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Star Swarms Reveal a Hidden Beast: NASA’s Hubble Hunts for Black Hole Close to Earth

Lead Image: A Hubble Space Telescope image of the globular star cluster, Messier 4. The cluster is a dense collection of several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers suspect that an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing as much as 800 times the mass of our Sun, is lurking, unseen, at its core. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, Eduardo Vitral (STScI) A Dark Central Mass is Lurking at the Hub of a Glittering Stellar Island Gravitational traps in space, black holes, come in different sizes. Or more correctly, different masses, because they are all infinitely small. The first black hole ever discovered, in 1971, weighed in…

MIT’s Innovative Volumetric Approach: The Future of 3D Shape Mapping

This image shows how the algorithm the researchers’ developed can align two shapes by mapping the volume of one shape, in this case a horse, onto another shape, a cow. Their system represents each shape as a tetrahedral mesh and then the algorithm determines how to move and stretch the corners of tetrahedra so they align. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers By mapping the volumes of objects, rather than their surfaces, a new technique could yield solutions to computer graphics problems in animation and CAD. MIT scientists have improved 3D shape alignment in computer graphics by developing a method that…

Clean Energy 24/7: Engineers Use Nanotechnology To Harvest Electricity “From Thin Air”

Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a technique for harvesting electricity from air humidity, dubbed the “generic Air-gen effect.” According to research published in Advanced Materials, any material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter can be utilized to continuously generate electricity. Engineers describe the “generic Air-gen effect”—nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost-effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a method to harvest continuous electricity from air humidity using any material with nanopores smaller than 100 nanometers, called the “generic Air-gen effect.” This technique, scalable…

MIT’s New CRISPR-Based Gene-Editing Technique Transforms Cancer Mutation Studies

Lead Image: MIT researchers have developed a fast and precise technique using CRISPR genome-editing technology to engineer specific cancer-related mutations in mouse models, a step that could significantly advance drug development and understanding of tumor development. p53 (blue) binds to DNA (pink) to help prevent cancer formation. With the new method, scientists can explore many cancer mutations whose roles are unknown, helping them develop new drugs that target those mutations. MIT scientists have advanced cancer research by creating a novel method to engineer specific cancer-related mutations into mouse models using CRISPR genome-editing technology. This technique has been employed to design…

Smartphone Diet: How Viewing the Right Food Images Can Curb Your Appetite

Lead Image: A recent study by Aarhus University suggests that looking at repetitive images of food can lead to a sense of satiety, reducing the portion size people choose to consume. The research builds on the grounded cognition theory, suggesting that cognitive perception strongly influences appetite. The results may have implications for weight-loss strategies and the role of food advertisements on social media, particularly given the pervasiveness of food imagery in today’s digital age. Experiment results may lead to a new form of treatment for overeating. Research from Aarhus University has found that repeated exposure to images of the same…