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A team of mathematicians from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brown University has discovered a new phenomenon that generates a fluidic force capable of moving and binding particles immersed in density-layered fluids. The breakthrough offers an alternative to previously held assumptions about how particles accumulate in lakes and oceans and could lead to applications in locating biological hotspots, cleaning up the environment and even in sorting and packing.

How matter settles and aggregates under gravitation in systems, such as lakes and oceans, is a broad and important area of scientific study, one that greatly impacts humanity and the planet. Consider “marine snow,” the shower of organic matter constantly falling from upper waters to the deep ocean. Not only is nutrient-rich essential to the global food chain, but its accumulations in the briny deep represent the Earth’s largest carbon sink and one of the least-understood components of the planet’s carbon cycle. There is also the growing concern over microplastics swirling in ocean gyres.

Ocean particle accumulation has long been understood as the result of chance collisions and adhesion. But an entirely different and unexpected phenomenon is at work in the , according to a paper published Dec. 20 in Nature Communications by a team led by professors Richard McLaughlin and Roberto Camassa of the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences, along with their UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Robert Hunt and Dan Harris of the School of Engineering at Brown University.

#Starliner is “go” for launch!

The launch of The Boeing Company’s Orbital Flight Test to the International Space Station, as part of our NASA Commercial Crew Program, is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 20.

Tune in starting at 5:30 a.m. EST to see the uncrewed flight test launch at 6:36 a.m. EST for the spacecraft’s maiden mission to our orbiting laboratory.

United Launch Alliance €™s countdown is underway in preparation for liftoff of an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Friday at 6:36 a.m. EST (1136 GMT) with Boeing €™s Starliner crew capsule on an unpiloted Orbital Flight Test to the International Space Station.

LIVE COVERAGE: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/12/18/atlas-5-av-080-starlin…us-center/

A year marked by climate protests, political uncertainty and debate over the ethics of gene editing in human embryos proved challenging for science. But researchers also celebrated some exciting firsts — a quantum computer that can outperform its classical counterparts, a photo of a black hole and samples gathered from an asteroid.


Climate strikes, marsquakes and gaming AIs are among the year’s top stories.

The surface of the Sun is never still. Upon this burning ball of gas, a continual flow of super-hot plasma creates ropes of magnetic fields that can twist and tangle with one another.

As the star rotates, these invisible lines snap apart and join together again, bursting into flares, storms and eruptions of plasma.

This phenomenon, known as magnetic reconnection, has been seen many times before on the Sun and even around our own planet, but we’ve only captured spontaneous reconnections in the past.