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Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates like Earth, but it does have volcanically active regions that can cause rumbles, and one way to develop a better understanding of Mars’ mantle and core is to examine seismic active. In March, NASA’s InSight lander detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae – the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. Those quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5. InSight has recorded over 1,300 quakes to date, but nothing like the magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022. That is a medium-sized earthquake on Earth, they happen 5 times each day, but it is a size researchers only hoped to get during this mission on Mars.

A half-mile-long stretch of tunnel in California is now colder than most of the universe. It contains a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser, one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second – a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources. Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process.

Seeing a doctor can be crucial to managing and preventing chronic disease but there has long been a racial gap in routine visits that can't be explained by racism or income. Maybe people didn't like like going to the doctor because the COVID-19 pandemic caused use of telemedicine to rise sharply, and as that happened gaps in visits disappeared for black patients at Penn Medicine. Once “normal” in-office appointments returned, previous inequities stayed erased, indicating that telemedicine wasn’t just a stopgap solution but a potential long-term tool for equity. 

Astronomers have been assuming that real new knowledge of black holes might have to wait until 2030, when/if NASA’s gravitational wave detector, LISA, launches into space.The Event Horizon Telescope may have something else in mind. They have called a press conference for Thursday and speculation is rampant about what it might mean.

By looking at the ‘shadows’ of two supermassive black holes in the process of colliding, astronomers may have a way to measure black holes in distant galaxies and test competing theories of gravity.Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole, at the center of galaxy Messier 87, came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.Now a new imaging technique could allow astronomers to study black holes smaller than M87’s, a monster with a mass of 6.5 billion suns, harbored in galaxies more distant than M87, which at 55 million light-years away, is still relatively close to our own Milky Way.

In 2001, after the US World Trade Centers were destroyed in a terrorist attack, assaults on middle-eastern buildings and people in San Francisco went up. Yet the middle eastern people attacked were Jewish, not Muslim. A common sentiment among intelligentsia was that the attacks were due to Israel being created by the United Nations in 1948.Anti-Semitism has gotten worse rather than better since, despite governments creating laws against hate crimes, according to the 28th Annual Report on Antisemitism Worldwide.

The Uralic language family and languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Saami and Hungarian began to spread west approximately 4,200–3,900 years ago, first to the central Volga region and later to the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic.The Uralic language family is a few hundred years younger than the Indo-European one, and its spread led to contacts with Indo-Iranian language variants and the creation of a long contact zone in the area currently known as central Russia. Early loan words originating from this contact made their way into the Uralic languages that were beginning to emerge, including Sami, the Balto-Finnic languages, Mordvinic, Mari and the Permic languages.(1) 

There are three dimensions in the known universe. Fiction authors like to call time a dimension but it really isn't, it is just a way to look at the other three. Even if you don't remember what you ate for lunch yesterday the universe knows you were 2 millions miles away from where you are right now when you at it. Since everything in the universe was also shifting in chaotic ways there is no way to return and have a different lunch.

At the very large and very small scale, Newtonian gravity does not work the way it should. The universe should not be expanding and forget trying to explain quantum mechanics.Trying to detail why electrons can behave as both particles and waves, depending on the experimental context in which they are observed, is challenging. Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and David Bohm all tried but used self-consistent yet contradictory interpretations.

A genetic analysis found a single point mutation in the TLR7 gene and then identified other cases of severe lupus where this gene was also mutated. Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease which causes inflammation in organs and joints, affects movement and the skin, and causes fatigue. In severe cases, symptoms can be debilitating and complications can be fatal. The work resulted from whole genome sequencing on the DNA of a Spanish child named Gabriela, who was diagnosed with severe lupus when she was 7 years old. Such a severe case with early onset of symptoms is rare and indicates a single genetic cause.

In a new paper, scholars say depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues are more common than ever before, and that people of color are impacted most.The data are from surveys, and young people have always felt a need to 'live in important times' and believe everything is different than any other generation faced, but young people today went through an economic meltdown and then a pandemic, with all of the resulting media attention and worry that entailed. The Healthy Minds Network pool was between 2013 and 2021 from 350,000 students at over 300 campuses. 

The mysteries of the universe are profound but one solution has long been sought; how events at the edge of our solar system, the beginning of the rest of the universe, brought about evolution of earth, the other planets, and even life itself. A new paper speculates about how the gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — ended up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do. They try to figure an explanation for what happened to gas giants in other solar systems and ours- and try to make an education guess if a fifth gas giant lurks 50 billion miles away. A new planet 9, or a planet 14, or whatever a tiny minority of astronomers in the IAU try to decree.