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Which of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets have atmospheres? With help from JWST, astronomers are inching closer to an answer, and new observations of a super-Earth planet around a low-mass star help to define the dividing line between planets with atmospheres and planets without.

How to Find an Atmosphere

With the number of known exoplanets growing steadily larger, a major challenge for astronomers is deciding how to allocate limited telescope time to study these planets further. Rocky planets with atmospheres make promising targets, but it’s not obvious which exoplanets should have atmospheres. Taking cues from the planets in our solar system and the subset of exoplanets that have been studied in detail, researchers have defined the concept of the cosmic shoreline, which separates planets with atmospheres from planets without on the basis of escape velocity — related to a planet’s mass and size — and the amount of starlight the planet receives.

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

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MetaShape’s PNP inhibitor technology aims to restore NAD+ levels to combat LDL cholesterol, cognitive decline and neurodegeneration.

A large number of 2D materials like graphene can have nanopores—small holes formed by missing atoms through which foreign substances can pass. The properties of these nanopores dictate many of the materials’ properties, enabling the latter to sense gases, filter out seawater, and even help in DNA sequencing.

“The problem is that these 2D materials have a wide distribution of nanopores, both in terms of shape and size,” says Ananth Govind Rajan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc). “You don’t know what is going to form in the material, so it is very difficult to understand what the property of the resulting membrane will be.”

Machine learning models can be a powerful tool to analyze the structure of nanopores in order to uncover tantalizing new properties. But these models struggle to describe what a nanopore looks like.

Moore’s Law, the guiding concept in computing, is an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. According to this law, the number of transistors on a device doubles roughly every two years, hence increasing performance. For years, this idea has driven the semiconductor sector.

In the fast-paced world of technology, not many ideas have been as impactful as Moore’s Law. The principle, first highlighted in 1965, predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double about every two years, resulting in rapid advancements in computing power. Yet, it has been observed that the transistor count does not merely follow Moore’s Law but surpasses it in significant ways.

With that thought, AIM has put together this article highlighting the number of times Moore’s Law was challenged.

Scientists have now performed one such large-scale test by using DESI. They observed almost 6 million galaxies and quasars, which are bright hearts of galaxies powered by feeding supermassive black holes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this test, which has traced the evolution of the universe since it was around 3 billion years old, has once again shown general relativity to be the right “recipe” for gravity.

“General relativity has been very well tested at the scale of solar systems, but we also needed to test that our assumption works at much larger scales,” study co-leader and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) cosmologist Pauline Zarrouk said in a statement. “Studying the rate at which galaxies formed lets us directly test our theories and, so far, we’re lining up with what general relativity predicts at cosmological scales.”

Located a staggering 160,000 light-years from us, the star WOH G64 was imaged thanks to the impressive sharpness offered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI). The new observations reveal a star puffing out gas and dust in the last stages before it becomes a supernova.

“For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” says Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile.

“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” says Ohnaka, the lead author of a study reporting the observations published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”