Less than six weeks after it began, construction of the first sample depot on another world is complete. Confirmation that NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover successfully dropped the 10th and final tube planned for the depot was received around 5 p.m. PST (8 p.m. EST) on Sunday, January 29, by mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. This major milestone involved precision planning and navigation to ensure the tubes could be safely recovered in the future by the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign, which aims to bring Mars samples to Earth for closer study....

NASA astronauts Nicole Mann, commander; Josh Cassada, pilot; and mission specialists Koichi Wakata, of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of Roscosmos will lift off aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. They will be carried atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy. Currently, liftoff is targeted for no earlier than October 3. As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, Crew-5 marks the sixth human spaceflight mission on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft....

Jupiter’s iconic storm is on the Webb telescope’s list of targets chosen by guaranteed time observers, scientists who helped develop the incredibly complex telescope and among the first to use it to observe the universe. One of the telescope’s science goals is to study planets, including the mysteries still held by the planets in our own solar system from Mars and beyond. Leigh Fletcher, a senior research fellow in planetary science at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, is the lead scientist on the Webb telescope’s observations of Jupiter’s storm....

As the Juno spacecraft orbits Jupiter, new discoveries about the giant planet continue to be made. When NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently flew over the poles of Jupiter, researchers were astonished, as if they had never seen a giant planet before. And in a sense they hadn’t. The pictures were unlike anything in the history of planetary exploration. Juno entered orbit on the 4th of July 2016 and later found Jupiter’s poles covered in nearly continent-sized storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together in a mind-blowing swirl....

The Columbia is a large tidewater glacier, flowing directly into the sea. When British explorers first surveyed it in 1794, its nose—or terminus—extended south to the northern edge of Heather Island, a small island near the mouth of Columbia Bay. The glacier held that position until 1980, when it began a rapid retreat that continues today. False-color images, captured by Landsat satellites, show how the glacier and the surrounding landscape has changed since 1986....

The latest analysis of measurements of the electrical properties of ultracold neutrons published in the scientific journal Physical Review X has led to surprising conclusions. On the basis of data collected in the nEDM (Electric Dipole Moment of Neutron) experiment, an international group of physicists – including the Cracow-based scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) and the Jagiellonian University – showed in an innovative way that axions, the hypothetical particles that may form cold dark matter, if they existed, would have to comply with much stricter limitations than previously believed with regard to their mass and manners of interacting with ordinary matter....

Studies show wearing masks and social distancing can contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but their combined effectiveness is not precisely known. In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers at New York University and Politecnico di Torino in Italy developed a network model to study the effects of these two measures on the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19. The model shows viral outbreaks can be prevented if at least 60% of a population complies with both measures....

In Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain, a deadly alien microbe hitches a ride to Earth aboard a downed military satellite and scientists must race to contain it. While fictional, the plot explores a very real and longstanding concern shared by NASA and world governments: that spacefaring humans, or our robotic emissaries, may unwittingly contaminate Earth with extraterrestrial life or else biologically pollute other planets we visit. It’s an old fear that’s taken on a new relevance in the era of COVID-19, said Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University....

A team from Dartmouth College and MIT has designed and conducted the first lab test to successfully detect and characterize a class of complex, “non-Gaussian” noise processes that are routinely encountered in superconducting quantum computing systems. The characterization of non-Gaussian noise in superconducting quantum bits is a critical step toward making these systems more precise. The joint study, published today (September 16, 2019) in Nature Communications, could help accelerate the realization of quantum computing systems....

Dr. Niamh Buckley and Professor Helen McCarthy from the School of Pharmacy secured a £228,900 (~$278,000) grant from Breast Cancer Now to tackle protein p53 – which is found at very high levels in around 90% of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors. They will use Messenger RNA (mRNA) – a molecule that provides temporary instructions to create proteins in cells – to target breast cancer cells with high levels of p53....

