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The James Webb Space Telescope peered through dust and gas to reveal star formation in a rare wheel-shaped galaxy that formed in a long-ago galactic crash. The galaxy, called the Cartwheel for its striking resemblance to a wheel of an old fashioned carriage, was previously studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, but Webb’s infrared gaze has revealed a plethora of previously unseen details in the galaxy’s structure. Infrared light, which is essentially heat, penetrates through dust clouds, allowing the James Webb Space Telescope to peer into regions of space that are obscured to optical telescopes, such as Hubble....

By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazineSome of the brightest stellar explosions in the Universe should be classified together as a new type of supernova, according to an international collaboration of researchers. The group has catalogued six explosions that cannot easily be explained by any process yet known.When stars several times more massive than our Sun die, they explode, forming supernovae. The process varies, but the result is a massive radiation of energy that can outshine an entire galaxy....

Humans cooperate on all sorts of issues and tasks, but every so often a member of the group fails to pull his weight. If such free riding is allowed to proliferate, cooperation itself can break down. A new study suggests that the threat of penalty is the key to successful cooperation. Bettina Rockenbach of the University of Erfurt in Germany and her colleagues set up an economic test of 84 students self-selected into two groups–one in which punishment was permitted and one in which it was not....

Pity our neighbors to the north. A change in the U.S. flu shot policy for preschoolers has led to a 34 percent decline in flu cases for children ages 2 to 4 compared with their Canadian counterparts, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and McGill University in Montreal. The flu rates in the two countries had mirrored each other for years, the researchers found, but rates improved dramatically in the United States starting in 2006, the year that the U....

With U.S. demand for nuclear energy projected to flatline over the next decade, the success or failure of the American nuclear industry will depend on its ability to forge partnerships overseas, particularly in the developing world. As it does so, though, it will have to work hard to ensure that stringent safety regulations are implemented anywhere nuclear energy gains a foothold, or risk public backlash on the world stage. Those were two key messages delivered by industry leaders and regulators at yesterday’s Nuclear Energy Assembly, held this week in Charlotte, N....

The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When the iPhone emerged in 2007, it came with all the promise and pomp of a major Steve Jobs announcement, highlighting its user interface and slick design as key selling points. We know now that the iPhone transformed the mobile phone business, the internet economy and, in many ways, society as a whole. But technically speaking, the iPhone was not very innovative....

The temperature has settled into the mid-50s this week at the Sochi Olympics, and snowboarders were furious at the slushy condition of the halfpipe Tuesday. Four years ago at the Vancouver Olympics, rain and fog delayed downhill skiing events, and organizers resorted to straw bales to build jumps and obstacles for courses where snow proved scarce. None of this bodes well for future Olympics. A warming climate may rule out warmer venues such as Sochi or Vancouver in the future....

In his 1776 work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith identified the cause in a single variable: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Today we call this free trade or market capitalism, and since the recession it has become de rigueur to dis the system as corrupt, rotten or deeply flawed. If we pull back and take a long-horizon perspective, however, the free exchange between people of goods, services and especially ideas leads to trust between strangers and prosperity for more people....

1969 Neutrino Puzzle “Most physicists and astronomers believe that the sun’s heat is produced by thermonuclear reactions that fuse light elements into heavier ones. To demonstrate the truth of this hypothesis, however, is still not easy, nearly 50 years after it was suggested by Sir Arthur Eddington. Of the particles released by the hypothetical reactions in the solar interior, only one species has the ability to penetrate to the surface (a distance of some 400,000 miles) and escape into space: the neutrino....

“Once you have eliminated the impossible,” the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously opined, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” That adage forms the foundational principle of “constructor theory”—a candidate “theory of everything” first sketched out by David Deutsch, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, in 2012. His aim was to find a framework that could encompass all physical theories by determining a set of overarching “meta-laws” that describe what can happen in the universe and what is forbidden....

The discovery would change the world. From power grids that never lose energy to magnetically levitating trains, finding a material that is superconductive at room temperature would bring a range of fantastical technologies to life. And it is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Although superconductors—materials that can transmit electricity with zero resistance—exist only at extremely frigid temperatures today, there is no physical reason why they cannot also work at room temperature....

Nearly four decades ago zoologist Michael Thompson, then at the University of Adelaide in Australia, made an alarming discovery: invasive red foxes were gobbling up more than 90 percent of all the turtle eggs laid along the banks of Australia’s Murray River. Thompson’s surveys also revealed a disproportionate number of older turtles, suggesting that fox predation had already reduced the amount of juveniles in the river. If no one took action, he warned, the formerly abundant turtles would eventually disappear....

Jellyfish appear to swim through the heavens just as they do through the seas. In recent years astronomers have spotted spiral galaxies that resemble the exotic creatures, trailing blue tendrils of gas and young stars. Now a search for more of these intriguing galaxies has yielded insights into their origin. To locate celestial jellyfish, astronomers Conor McPartland and Harald Ebeling of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and their colleagues searched within 63 galaxy clusters, which harbor numerous large galaxies embedded in torrid gas....

The sci-fi dream (or utter fantasy) of getting from one place to another instantaneously continued this February 14, with the opening of Doug Liman’s film Jumper, based on the novel by Steven Gould. We asked quantum physicist H. Jeff Kimble of the California Institute of Technology to explain how physicists understand quantum teleportation, which turns out to be more relevant to computing than to commuting. Note: This is an expanded version of a Q&A published in the March 2008 print edition of Scientific American....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Babies who are breastfed have lower arsenic exposure than babies who are fed formula, according to a new study. The powder and water used to make the baby formula may be sources of arsenic, which occurs naturally in the environment and in large doses is linked to serious health problems, the researchers said February 23 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It’s not clear, however, whether the low levels of arsenic exposure in the study will turn out to be harmful, the researchers say....

Carl Sagan described Earth as viewed from space as a pale blue dot, and our first direct images of light-years distant planets will be just as minuscule. When new mega-telescopes capture their first pictures of exoplanets, we will at best see half pixels of grayish blur. Even so, investigators eager to learn whether any exoplanets harbor life might be able to find hints in those first fuzzy images. First, however, they will need to know what biosignatures would look like in data coming from worlds very different from our own....

Green Burning Man Black Rock City—complete with a post office and volunteer emergency service crews—rises from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for only one week of every year, thanks to Burning Man, a festival of art and counterculture. Running from August 27 to September 3, it ends with the destruction of the “city,” capped by the arsonous elimination of art, structures and a central effigy of “the man.” This year’s event, dubbed Green Man, has an environmental theme....

The precarious status of the Colorado River was brought into sharper focus today with the release of a federal study that determines how the basin’s big reservoirs will be operated in the coming year — and which states will be required to limit their water withdrawals from the shrinking river. With key water supply reservoirs Mead and Powell near record low levels, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico will shoulder the largest cuts from the Colorado River to date, forgoing a combined 721,000 acre-feet of water next year....

The bizarre, powerful flashes of light known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) may be far more common than astronomers had thought. Throughout the universe, at least one FRB is blasting out intense radio emissions every second, a new study suggests. “If we are right about such a high rate of FRBs happening at any given time, you can imagine the sky is filled with flashes like paparazzi taking photos of a celebrity,” study lead author Anastasia Fialkov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement....

Editor’s Note (11/5/21): This story from October 29, 2020, is being republished ahead of November 7, when daylight saving time will end this year and clocks will be turned back one hour. It’s nearly that time of the year again: the end of daylight saving, when Americans push their clocks back and rejoice at the gained hour of sleep—or mourn the lost hour of sunlight in the afternoon. This system’s twice-a-year transitions have become increasingly unpopular....