Astrophotography is one of the most gratifying parts of space exploration, and there's nothing better at it than Hubble. Recently, it celebrated the 31st anniversary of its launch by taking a spectacular image of one of the most impressive stars in the sky - AG Carinae. In the not too distant future, Hubble, or a successor, might be able to capture an even more spectacular display from the star when it goes supernova.

AG Carinae, located appropriately in the constellation Carina, is one of the most luminous stars in the sky, though its apparent brightness on Earth is somewhat diminished give its 20,000 light year distance from Earth. The star is famous for a number of reasons, including that it is one of only 50 known luminous blue variable stars.

Luminous blue variables are extremely short lived and violent, barely balancing between exploding into a supernova and collapsing under its own weight into a black hole. As part of their life cycle, they occasionally emit a spectacular outburst that creates a kind of glowing shell around them, as can be seen in the Hubble image of AG Carinae.

Outbursts like the one in the picture only happen once or twice in a luminous blue variable's lifetime. They occur when radiation pressure from the interior of the star expands it out to such an immense size that it pushes material out of itself, then collapses back into a more stable state for potentially millions of years.

Lightning bolts break apart nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and create reactive chemicals that affect greenhouse gases. Now, a team of atmospheric chemists and lightning scientists have found that lightning bolts and, surprisingly, subvisible discharges that cannot be seen by cameras or the naked eye produce extreme amounts of the hydroxyl radical — OH — and hydroperoxyl radical — HO₂.

The hydroxyl radical is important in the atmosphere because it initiates chemical reactions and breaks down molecules like the greenhouse gas methane. OH is the main driver of many compositional changes in the atmosphere.

Understanding how light waves oscillate in time as they interact with materials is essential to understanding light-driven energy transfer in materials, such as solar cells or plants. Due to the fantastically high speeds at which light waves oscillate, however, scientists have yet to develop a compact device with enough time resolution to directly capture them.

Now, a team led by MIT researchers has demonstrated chip-scale devices that can directly trace the weak electric field of light waves as they change in time. Their device, which incorporates a microchip that uses short laser pulses and nanoscale antennas, is easy to use, requiring no special environment for operation, minimal laser parameters, and conventional laboratory electronics.

The team's work, published earlier this month in Nature Photonics, may enable the development of new tools for optical measurements with applications in areas such as biology, medicine, food safety, gas sensing, and drug discovery.

Prevention is better than cure, so we should start using genetic techniques to stop dangerous animal diseases jumping to humans, say Scott Nuismer and James Bull

A famous quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin is "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The world is now discovering the cost of its pound of cure for covid-19. But what would an ounce of prevention look like?

For infectious diseases that originate in wild animals, like covid-19, SARS, MERS and Ebola, one solution is to prevent the transmission to humans in the first place. To achieve this, an important first step is to change our behaviour to reduce contact with the wildlife species that harbour such diseases.

While Perseverance rover is rolling over the Red Planet studying its geology and taking fancy selfies with the help of the Ingenuity helicopter, researchers back on Earth are looking forward to welcome and investigating the first Martian soil samples in the upcoming years.

Bringing rocks from the Marian surface to Earth does not seem very exciting to a small group of enthusiasts from The International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (ICAMSR), who warn about incredible risks these life-bearing samples may pose to our home planet, including an immense "Martian plague".

The chief scientist for the newly created US Space Force has said he thinks 'human augmentation' will be here sooner rather than later. Dr. Joel Mozer, speaking at an event at the Airforce Research Laboratory, said that it is 'imperative' that the US outdo its adversaries by leading in 'human augmentation' in military technology.

"In the last century, Western civilization transformed from an industrial-based society to an information-based society, but today we're on the brink of a new age: the age of human augmentation. In our business of national defense, it's imperative that we embrace this new age, lest we fall behind our strategic competitors."

Mozer, whose career has been spent largely with the US Air Force developing space flight technologies, warned that there would be 'unimaginable' advances made over the next decade, citing the leaps in artificial intelligence (AI) that have already been made in programs like Google's AlphaGo. The Space Force scientist added that AI could eventually develop military tactics and strategies that 'no human could', and that eventually 'autonomous' programs or machines could advise commanders in real time. The AI could eventually create programs that design lines of attack too complex for humans to understand, Mozer warned.

Across decades, topics, and studies, women are more censorious than men. Compared to men, women support more censorship of various kinds of sexual and violent content and content perceived as hateful or otherwise offensive to minorities.

Women are more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants, homosexual individuals, transgender individuals, the police, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jewish people, and Christians, and are more supportive of banning sexually explicit public statements and flag burning. In contrast, men evaluate free speech as more important than do women.

One likely reason for this pattern is that women are more averse to interpersonal harm and have a relatively stronger concern for protecting others. Indeed, women believe sexual media content has more harmful effects on the self and others, and women view hate speech as more harmful and violent than do men.

Scientists at the UNIGE have shown that the response of the retina to light depends not only on the intensity of the light perceived by the eye, but also on its temporal shape and the order in which the colours are organized.
Vision is a complex process that has been successfully deciphered by many disciplines -physics, biochemistry, physiology, neurology, etc.-: The retina captures light, the optic nerve transmits electrical impulses to the brain, which ultimately generates the perception of an image. Although this process takes some time, recent studies have shown that the first stage of vision, the perception of light itself, is extremely fast. But the analysis of this decisive step was carried out on molecules in solution in the laboratory.

Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with EPFL and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Switzerland, reproduced the experiment on mice, in order to observe the processing of light by a living organism in all its complexity. This non-invasive study shows that light energy alone does not define the response of the retina. Its shape -short or long- also has an impact on the signal sent to the brain to form an image. This discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, opens up a new field of research into vision, diagnostics and possibly new curative possibilities.

The cellular mechanism of vision has been successfully studied thanks to the collaboration of several disciplines. "In the eye, the first stage of vision is based on a small molecule - the retinal - which, on contact with light, changes shape," explains Geoffrey Gaulier, researcher at the Applied Physics Department of the UNIGE Faculty of Science and first author of the study. "When the retinal alters its geometric form, it triggers a complex mechanism that will result in a nerve impulse generated in the optic nerve."

Marine scientists say they have found what they believe to be more than 25,000 barrels that possibly contain DDT dumped off the Southern California coast near Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to World War II has long been suspected.

The 27,345 "barrel-like" objects were captured in high-resolution images as part of a study by researchers at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They mapped more than 56 square miles (145 square kilometers) of seafloor between Santa Catalina Island and the Los Angeles coast in a region previously found to contain high levels of the toxic chemical in sediments and in the ecosystem.

Researchers at the University Zurich have mapped the first complete atlas of single cells that make up the human teeth. Their research shows that the composition of human dental pulp and periodontium vary greatly. Their findings open up new avenues for cell-based dental therapeutic approaches.
During the last 30 years, medical and dental research has attracted a large number of scientists and practitioners working on aspects of high medical relevance that involve a combination of genetic and tissue regeneration approaches. These developments in stem cell and tissue engineering have provided medical and dental researchers with new insights and given rise to new ideas as to how everyday clinical practice can be improved. Many research groups are dealing with questions like: How can we help injured tissues and organs heal? Can lost tissue be regenerated? How can we create solid protocols that apply across all stem cell therapies?