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Head-scratching observations of distant galaxies are challenging cosmologists’ dominant ideas about the universe, potentially leading to the implication that the strange substance called dark matter doesn’t exist. That’s one possible conclusion from a new study published June 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The finding “raises questions of an extraordinarily fundamental nature,” says Richard Brent … Read more

When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers … Read more

The cosmos may have something in common with a doughnut. In addition to their fried, sugary goodness, doughnuts are known for their shape, or in mathematical terms, their topology. In a universe with an analogous, complex topology, you could travel across the cosmos and end up back where you started. Such a cosmos hasn’t yet been … Read more

Keep your eyes on the night sky this summer, scanning for the constellation Corona Borealis, and if you are lucky, you may glimpse what appears to be a new star winking on in the dark. The brightening point of light will not be a new star, but a nova eruption about 3,000 light-years from Earth. … Read more

Rogue waves are freakishly large ridges of water known for rising out of the blue to ambush hapless ships and beachgoers. But a new artificial intelligence model can predict most of these surprising swells up to five minutes in advance, mechanical engineers Thomas Breunung and Balakumar Balachandran of the University of Maryland in College Park … Read more

Meet graphene’s newest metallic cousin, goldene. For the first time, researchers have created a free-standing sheet of gold that’s just one atom thick. The development, reported in the April 16 Nature Synthesis, could someday allow scientists to use less gold in electronics and chemical reactions, says materials physicist Lars Hultman of Linköping University in Sweden. … Read more

Supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies may be churning out a lot of the universe’s high-energy neutrinos. Two teams using data from IceCube, the world’s premier neutrino observatory located in Antarctica, have independently identified a common type of these active galaxies, called Seyfert galaxies, as likely neutrino producers. These findings, reported in … Read more

Imagine tiny fists punching their way through your body. For some cancer patients, this may be the reality. Melanoma cells can mechanically tunnel their way through tissue using fleshy membrane protrusions without the need for chemicals that chew up the environment, researchers report June 12 in Developmental Cell. Cells have various modes of movement (SN: … Read more

For the first time in nearly a century, physicists have identified a brand new type of magnetic material. Crack open a physics textbook and you may read that scientists classify magnetic materials into two main types: ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Ferromagnets are what most people think of when magnets come to mind. These materials possess a … Read more

A summer wave of COVID-19 is rising. “There’s clearly a bump,” says William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. The medical center has seen a steady increase of hospital admissions for COVID-19 over the past three weeks, Schaffner says. “That was entirely expected, I’m afraid.” Each year, peaks of … Read more