In a new study in Journal of Power Sources, an international team of researchers, led by Prof. Joondong Kim from Korea, demonstrate the first transparent solar cell. Their innovative technique rests on a specific part of the solar cell: the heterojunction, made up of thin films of materials responsible for absorbing light. By combining the unique properties of titanium dioxide and nickel oxide semiconductors, the researchers were able to generate an efficient, transparent solar cell....

One of them was Galileo, JPL’s flagship mission to Jupiter, whose route toward the launch pad would be full of unexpected twists and turns. At the same time, the legendary Voyager 2 was in the midst of its triumphant Grand Tour through the outer planets. Drawing on rare film footage and the memories of the engineers and scientists who were there, this 60-minute documentary brings alive again the dramatic experiences of these first-ever encounters at Uranus and Neptune....

Self-control, or the ability to resist temptation in favor of a higher but delayed reward, is a crucial ability that promotes wise judgment and long-term planning. Jays belong to the corvid family, which is often known as the “feathered apes” because they rival non-human primates in their cognitive abilities. Corvids conceal their food, or ‘cache’ it, to save it for later. In other words, individuals must postpone immediate gratification in order to plan for future meals....

Collisions between protons and lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have produced surprising behavior in some of the particles created by the collisions. The new observation suggests the collisions may have produced a new type of matter known as color-glass condensate. When beams of particles crash into each other at high speeds, the collisions yield hundreds of new particles, most of which fly away from the collision point at close to the speed of light....

A research team led by The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be. Their study shows that the Moon’s crust initially formed from rock floating to the surface of the magma ocean and cooling. However, the team also found that one of the great mysteries of the lunar body’s formation – how it could develop a crust composed of just one mineral – cannot be explained by the initial crust formation and must have been the result of some secondary event....

Many popular fertility and pregnancy planning apps may be inaccurate, suggest the results of a scoping review of the available evidence, published online in the journal BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health. Despite their growing popularity, there’s little hard evidence to inform the use of these apps in practice, coupled with minimal regulation, note the researchers. And many apps seem to have been developed without any fertility specialist input. There has been a significant increase in the use of mobile health apps, including those that monitor monthly menstrual cycles and fertility....

Space rocks hitting Mars excavate fresh craters at a pace of more than 200 per year, but few new Mars scars pack as much visual punch as one seen in a NASA image released today. The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a crater about 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter at the center of a radial burst painting the surface with a pattern of bright and dark tones....

Globally, cancer is one of the biggest killers and in 2018, an estimated 9.6 million people died of the disease. In order to provide the best treatment for the disease, it is essential to find out which mutations are driving the cancer. In a major international collaboration called Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG), researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Aarhus University Hospital, and Rigshospitalet have helped to map mutations in 38 different types of cancer....

Late on the Earth night of May 4, or Sol 1222 on Mars, NASA’s InSight Mars Lander detected a quake on the Red Planet using SEIS, its onboard seismometer. Reverberations lasted for many hours. According to new research, the Marsquake was at least five times as large as the next largest quake recorded on the planet. The study was published on December 14 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, an AGU journal....

While the Standard Model of Particle Physics has remained mostly unchanged since its initial conception, experimental observations for neutrinos have forced the neutrino part of the theory to be reconsidered in its entirety. Neutrino oscillation was the first observation inconsistent with the predictions and proves that neutrinos have non-zero masses, a property that contradicts the Standard Model. In 2015, this discovery was rewarded with the Nobel Prize. Are neutrinos their own antiparticles?...

Yale University researchers had previously shown that mesenchymal stem cells harvested from bone marrow helped repair spinal cord injury in rats; however, many of the cells did not reach their target injury site. The study by the Yale team, headed by neuroscientists Jeffery Kocsis and Karen Lankford, shows how properties from stem cells can be carried to the macrophages by intercellular cargo vesicles called exosomes. There, the stem cell-derived exosomes may aid macrophages to repair ruptures in the blood-brain barrier that can wreak havoc with the central nervous system....

The findings also reveal a stark reversal in the proportions of the two mice populations present in the area, adding to evidence that warming temperatures are driving wildlife north. At McGill’s Gault Nature Reserve, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Montreal in the St. Lawrence valley, biologist Virginie Millien for the past 10 years has been studying two similar, coexisting species: the deer mouse and the white-footed mouse. Both are common in eastern North America....

An evolutionary mystery that had eluded molecular biologists for decades may never have been solved if it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic. “Being stuck at home was a blessing in disguise, as there were no experiments that could be done. We just had our computers and lots of time,” says Professor Paul Curmi, a structural biologist and molecular biophysicist with UNSW Sydney. Prof. Curmi is referring to research published recently in Nature Communications that details the painstaking unraveling and reconstruction of a key protein in a single-celled, photosynthetic organism called a cryptophyte, a type of algae that evolved over a billion years ago....

Today, underwater sensors cannot share data with those on land, as both use different wireless signals that only work in their respective mediums. Radio signals that travel through air die very rapidly in water. Acoustic signals, or sonar, sent by underwater devices mostly reflect off the surface without ever breaking through. This causes inefficiencies and other issues for a variety of applications, such as ocean exploration and submarine-to-plane communication. In a paper being presented at this week’s SIGCOMM conference, MIT Media Lab researchers have designed a system that tackles this problem in a novel way....

This biggest type of phenomenon in the environment of modern Mars could be examined as never before possible, using the combination of spacecraft now at Mars. A study published this week based on observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) during the most recent Martian global dust storm — in 2007 — suggests such storms play a role in the ongoing process of gas escaping from the top of Mars’ atmosphere....

Super-puffs are notable for having exceptionally large radii for their masses — which would give them seemingly incredibly low densities. The adorably named bodies have been confounding scientists since they were first discovered, because they are unlike any planets in our Solar System and challenge our ideas of what distant planets can be like. “We started thinking, what if these planets aren’t airy like cotton candy at all,” Piro said....

Engineers also performed a development flight test objective that changed the minimum jet firing time for the reaction control thrusters over a period of 24 hours. This test objective is designed to exercise the reaction control system jets in a pre-planned sequence to model jet thruster firings that will be incorporated into the crewed Artemis II mission. The test used the reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, built by ArianeGroup, on the European Service Module....

A newly released Cassini Spacecraft image shows the Earth as a point of light between the icy rings of Saturn. The spacecraft captured the view on April 12, 2017, at 10:41 p.m. The Cassini Spacecraft was 870 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth when the image was taken. Although far too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing Cassini at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean....

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity drove 63 feet (19 meters) northeastward early Monday, December 10, approaching a step down into a slightly lower area called “Yellowknife Bay,” where researchers intend to choose a rock to drill. The drive was Curiosity’s fourth consecutive driving day since leaving a site near an outcrop called “Point Lake,” where it arrived last month. These drives totaled 260 feet (79 meters) and brought the mission’s total odometry to 0....

“We’ve seen some really surprising results that suggest the oceans have a huge effect on Greenland’s biggest glaciers,” said OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This year, we hope to figure out whether the ocean’s impact is widespread or if it’s just a few big glaciers that care about ocean temperatures.” JPL engineer Ron Muellerschoen has flown back and forth across Greenland during its snowiest season for the last three years....