Sweeping winds of vaporized metals have been found in a massive cloud that dimmed the light of a star for nearly nine months. This discovery, made with the Gemini South telescope in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, offers a rare glimpse into the chaotic and dynamic processes still shaping planetary systems long after their formation.

University of Warwick-led study shows how tabletop devices could uncover the fundamental texture of the universe.

At Frontiers Science House, SPARK Microgravity GmbH revealed plans to build Europe’s first dedicated commercial orbital cancer lab. The lab will accelerate the path from discovery to therapy. In microgravity, researchers can run experiments that are impossible on Earth – including 3D tumor growth and revealing new drug targets.

It’s one of astronomy’s great mysteries: how did black holes get so big, so massive, so quickly. An answer to this cosmic conundrum has now been provided by researchers at Ireland's Maynooth University and reported today in Nature Astronomy. 

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.

A new study by researchers in Japan offers new insights into how protocells may have inherited and enriched genetic material before modern biology emerged. By exposing mixed phospholipid vesicles to repeated freezing and thawing, the team found that vesicles with more unsaturated lipids grew more efficiently and became selectively enriched. This membrane-level selection also increased the fraction of selectively neutral genetic material trapped inside.