The World's Tallest Trees Seem to Struggle to Make Their Own Food During Heat Waves, Leaving Them Vulnerable as the World Warms - Smithsonian Magazine

Tiny atoms and molecules are constantly bombarding each other all around us. While we regularly measure the large-scale effects of these interactions, measuring the effect of each individual collision is far more difficult. But now, researchers have managed to measure how tiny gas particles affect a single silica particle in the lab. In their new study, published in Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they detected the momentum transfers of individual collisions of gas particles with a nanoparticle levitated in laser light.

Despite the iconic documentary, Uranus and Neptune are arguably the real “blue planets” in our solar system. And their visual similarities in part convinced astronomers that they were evolutionary and chemical twins—but looks can deceive, as a new study has found. In short, the similarities we observe today between Uranus and Neptune may be a coincidence, according to research published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Studying recent measurements of carbon monoxide revealed that Neptune’s deep atmosphere has more oxygen than that of Uranus. Using this information, the team ran models to track regions of the protoplanetary disk—a rotating “platter” of gas and dust that forms planets—that birthed Uranus and Neptune. Surprisingly, the analysis strongly suggested that Uranus and Neptune weren’t from the same section of the protoplanetary disk, which would also give them different chemical origins. “Uranus and Neptune may resemble twins today, but their chemistry is telling us that they are more like cousins with very different histories,” Olivier Mousis, the study’s co-author and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered a supernova erupting just 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Colorful outflows from young protostars in Orion the Hunter plunge into the thick dust of a molecular cloud in this new infrared image. A small slice of the molecular cloud known as OMC-2 in Orion explodes to life in this new JWST image. Young protostars and their powerful outflows highlight a region chock full of cold gas and dust. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Megeath (University of Toledo), M. Zamani (ESA/Webb); Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

College Station, TX — A recent study of construction worker use of lower-back exoskeletons found that in addition to experiencing less fatigue, workers also exhibited improved hazard recognition. Researchers at Texas A&M University asked 16 workers at a construction site in Louisiana to complete two three-hour sessions performing their normal work with and without the exoskeleton so their fatigue could be measured. The workers were also shown images of construction hazards before and after each session and asked to identify the hazards and assess the associated risks.