A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the  U.S. and Slovenia has found a previously unknown protein in the  strongest known spider web material. In their paper published in the  journal Communications Biology,the group describes their study of Darwin's bark spider silk and the glands that produce it.                             Humans have been impressed by the silk made from spiders for thousands of years—so much so that a lot of  effort has been put into harvesting it from spiders for use in making  clothing—and in reproducing it in a lab to create new strong materials.  In this new effort, the researchers focused their efforts on Darwin' sbark spiders, their silk-producing glands and the silk that is produced. Darwin's bark spiders are a type of orb spider,  which means they make their spider webs in the shape of a spoked wheel.  They make the largest known orb webs of any spider, which they spin  above the surfaces of streams. Prior research has shown that the spider  actually makes seven different kinds of silk for use in different parts  of its web. One of those silk types, called dragline, is used to build  the spokes that give the wheel its strength. Prior research has shown it  to be the strongest spider silk in existence. In this new effort, the  researchers took a closer look at the dragline silk and the gland that produces it. The researchers found two familiar types of spindroins—types of  repetitive proteins—called MaSp1 and MaSp2, which are found in many  spider silks. But in the dragline from Darwin's bark spiders, they found  another spindroin, which they named MaSp4a. Study of this protein revealed that contained high quanitities of an amino acid called  proline, which prior research has shown is generally associated with  elasticity. The protein also had less of some of the other components  found in MaSp1 and MaSp2, which made it quite unique. The researchers also found that the gland that produces the silk—the  ampullae—is longer than in other spiders, perhaps providing another clue  to the strength of the silk that is produced

One of the 21st century's greatest challenges is to develop diets  that are both sustainable for the planet and good for our bodies. An  IIASA-led study explored the major drivers of widespread shifts to  sustainable diets using a newly developed computational model of  population-wide behavioral dynamics.High  meat consumption—especially of red and processed meat—has been linked  to poor health outcomes, including diabetes, heart disease, and various  cancers. Livestock farming for meat production also has a massive environmental footprint. It contributes to  deforestation to make room for livestock, leads to land and water  degradation and biodiversity loss, and, considering the meat industry's  considerable methane emissions, creates as much greenhouse gas (GHG)  emissions as all the world's cars, trucks, and airplanes combined. It  therefore seems logical that several studies have demonstrated that diet  change, especially lowering red meat consumption, can significantly  contribute to the mitigation of climate change and environmental  degradation, while also being conducive to better public health. Previous studies on diet change scenarios involving lowered meat  consumption, which were mostly based on stylized diets or average  consumption values, showed promising results in terms of alleviating  environmental degradation. If the world's average diet, for example,  became flexitarian by 2050, in other words, people started to limit  their red meat consumption to one serving per week and white meat to half a portion per day, the  GHG emissions of the agriculture sector would be reduced by around 50%.  This seems like an easy change to make, but research shows that due to  the scale of behavioral change required, most of these scenarios will be  difficult to achieve. In their study published Nature Sustainability researchers from IIASA and the University of Koblenz-Landau explored  the major behavioral drivers of widespread shifts to sustainable diets.

Apollo 11 "will be remembered forever," Pence said today during a 50th-anniversary celebration at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. "Apollo 11 is the only event in the 20th century that stands a chance of being widely remembered in the 30th century," added Pence, who chairs the newly resurrected National Space Council. "A thousand years from now, July 20, 1969 will likely be a date that will live in the minds and imaginations of men and women, as long as there are men and women to remember — across this world, across this solar system and beyond."

A photonic chip with no less than 128 tunable components proves to be a true computing "Swiss army knife" with a variety of applications. During her research on measuring light wavelengths using this photonic chip, Caterina Taballione of the University of Twente came across yet another application serendipitously—by sending single photons through the system instead of continuous light, the optical components can perform quantum operations, as well. The same chip works as a photonic quantum processor.Manipulating light on a chip is now possible on a very advanced level, especially using combinations of materials. Researchers can build optical waveguides with very low losses using silicon nitride, or very narrow laser light sources using indium phosphide. The chip Caterina Taballione is presenting in her thesis contains many components that can either split or combine the light in and from separate channels, similar to a rail yard. It also has ring-shaped resonators that can work as a filter. The strength lies in the fact that the components can be controlled from the outside, making the chip flexible and programmable. It also has applications in quantum photonics.

