During his Ph.D. at UMass, Nikhil Malvankar was laser-focused on quantum mechanics and the movement of electrons in superconductors. Now a professor at Yale, the native of Mumbai, India, has pivoted toward biology to explain how bacteria breathe deep underground...
Extremophiles are a favorite tool of astrobiologists. But not only are they good for understanding the kind of extreme environments that life can survive in, sometimes they are useful as actual tools, creating materials necessary for other life, like oxygen, in those...
A team of astronomers have observed an explosion in the universe unlike any ever witnessed before. The gamma-ray bursts from outside the Milky Way galaxy repeated several times over the course of a day. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the...
The molecular hydrogen ion H₂⁺ is the simplest molecule. This simplicity makes it a perfect study object for physicists, as its properties—for example, its energy levels—can be calculated precisely. In turn, this enables theoretical predictions to be compared with...
A Southwest Research Institute-led team has reported the first detection of gas on the distant dwarf planet Makemake, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This discovery makes Makemake only the second trans-Neptunian object, after Pluto, where the...
