ESA’s Mars Express has observed the southern part of a partially buried approximately 440-km wide crater, informally named Ladon basin. The images, near to where Ladon Valles enters this large impact region reveal a variety of features, most notably the double interconnected impact craters Sigli and Shambe, the basins of which are crisscrossed by extensive fracturing. This region, imaged on April 27 by the high-resolution stereo camera on Mars Express is of great interest to scientists since it shows significant signs of ancient lakes and rivers....

Around 20% of those who have recovered from COVID-19 fail to develop immune protection against SARS-CoV-2, according to a MedUni Vienna research team led by allergologist and immunologist Rudolf Valenta from the Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology. Their study found that the crucial immune protection that prevents the virus from docking and invasion of the body’s cells only occurs when a person is able to form specific antibodies against the folded receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein....

In the process of solving a decades-long mystery about a particular protein, scientists have identified a specific location in the brain where schizophrenia may originate. The news: Despite the identification of many genes that show some link to schizophrenia, identifying a part of the brain that is likely responsible for the disorder with a high level of certainty has proven to be extremely difficult — until now. Why it’s important: Knowing what to search for and where to look might aid in identifying persons who are at risk of developing schizophrenia before the illness manifests and could result in new diagnostic, preventative, and therapeutic approaches....

The Giant Magellan Telescope announces fabrication of the sixth of seven of the world’s largest monolithic mirrors. These mirrors will allow astronomers to see farther into the universe with more detail than any other optical telescope before. The sixth 8.4-meter (27.5 feet) mirror — about two stories high when standing on edge — is being fabricated at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab and will take nearly four years to complete....

As a result of the spacecraft turning, data were only reaching ground control patchily and the batteries were quickly discharging. With just a few hours of power left, it seemed possible that the 19-year-old mission could be lost. The Integral Flight Control Team, together with Flight Dynamics and Ground Station Teams at ESA’s ESOC mission control, teams at ESAC and Airbus Defence & Space, set to work. With quick thinking and ingenious solutions, they found the problem and rescued the mission....

University of Arizona researchers have found that the mystery surrounding the possibility of microbial extraterrestrial life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 83 moons, may be resolved by an orbiting space probe. The researchers have outlined a plan in a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, explaining how a hypothetical space mission could provide conclusive answers. Initially, when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft surveyed Enceladus in 1980, it appeared to be just a small, unimpressive “snowball” in the sky....

Only by increasing the rate at which telescopes monitor the sky has it been possible to catch more Fast-Evolving Luminous Transients (FELTs) and begin to understand them. According to a new study in Nature Astronomy, researchers say NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope captured one of the fastest FELTs to date. Peter Garnavich, professor and department chair of astrophysics and cosmology physics at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of the study, described the event as “the most beautiful light curve we will ever get for a fast transient....

Successfully launched on December 16, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite promises to provide an extraordinary accounting of water over much of Earth’s surface. Its measurements of fresh water and the ocean will help researchers address some of the most pressing climate questions of our time and help communities prepare for a warming world. Making this possible is a scientific instrument called the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn). Years in development, the instrument has been designed to capture very precise measurements of the height of water in Earth’s freshwater bodies and the ocean....

The study focused on intracluster light, a faint type of light found inside clusters of galaxies. Scientists think this light may provide a new way to measure dark matter—a mysterious form of matter that is invisible to telescopes, yet is thought to account for the vast majority of matter in the universe. What dark matter consists of stands as one of the major mysteries of modern cosmology. “Just measuring the intracluster light itself is pretty exciting....

Viruses that cause respiratory diseases such as the flu and COVID-19 can lead to mild to severe symptoms within the first few weeks of infection. Usually, these symptoms resolve on their own within a few more weeks. Sometimes, if the infection is severe, treatments are needed to aid recovery. However, some people go on to experience persistent symptoms that last several months to years. It is still unclear why and how respiratory diseases can develop into chronic conditions like long COVID-19....

