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Research News 
Researchers at Princeton University have found a way to turn a common breakfast food into a new material that can cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater. The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many applications, including water filtration, energy storage and sound … Read more
Summary A Deep Gravitational Sinkhole Swallows Unlucky Bypassing Star Black holes have such a voracious gravitational pull that they even swallow light. This makes them hungry monsters lurking in the eternal darkness. There’s no escape if you happen to stumble across one in the inky blackness of space. That’s no worry for astronauts who have … Read more
For centuries, sailors have known where the most fearsome storms are located: the Southern Hemisphere. “The waves ran mountain-high and threatened to overwhelm [the ship] at every roll,” wrote one passenger on an 1849 voyage rounding the tip of South America. Decades later, scientists poring over satellite data could finally put numbers behind that experience. … Read more
Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. Its close proximity to Earth, a mere 1,600 light-years away, offers an intriguing target of study to advance understanding of the evolution of binary systems. The U.S. National Science Foundation provided funding … Read more
A new study by researchers at New York University and other institutions details ways that flooding can affect food security. The study tracked the effects of flooding on 5.6 million people in several African nations. “Our findings show that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event,” says … Read more
Summary Orphaned Stars Were Lost into Intergalactic Space Long Ago In the 1960s sci-fi television show “Lost in Space” a small family of would-be planetary colonists get off course and lost in our galaxy. But truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to Hubble Space Telescope discoveries. Thanks to Hubble, astronomers now know about … Read more
Proper indoor ventilation is key to reducing the spread of COVID-19. Now, a study by MIT researchers finds that indoor relative humidity may also influence transmission of the virus. Relative humidity is the amount of moisture in the air compared to the total moisture the air can hold at a given temperature before saturating and … Read more
There are many sources of ice-forming particles in the atmosphere, but sea spray aerosols, or SSAs, are a significant source of ice-nucleating particles, or INPs. What SSAs are composed of, how they affect cloud formation, and how they may affect climate remain outstanding questions for atmospheric scientists. Now researchers at Stony Brook University have developed … Read more
The Earth’s climate has undergone big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating. Now, a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts … Read more
The phrase “to swallow one’s tongue” has been around since at least the 1880s and has been repurposed in several languages to mean everything from falling silent to a general feeling of fear. While it’s anatomically impossible for a human to swallow their tongue, a new study shows that cane toads (Rhinella marina) achieve this … Read more