells, called organelles, evolved to have certain shapes and sizes because their forms are closely related to how they function. Now, Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a bacteria-based tool to test whether, as the axiom goes, form follows function.

New research led by the George Washington University finds that current mitigation efforts to combat distrust online may not be effective because organizations and governments tackling distrust are only targeting one topic and only one geographical scale. The study shows that online distrust has become a 'glocal' phenomenon, meaning that it is spreading with different topics lumped together and mixing both local and global interests.

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: "The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert." Relative clauses often feature "who," "which," "that," and so on.

It is well documented that women who are sexually assaulted, or raped, rarely report the crime to the police. The US charity, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, has shown that 1 in 6 women in the US has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, yet two in three rapes go unreported. For women under 25, that figure drops to 1 in 5.

It's been almost exactly 15 years since Lehmann Brothers declared bankruptcy, marking the height of the financial crisis. Since then, we've entered the era of the "polycrisis"—where several catastrophic events are happening at once. We're dealing with the aftermath of a pandemic, a war in Ukraine, extreme weather events, rising inflation and a food and energy crisis.

Today, 1.2 billion people live in poverty. To lift them out of it, an average of about six tons of raw materials are needed per person and year—in particular minerals, fossil fuels, biomass and metal ores. This is the result of a study published in Environmental Science & Technology by researchers from the Chair of Sustainable Energy and Material Flow Management at the University of Freiburg.

Molasses, a broad term used to describe concentrated sugarcane or sugarbeet juice solutions after removal of sucrose crystals, are an industrial byproduct of the raw sugar production process. Natural molasses have variable compositions that are not entirely known. This knowledge gap is a hindrance to both scientific research and industry, where molasses are used in several processes, including production of fuel ethanol from molasses by fermentation with brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).

Exposure to a virus isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. The concept of “infectious dose” suggests ways to keep ourselves safer from harm.
The post How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Under a microscope, cells in a worm embryo deliberately eliminated one-third of their genome — an uncompromising tactic that may combat harmful genetic parasites.
The post To Defend the Genome, These Cells Destroy Their Own DNA first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A new paper establishes a long-conjectured bound about the size of the overlap between sets of lines and points.
The post Mathematicians Cross the Line to Get to the Point first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Modular forms are one of the most beautiful and mysterious objects in mathematics. What are they?
The post Behold Modular Forms, the ‘Fifth Fundamental Operation’ of Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine

To catch even a whiff of the universe’s earliest epochs — an age of darkness, and one of new light — Cynthia Chiang builds her own equipment. Then she deploys it at the ends of the Earth.
The post The Experimental Cosmologist Hunting for the First Sunrise first appeared on Quanta Magazine