Latest News Releases 12 October

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully arrived in French Guiana Tuesday, after a 16-day journey at sea. The 1,500-mile voyage took Webb from California through the Panama Canal to Port de Pariacabo on the Kourou River in French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.

New research from the Florida State University College of Medicine found that changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease are often visible early on in individuals with personality traits associated with the condition. The study focused on two traits previously linked to the risk of dementia: neuroticism, which measures a predisposition for negative emotions, and conscientiousness, which measures the tendency to be careful, organized, goal-directed and responsible.

Scientists seeking to explore the teeming microcosm of quarks and gluons inside protons and neutrons report new data delivered by particles of light. The light particles, or photons, come directly from interactions of a quark in one proton colliding with a gluon in another at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). By tracking these "direct photons," members of RHIC's PHENIX Collaboration say they are getting a glimpse—albeit a blurry one—of gluons' transverse motion within the building blocks of atomic nuclei.

Where do our elements come from? And how are they made? Michael Famiano's new research is flipping the script on those age-old nuclear astrophysics questions. The truth is out there—several light years away among the stars, to be exact.

Urban areas may be at greater risk for precipitation-triggered landslides than rural areas, according to a new study that could help improve landslide predictions and hazard and risk assessments. Researchers found that urban landslide hazard was up to 10 times more sensitive to variations in precipitation than in rural areas.

A panel of plasma biomarkers measured 3-months after hospital discharge may accurately identify patients with low risk for kidney function loss after acute kidney injury

Researchers found increased concentrations of air pollutants downwind from oil and gas wells in California, likely affecting millions of Californians who live near them.

A new measurement of the neutron skin in calcium reveals that heavier types of calcium nuclei are relatively thin-skinned. The new measurement, made by the 48Ca Radius EXperiment (CREX) collaboration at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, was presented at the 2021 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society. It is the first highly robust electroweak measurement of the neutron skin in a medium-weight nucleus, and it features a precision of about 0.025 millionths of a nanometer.

With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: If this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice—and the creatures who need it to survive—persist anywhere? A new study addresses this question, and the results are daunting.