Science

As people, we are all shaped by the neighborhoods we grew up in, whether it was a bustling urban center or the quiet countryside. Objects in distant outer space are no different.

As an astronomer at the University of Arizona, I like to think of myself as a cosmic historian, tracking how supermassive black holes grew up.

Can scientists predict a particular earthquake?

In short, no. Science has not yet found a way to make actionable earthquake predictions. A useful prediction would specify a time, a place and a magnitude – and all of these would need to be fairly specific, with enough advance notice to be worthwhile.

For example, if I predict that California will have an earthquake in 2023, that would certainly come true, but it’s not useful because California has many small earthquakes every day. Or imagine I predict a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake will strike in the Pacific Northwest. That is almost certainly true but doesn’t specify when, so it’s not helpful new information.

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies – including our own Milky Way – are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies.

Most of this we know from optical images, whether taken with small backyard telescopes or much bigger dedicated ground- and space-based telescopes that reveal the light from billions of distant suns. However, as we are discovering, what happens beyond the bright disk of stars may be even more interesting.

When a wildfire erupted in the middle of a recent California night, it could have been a disaster.

But thanks to a new monitoring system that uses artificial intelligence to scan for danger, firefighters were able to quell the blaze long before it got out of hand.

Between January and August, the United States was struck by a record-breaking 23 weather and climate disasters where losses exceeded $1 billion in each case, official data showed Monday.

The tally for 2023 has already exceeded the previous record of 22 such events in 2020, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said, and four months still remain in the year.

The British scientist who led the team that created Dolly the sheep, a breakthrough in cloning, has died at the age of 79, his former university said on Monday.

Ian Wilmut, who revealed in 2018 he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, helmed the team at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which cloned Dolly in 1996.

What would you guess are the two biggest killers in the world? Based on media coverage, maybe you guessed gun violence, accidents or COVID-19. But the top two killers are actually cardiovascular disease and cancer. These two diseases combined account for nearly 50% of deaths in the U.S.

Cardiovascular disease and cancer seem to be quite different on the surface. But newly discovered parallels between the origins and development of these two diseases mean that some treatments may be effective against both.

Technologies based on nanoscale materials – for example, particles that are more than 10,000 times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence – play a growing role in our world.

Carbon nanofibers strengthen airplanes and bicycle frames, silver nanoparticles make bacteria-resistant fabrics, and moisturizing nanoparticles called nanoliposomes are used in cosmetics.

Separating molecules is critical to producing many essential products. For example, in petroleum refining, the hydrocarbons – chemical compounds composed of hydrogens and carbons – in crude oil are separated into gasoline, diesel and lubricants by sorting them based on their molecular size, shape and weight. In the pharmaceutical industry, the active ingredients in medications are purified by separating drug molecules from the enzymes, solutions and other components used to make them.

These separation processes take a substantial amount of energy, accounting for roughly half of U.S. industrial energy use. Traditionally, molecular separations have relied on methods that require intensive heating and cooling that make them very energy inefficient.

Early universe observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cannot be explained by current cosmological models. These models estimate the universe to be 13.8 billion years in age, based on the big-bang expanding universe concept.

My research proposes a model that determines the universe’s age to be 26.7 billion years, which accounts for the JWST’s “impossible early galaxy” observations.