At the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Kelly Benoit-Bird will discuss how sonar or active acoustics can identify biological hotspots in ocean life, revealing the answer to the food paradox in the sea.

Using active acoustics, researchers could analyze returning echoes from sound pulses to find small activity hotspots throughout the ocean. Conventional sampling often misses these, giving rise to the Lasker food paradox proposed in the 1970s, which found that laboratory animals fed the average concentration of ocean food did not survive, despite their ocean-dwelling counterparts doing fine.

"We're using systems much like those used to find the depth of the ocean, but instead of interpreting echoes from the seafloor, we're using more sensitive systems that allow us to map layers of life in the water. What we've found is that animals of all different sizes, from millimeter-long plankton to large predators, are unevenly distributed, and this variation is really important to how life in the ocean functions," said Benoit-Bird.

The presence of concentrated pockets of ocean food and biota, varying by depth and location, suggests animals must find and capitalize on aggregated resources to survive. Higher concentrations of resources reduce the energy they must expend continuously hunting for a steady supply of food.

Using radar data from China's Chang'e 3 mission in 2013, researchers are learning more about the stratified layers of the lunar surface.

Volcanic activity on the moon has deposited lava rock on its surface throughout its history. With time, these rocks break down into dust and soil, called regolith, from space weathering and asteroid impacts. Layers of this material have been buried beneath the lunar surface over time as this cycle repeats.

"Using careful data processing, we found interesting new evidence that this buried layer, called paleoregolith, may be much thicker than previously expected. These layers have been undisturbed since their formation and could be important records for determining early asteroid impact and volcanic history of the moon," said Tieyuan Zhu, assistant professor of geophysics at Penn State.

Researchers identified from the first direct ground radar measurements made by the Chang'e 3 mission a layer of paleoregolith roughly 16 to 30 feet (4.8 to 9.1 meters) thick, between two layers of lava rock thought to be 2.3 and 3.6 billion years old. Scientists say this suggests that the paleoregolith formed significantly faster than the previous estimate of 6.5 feet (1.8 meters) per billion years.

The Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine, along with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is seeking scientific proposals to counteract wear and tear on astronauts during spaceflight.

The NASA-funded Institute's Biomedical Research Advances for Space Health (BRASH) solicitation is investing in science to protect astronauts on future Artemis missions and more. Deep space exploration presents astronauts with many physiological stressors, such as increased radiation exposure and gravity changes, and psychological stressors from isolation, confinement, and the inherent danger in such an environment.

Consequently, astronaut health is impacted as tissues degrade, DNA is damaged, and more. The BRASH solicitation aims to reduce risks to crew member health through supporting the development of disruptive technologies, therapies, or novel approaches to enhancing pre-existing internal cellular repair functions, improving the body's endogenous repair and maintenance systems.

Long after it was theorized to exist, a new class of stars has been discovered by astronomers.

Using the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory in California and data from multiple astronomical surveys, researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian made this discovery.

"We have observed the first physical proof of a new population of transitional binary stars. This is exciting; it's a missing evolutionary link in binary star formation models that we've been looking for," says Kareem El-Badry, the postdoctoral fellow responsible for the discovery.

When a star dies, it will almost always become a typical white dwarf but may rarely become an extremely low mass (ELM) white dwarf. Standard stellar evolution calculations would take the mass of such a star and conclude that it must be older than itself, so these stars cannot have come to be on their own after burning away their fuel. Therefore, astronomers theorized ELM white dwarfs must result from an interaction with another star in a binary pair, which would siphon mass from it faster than it would lose otherwise.

Mark Zuckerberg has sat down with Vayner Media CEO Gary Vaynerchuk on November 12, 2021, to discuss the next platform shift called the Metaverse or Web 3.0.

Zuckerberg is at the helm of what was formerly called Facebook, and is now Meta, and explains why he thinks the Metaverse is the next big thing on the technological advancement horizon. Zuckerberg explains that, simply put, the Metaverse is a combination between augmented reality and virtual reality. "Virtual reality" can be easily defined as being in an entirely digital world that you can interact in, and "augmented reality" is the virtual world projected onto the world that we see today.

