Author: John Timmer

For over a century, a star's bizarre behavior has been hiding in plain sight. Now, after unusual fluctuations in its light were spotted in the Kepler data, a researcher has gone back and looked at old photographic plates and found that its behavior has been unusual since some of the earliest images. The new findings make any mundane explanations for the star's erratic behavior even less likely.

"The star KIC8462852 (TYC 3162-665-1) is apparently a perfectly normal star." That's how a new paper from Louisiana State's Bradley Schaefer begins. It's an F-type star, which means it's a bit larger than the Sun, but is otherwise boring and stable. If you were to image it (as has happened many times over recent decades), it would look unremarkable.

It took the Kepler telescope to figure out that the star was anything but boring. Kepler was designed to stare at one patch of the sky and watch for signs of planets passing in front of their host stars. By chance, that patch of sky included KIC8462852. Its bizarre behavior—sudden dips in brightness of as much as 20 percent, lasting for seemingly random periods of time—wouldn't have been identified by the software that analyzes Kepler data.

Today, the US Department of the Interior announced that it will put a halt to new leases for coal extraction on public lands. While coal companies could continue to mine on existing leases, no new ones will be permitted until a comprehensive review of the program is completed. Roughly 40 percent of the nation's coal comes from public lands.

“We haven’t undertaken a comprehensive review of the program in more than 30 years, and we have an obligation to current and future generations to ensure the federal coal program delivers a fair return to American taxpayers and takes into account its impacts on climate change,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said via a released statement.

The announcement follows President Obama's latest State of the Union Address, in which he called for changes in how the US manages its coal and oil resources. Obama suggested that the costs fossil fuels impose on the planet need to be taken into account, language that was echoed in Jewell's announcement. The move implies that there will be some effort to have the extraction of coal include some portion of the social cost of carbon, which has until now been left as an externality.

NEW YORK—Today, the American Museum of Natural History dropped the curtain to reveal one of the biggest paleontological finds of recent years. Everything in that sentence is literal—the museum lowered a curtain to reveal a full-sized cast of the Titanosaur, a species that may be the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

The find itself made news when images came out of paleontologist Diego Pol lying on the femur of the skeleton, which is roughly the size of a sofa (though far less comfortable). Since then, the team from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio (MPEF) have excavated over 200 bones, representing 70 percent of the skeleton. Four of those bones (each over a meter long) are also on display at the exhibit. The skeleton on display is made of lightweight fiberglass casts, as the actual bones would weigh far too much to support—the femur alone is roughly 500kg. It's the first outside of the MPEF.

The partnership between MPE and the AMNH was a natural one, as Pol got his PhD there. And he was back on hand for the Titanosaur's unveiling.

We reported yesterday on the workplace difficulties that many female scientists face as they advance through their careers. But all of those problems happen after the women have been through years of education, a process that can also be a source of challenges. A variety of surveys have found indications that stereotypes about women's capabilities in science and math influence expectations throughout their education.

Connecting these biases to actual educational problems can be challenging, but a Swiss researcher named Sarah Hofer has found a way to test these issues. Hofer provided a large panel of physics teachers with a single answer that was attached to either male or female biographical information and asked them to grade it. She found that tests with a female bio got significantly lower grades, at least from teachers who were early in their careers.

Hofer's approach was simple. She told physics teachers in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany that she was doing a survey on their grading practices. They'd be given a physics question with an answer that required detailed reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, along with some information about a student and the student's answer.

Last year, a confidential report was leaked that revealed that University of California, Berkeley had conducted an investigation into one of its prominent astronomy researchers and found that he had repeatedly engaged in sexual harassment. The report, however, was kept so confidential that the other faculty in his own department didn't even know about it. After it leaked, they called on him to resign, which he did.

That level of secrecy has now drawn the attention of Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Speier announced today that she would be seeking legislation that would compel universities to make other universities aware of the results of any investigations into violations of federal sexual harassment standards. To bolster her case, she also released a second confidential university report that details how a different astronomer engaged in flagrant sexual harassment, yet continued a successful career at a different university.

University investigations into faculty misconduct (sexual or otherwise) are typically kept confidential because even unfounded allegations can have severe consequences on an academic career. In both of these cases, however, the universities (Berkeley and the University of Arizona) kept the results of the investigation confidential even after the allegations had been substantiated during the investigation.