In a quest to make safer and more effective vaccines, scientists at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University have turned to a promising field called DNA nanotechnology to make an entirely new class of synthetic vaccines. In a study published in the journal Nano Letters, Biodesign immunologist Yung Chang joined forces with her colleagues, including DNA nanotechnology innovator Hao Yan, to develop the first vaccine complex that could be delivered safely and effectively by piggybacking onto self-assembled, three-dimensional DNA nanostructures....

An end-to-end cyber-biological attack, in which unwitting biologists may be tricked into generating dangerous toxins in their labs, has been discovered by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev cyber-researchers. According to a new paper just published in Nature Biotechnology, it is currently believed that a criminal needs to have physical contact with a dangerous substance to produce and deliver it. However, malware could easily replace a short sub-string of the DNA on a bioengineer’s computer so that they unintentionally create a toxin producing sequence....

The bacterium Pseudomonas protegens can kill soil-dwelling plant pathogens, including fungi and bacteria that attack the roots of important crops such as cotton. Pseudomonas protegens releases diverse antimicrobial compounds into the soil, but John Whitney was curious specifically about the compounds that it was injecting directly into other bacteria through the type VI secretion system, or T6SS. “[The T6SS] is this molecular nanomachine that injects toxic protein into other species of bacteria and kills them,” Whitney said....

This led to an extension of the fundamental theory of strong shocks in the atmosphere, which was first developed by G.I. Taylor in the 1940s. The work represents an improvement to the Lab team’s basic understanding of nuclear weapon effects for near-surface detonations. The results indicate that the shock wave produced by a nuclear detonation continues to follow a fundamental scaling law when reflected from a surface, which enables the team to more accurately predict the damage a detonation will produce in a variety of situations, including urban environments....

Led by UdeM cell biologist Jean-François Côté, the team threw 56 “baits” into human cells they were incubating in their laboratory, catching more than 9,000 proteins in the process. The results were published on December 23, 2019, in the journal Nature Cell Biology. The goal was to identify the proteins that attach to those of the Rho family, famous in the cell biology world since the discovery in the early 1990s that they dictate how pieces of the cell skeleton — the “cytoskeleton” — are assembled....

When using self-checkout machines in supermarkets and drugstores, it is unlikely that you are bagging your purchases as efficiently as checkout clerks used to. The main advantage of automation for large retail chains is that it reduces the cost of bagging. “If you introduce self-checkout kiosks, it’s not going to change productivity all that much,” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. However, in terms of lost wages for employees, he adds, “It’s going to have fairly large distributional effects, especially for low-skill service workers....

Monash University researchers have gained insights into how nanoparticles could develop a biosensor to prevent deadly diseases contracted on medical equipment, such as catheters.Candida albicans can become a serious problem for people who are seriously ill or immune-suppressed. Researchers at Monash University have gained insights into how nanoparticles could be used to identify the presence of invasive and sometimes deadly microbes, and deliver targeted treatments more effectively. This study was conducted as an interdisciplinary collaboration between microbiologists, immunologists, and engineers led by Dr....

Knowing where water vapor is in the atmosphere is one of many factors forecasters use to identify weather features. The NASA/NOAA GOES Project has now created two new types of animations based on satellite data that indicate where water vapor is moving over the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. Observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) measure the local air temperature in kelvins (degrees Kelvin) at different layers of the atmosphere....

A Franco-German research team, headed by Dr. Carlos Marques from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, and Prof. Dr. Jan Behrends from the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, has recently collected data that casts fundamental doubt on what has been accepted for decades as the standard model of this mechanism. “This is a challenge for theory building and numerical simulations in this field,” says Marques. The results have now been published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)....

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists. Writing in Nature, a team led by Cambridge researchers report how they were able to observe SARS-CoV-2 mutating in the case of an immunocompromised patient treated with convalescent plasma. In particular, they saw the emergence of a key mutation also seen in the new variant that led to the UK being forced once again into strict lockdown, though there is no suggestion that the variant originated from this patient....