Astronomers have made a new measurement of how fast the universe is  expanding, using an entirely different kind of star than previous  endeavors. The revised measurement, which comes from NASA's Hubble Space  Telescope, falls in the center of a hotly debated question in  astrophysics that may lead to a new interpretation of the universe's  fundamental properties Scientists have known for almost a century that the universe is expanding, meaning the distance between galaxies across the universe  is becoming ever more vast every second. But exactly how fast space is  stretching, a value known as the Hubble constant, has remained  stubbornly elusive. Now, University of Chicago professor Wendy Freedman and colleagues  have a new measurement for the rate of expansion in the modern universe,  suggesting the space between galaxies is stretching faster than  scientists would expect. Freedman's is one of several recent studies  that point to a nagging discrepancy between modern expansion  measurements and predictions based on the universe as it was more than  13 billion years ago, as measured by the European Space Agency's Planck  satellite. As more research points to a discrepancy between predictions and  observations, scientists are considering whether they may need to come  up with a new model for the underlying physics of the universe in order  to explain it. "The Hubble constant is the cosmological parameter that sets the  absolute scale, size and age of the universe; it is one of the most  direct ways we have of quantifying how the universe evolves," said  Freedman. "The discrepancy that we saw before has not gone away, but  this new evidence suggests that the jury is still out on whether there  is an immediate and compelling reason to believe that there is something  fundamentally flawed in our current model of the universe." In a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Freedman and her team announced a new measurement of the Hubble  constant using a kind of star known as a red giant. Their new  observations, made using Hubble, indicate that the expansion rate for  the nearby universe is just under 70 kilometers per second per  megaparsec (km/sec/Mpc). One parsec is equivalent to 3.26 light-years  distance. This measurement is slightly smaller than the value of 74 km/sec/Mpc  recently reported by the Hubble SH0ES (Supernovae H0 for the Equation of  State) team using Cepheid variables, which are stars that pulse at  regular intervals that correspond to their peak brightness. This team,  led by Adam Riess of the Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope  Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, recently reported refining their  observations to the highest precision to date for their Cepheid  distance measurement technique.

The old tagline "in space no one can hear you scream" has been  confirmed by a South African mother loudly shouting for her children to  tidy their room from 33,000 meters above the ground. Or not so loudly,  as the case appears to be. The  experiment, carried out by a graduate engineer from Brunel University  London and the BBC Radio show "The Naked Scientists," involved sending a  microphone and speaker on a custom-built Screaming Satellite to near-space to test how high-up the scream could still be heard. People from all over the world were challenged with sending in  screams and yells, with a selection of the best ultimately selected for  the mission. Amongst those making the flight was Noha from South Africa,  who proposed the team send a recording of her scolding her kids with a  scream of "Children! Come and clean your room." Science suggests that as the payload's altitude increases—and the air  becomes correspondingly thinner—the level of the sound picked up by the  microphone should decrease. This is becausesound waves are carried by air molecules bumping into one another and the  microphone. So as the air pressure drops, and there are progressively  fewer particles capable of carrying the sound, the number of molecules  hitting the microphone decreases—leading to a quieter recording. This phenomenon was alluded to by the marketers of the 1979 sci-fi horror Alien And it does indeed appear to be the case the no one can hear you  scream in space, as by the time the device's launch balloon burst at 33  kilometers above the Earth—the altitude at which there is only about  3/1000th of the amount of air pressure as at ground level—the  screams, which were initially loud at ground level, were only just  audible.

There's no known way to prove a three-dimensional "quantum spin liquid" exists, so Rice University physicists and their collaborators did the next best thing: They showed their single crystals of cerium zirconium pyrochlore had the right stuff to qualify as the first possible 3-D version of the long-sought state of matter. quantum spin liquid is a solid material in which the weird property of quantum mechanics—entanglement—ensures a liquidlike magnetic state. In a paper this week in Nature Physics, researchers offered a host of experimental evidence—including crucial neutron-scattering experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and muon spin relaxation experiments at Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)—to support their case that cerium zirconium pyrochlore, in its single-crystal form, is the first material that qualifies as a 3-D quantum spin liquid. "A quantum spin liquid is something that scientists define based on what you don't see," said Rice's Pengcheng Dai, corresponding author of the study and a member of Rice's Center for Quantum Materials (RCQM). "You don't see long-range order in the arrangement of spins. You don't see disorder. And various other things. It's not this. It's not that. There's no conclusive positive identification." The research team's samples are believed to be the first of their kind: Pyrochlores because of their 2-to-2-to-7 ratio of cerium, zirconium and oxygen, and single crystals because the atoms inside them are arranged in a continuous, unbroken lattice. "We've done every experiment that we could think of on this compound," Dai said. "(Study co-author) Emilia Morosan's group at Rice did heat capacity work to show that the material undergoes no phase transition down to 50 millikelvin. We did very careful crystallography to show there is no disorder in the crystal. We did muon spin relaxation experiments that demonstrated an absence of long-range magnetic order down to 20 millikelvin, and we did diffraction experiments that showed the sample has no oxygen vacancy or other known defects. Finally, we did inelastic neutron scattering that showed the presence of a spin-excitation continuum—which may be a quantum spin liquid hallmark—down to 35 millikelvin."