Given how fantastically cheap silicon-based photovoltaic cells have gotten, it might be hard to muster much excitement for developing any other material. But the cost of silicon-based PV has created a potential niche—it's so cheap that installation costs now dominate the price of solar power. If we could squeeze more energy out of a single installation, it could drop the costs even further.

That's one of the reasons researchers have been trying to develop perovskites. Not only are these made from chemicals that are cheap and easy to manufacture, there are indications that they can be tuned to absorb some wavelengths while allowing others to pass through to an underlying silicon photovoltaic. The big problem: they tend to decompose when exposed to intense light.

Now, an Oxford-Berlin collaboration is reporting they may have solved the decomposition problem and, in the process, accidentally made a material where they could tune the absorbance across a wide range of wavelengths. With some additional improvements, they suggest a combined silicon-perovskite cell could reach 30 percent efficiencies—up from the neighborhood of 22 for silicon alone.

We tend to think of the properties of the chemical elements as immutable—a metal is a metal, and a gas is a gas. But all those properties are what we experience on Earth. The Universe, on the other hand, is filled with extremes of temperature and pressure that cause elements to defy our expectations. Pluto is covered in nitrogen ice, while some exoplanets are likely to experience rains of liquid metal.

Close to the cores of gas giants, elements are squeezed by unimaginable pressures, capable of rearranging electron orbitals and playing havoc with the chemical bonding we see on Earth. Here, theorists have predicted, the electrons of hydrogen could be set free, converting the gas into a solid or liquid metal. But while researchers first predicted the existence of metallic hydrogen 80 years ago, the element has stubbornly refused to appear, even after we've raised pressures well above where it was expected to appear.

Now, three Edinburgh-based researchers report placing hydrogen under the highest pressures yet achieved. Scans of the resulting material suggest that the chemical bonds that normally link hydrogen into a molecule are starting to break down, heralding the possible appearance of a metallic form.

Coal-fired plants and other human activities release mercury into the environment, where some of it ends up converted into methyl mercury, a potent neurotoxin. Because of this toxicity, the Environmental Protection Agency is currently in the process of tightening emissions rules at US power plants.

Global estimates of how much mercury we're emitting indicates that humanity is putting more of the substance into the atmosphere. But various direct measurements of the amount in the environment have been declining slowly over the past few decades. So where's the missing mercury? A new study suggests that we've cleaned it up while getting different pollutants under control.

Mercury emissions actually come in two forms. Some of it is released as neutral atoms, which are able to circulate widely in the atmosphere before being oxidized and falling to the surface. Another portion of the emissions are already oxidized and result in local contamination.

Just prior to the end of 2015, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC to everyone, including itself) made a momentous discovery: it was accepting the existence of four new chemical elements. Combined, they complete the bottom row of the periodic table.

These days, discovering a new element involves making it yourself. Moderately weighty atoms are accelerated into each other and, in rare cases, fuse to form a single atomic nucleus—which falls back apart again almost instantly. Between the rarity of the formation and the vanishingly small half-life, actually spotting a success is a significant challenge.

Still, evidence that these four elements have been created was building for a number of years. The IUPAC, however, waited to convene a panel of experts to evaluate that evidence. Clearly, the panel found it compelling.

Ceramics have many useful properties: they can be extremely durable, and hold up to very high temperatures. Unfortunately simple flaws in the material can leave the door open for catastrophic failures, making manufacturing, especially of complex shapes, challenging.

Now, a team at a company called HRL Laboratories has described a method of 3D printing ceramics. The work, which combines a number of techniques that have already been in use, can create complicated structures that are very robust and able to withstand temperatures of up to 1,700 degrees Celsius.

The foundation of the work actually dates back to the 1960s. That's when researchers developed what are called polymer-derived ceramics. These are standard polymers made of chemicals that incorporate some of the materials that are typically used to make ceramic (such as silicon and nitrogen). Once the polymer is made in the desired shape, it can be heated, which causes it to undergo chemical reactions that decompose the organic portion of the polymer. Those escape as methane or carbon dioxide, leaving behind a ceramic composed of silicon, carbon, and nitrogen.