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of viral genomes have been sequenced to reconstruct the evolution and global spread of the coronavirus. This is important for the identification of particularly concerning variants that are more contagious, pathogenic, or resistant to the existing vaccines. For global surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it is crucial to sequence and analyze many samples in a cost-effective way. Therefore, researchers in the Bienko-Crosetto laboratory at Karolinska Institutet and Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden have developed a new method, named COVseq, that can be used for surveillance of the viral genome on a massive scale at a low cost....

After decades of uncertainty, the Apollo 16 S-IVB impact site on the lunar surface has been identified. S-IVBs were portions of the Saturn V rockets that brought astronauts to the moon. The site was identified in imagery from the high-resolution LROC Narrow Angle Camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Beginning with Apollo 13, the S-IVB rocket stages were deliberately impacted on the lunar surface after they were used. Seismometers placed on the moon by earlier Apollo astronauts measured the energy of these impacts to shed light on the internal lunar structure....

Two years ago, CfA astronomers reported the discovery of giant, twin lobes of gamma-ray emission protruding about 50,000 light-years above and below the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, and centered on the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s core. The scientists argued then that the bubbles were produced either by an eruption from the black hole sometime in the past, or else by a burst of star formation in that vicinity....

Presenting the work at the European Association of Urology (virtual) Congress, after recent acceptance for publication, research leader Dr. Paolo Capogrosso (San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy) said: “Over a 10 year period we have seen a real change in what concerns men when they attend sexual health clinics. This is probably driven by greater openness, and men now accepting that many sexual problems can be treated, rather than being something they don’t want to talk about....

The CME reached Mars two days after NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA tracks such solar eruptions because solar eruptions can trigger particle and radiation events that pose a risk to astronauts and sensitive spacecraft electronics. As astronauts venture beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field to the Moon and Mars, NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in collaboration with the Community Coordinated Modeling Center tracks solar activity to give advanced warning to spacecraft and crewed missions....

The agency’s newest rover is trekking across the Martian landscape using a newly enhanced auto-navigation system. NASA’s newest six-wheeled robot on Mars, the Perseverance rover, is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor seeking signs of ancient life. That means the rover team is deeply engaged with planning navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, even donning special 3D glasses to help map their course. But increasingly, the rover will take charge of the drive by itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system....

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snails and sea cucumbers also use this mechanism, called peristalsis, to get around, and our own gastrointestinal tracts operate by a similar action, squeezing muscles along the esophagus to push food to the stomach. Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Seoul National University have engineered a soft autonomous robot that moves via peristalsis, crawling across surfaces by contracting segments of its body, much like an earthworm....

Now, using the Great Lakes as a laboratory, sedimentary petrologist Patricia Corcoran and her students at the University of Western Ontario are studying the behavior of microplastics as a geologic phenomenon. What are the main sources of microplastics to Great Lakes sediment? What factors influence their distribution, and where do they concentrate? To explore these questions, and shed light on implications such as which animals may be at risk from microplastics, Corcoran’s team has analyzed offshore and nearshore sediment samples from Lakes Huron, Ontario, Erie, and St....

Coronaviruses like the one that causes COVID-19 are studded with protein “spikes” that bind with receptors on the cells of their victims ­– the first step in infection. Now scientists have made the first detailed images of those spikes in their natural state, while still attached to the virus and without using chemical fixatives that might distort their shape. They say their method, which combines cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and computation, should produce quicker and more realistic snapshots of the infection apparatus in various strains of coronavirus, a critical step in designing therapeutic drugs and vaccines....

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have devised a way to detect whether cells previously transplanted into a living animal are alive or dead, an innovation they say is likely to speed the development of cell replacement therapies for conditions such as liver failure and type 1 diabetes. As reported in the March issue of Nature Materials, the study used nanoscale pH sensors and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to tell if liver cells injected into mice survived over time....