The head of Meta says that the company is investing $10 billion dollars into the future of the Metaverse and that money will be going towards connecting people via this new digital experience. Zuckerberg recounts the timeline of the internet, with its beginning primarily being text-based to its transition to mobile phones with cameras and the shift in focus images. Zuckerberg says that video format is primarily how we share social experiences and that the Metaverse will be what's next.

The comet called Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) has just surprised researchers once again as it makes its way through to the edges of our solar system.

BB is a 62-mile wide comet that was first discovered back in 2014 and since then has been a focus point for researchers that want to understand the nature of comets and retrace their life-spans. Researchers analyzed data from the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that was acquired between 2018 and 2020, what they found was that BB was "active" much earlier than anticipated.

A comet becomes "active" when light from the Sun heats up the comets surface, melting the icy crust and turning it into water vapor, causing the iconic "tail", or "coma" that defines a comet. The researchers found that BB was active when it was much farther away from the Sun than previously anticipated, which has now pushed the possible distance for active comets out much further than researchers have previously estimated.

Russia recently tested an anti-satellite weapon out on one of its decommissioned satellites, sparking global debate over the new space debris caused by the test.

The anti-satellite weapon test caused new 1,500 pieces of space debris to join the already thousands of pieces floating around low-Earth orbit. Some of these space debris are travelling at extremely high speeds and can be a hazard to satellites, the International Space Station (ISS), and astronauts. Shortly after the weapon test was conducted, astronauts aboard the ISS were told to take cover in escape vehicles by NASAas space debris from the satellite break up were in-bound.

Russia's Minister-general of the army, Sergei Shoigu, commented on the space debris having the potential to pose a threat to future space activities, saying "the resulting fragments do not pose any threat to space activities". Now, the Pentagon has called for all global halt to testing anti-satellite weaponry, which was further backed up with condemnation for Russia's recent actions.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) has tracked another fireball event across the United States, as more than 50 people have reported a sighting.

The new listing appears on the American Meteor Society website and states the AMS received 52 reports about a fireball appearing in the night sky over several US states. Reports came from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, and Indianapolis. The AMS says that the sighting occurred on Wednesday, December 1st, 2021, around 03:14 UT.

Reports indicate that the fireball was visible for around 2.5 seconds before it disintegrated in Earth's atmosphere, seemingly disappearing in front of onlookers. For those that don't know, the AMS categorizes a meteor as a "fireball" if it is brighter than the planet Venus. There is two videos of the entry of the fireball, one above and one below. If you are interested in reading more about meteors, check out this link here.

Astronomers were trying to measure the dark matter profile for one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and discovered a massive black hole at the galaxy's center.

Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory were inspecting a Milky Way dwarf galaxy called Leo I in an attempt to find out of dark matter density increases or decreases towards a galaxy's center. Leo I lacks dark matter, hence its selection as an inspection candidate. The astronomers compiled the data and implemented it, along with models, into a supercomputer and were shocked at the results.

"The models are screaming that you need a black hole at the center; you don't really need a lot of dark matter. You have a very small galaxy that is falling into the Milky Way, and its black hole is about as massive as the Milky Way's. The mass ratio is absolutely huge. The Milky Way is dominant; the Leo I black hole is almost comparable," said UT astronomer, Karl Gebhardt.

A NASA expert has answered the following question in a new video posted to the NASA YouTube channel, "What's it Like Landing on Mars?"

Answering this week's question is NASA thermal engineer Alex Scammell, who explains that landing on Mars is a complicated process that is quite challenging, but after every attempt, the agency gains more knowledge on how to execute the landing process more effectively and efficiently. The latest rover to land on the surface of Mars is NASA's Perseverance rover that went from traveling 13,000 mph to a soft landing in just seven minutes. This process included using parachutes, thrusters, and a sky crane.

Scammell goes on to explain that majority of the decrease in speed can be attributed to the Martian atmosphere creating drag on the rover's heat shield. The NASA thermal engineer explains that understanding what the heat shield experienced while it was plummeting towards the surface of the Red Planet would allow for NASA engineers to improve upon future design iterations, which is why NASA engineers equipped instruments under Perseverance's heat shield that measure its conditions.