Galaxies Newr the Dawn of Time

The small red dot highlighted inside the white box on this James Webb Space Telescope image is an early galaxy, seen as it looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang.       STScI/NASA

New baby pictures of the universe, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, show that galaxies started forming faster and earlier than expected.

The telescope launched back in December and it now orbits the sun about a million miles away from Earth. Its giant mirror allows it to detect faint light that's been traveling for almost the entire history of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe. That means it can effectively see what galaxies looked like way back in time.

The snapshots captured so far have both thrilled and perplexed scientists, because it turns out that many luminous galaxies existed when the universe was very young.

"Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, there are already lots of galaxies," says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles. "JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began."

In research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Treu and other astronomers report the discovery of one galaxy that dates back to just 450 million years after the beginning, and another that dates back to 350 million years.  READ MORE...

Are You a COVID Super Dodger?

Back in the early 1990s, Nathaniel Landau was a young virologist just starting his career in HIV research. But he and his colleagues were already on the verge of a landmark breakthrough. Several labs around the world were hot on his team's tail.

"We were sleeping in the lab, just to keep the work going day and night because there were many labs all racing against each other," Landau says. "Of course, we wanted to be the first to do it. We were totally stressed out."

Other scientists had identified groups of people who appeared to be completely resistant to HIV. "People who knew they had been exposed to HIV multiple times, mainly through unprotected sex, yet they clearly were not infected," Landau explains.

And so the race was on to figure out why: "Are these people just lucky or did they really have a mutation in their genes that was protecting them from infection?'" he asks.

Now 25 years later, scientists all over the world are trying to answer the same question but about a different virus: SARS-CoV-2.


By this point in the pandemic, most Americans have had at least one bout of COVID. For children under age 18, more than 80% of them have been infected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.

But just as with HIV, some people have been exposed multiple times but never had symptoms and never tested positive.

"We've heard countless anecdotes about nurses and health-care workers, being exposed without any protection and remaining negative over and over again," says pediatrician Jean-Laurent Casanova, who studies the genetics of viral resistance at Rockefeller University. "Or people share a household with someone who's been coughing for a couple of weeks, and one person stays negative."

So why haven't these people caught COVID? .

After two years of hunting, a team at the University of California, San Francisco has come pretty close to answering the question.  READ MORE...

USA Makes Discovery Then Gives It To China

The former UniEnergy Technologies office in Mukilteo, Wash. Taxpayers spent $15 million on 

research to build a breakthrough battery. Then the U.S. government gave it to China

When a group of engineers and researchers gathered in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Wash., 10 years ago, they knew they were onto something big. They scrounged up tables and chairs, cleared out space in the parking lot for experiments and got to work.

They were building a battery — a vanadium redox flow battery — based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. 

The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

"It was beyond promise," said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. "We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected."

But that's not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. 

And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.     READ MORE...

Solar Emergy

A team of engineers at Stanford University have developed a solar cell that can generate some electricity at night.
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The research comes at a moment when the number of solar jobs and residential installations are rising.

While standard solar panels can provide electricity during the day, this device can serve as a "continuous renewable power source for both day- and nighttime," according to the study published this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

The device incorporates a thermoelectric generator, which can pull electricity from the small difference in temperature between the ambient air and the solar cell itself.

"Our approach can provide nighttime standby lighting and power in off-grid and mini-grid applications, where [solar] cell installations are gaining popularity," the study said.

Mini-grid applications refer to independent electricity networks. These can be used when a population is too small or too far away to extend the grid.

It wasn't until recently that solar energy declined in price and became much more affordable. Some companies have bought into the program, and California has even incentivized the shift to solar.  READ MORE...