The unique properties of baseball’s famed “magic” mud, which MLB equipment managers applied to every ball in the World Series, have never been scientifically quantified — until now. In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) and School of Arts & Sciences (SAS) reveal what makes the magic mud so special.

“One of the most important scientific questions today is how many potential Earth-like Habitats (EHs) exist in the Galaxy, and how many of these planets could, in principle, support aerobic life?” according to an article in the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology by Helmut Lammer and Manuel Scherf, from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Space Research Institute. In two additional articles in Astrobiology, the authors, together with Laurenz Spross, from the University of Graz, derived a new formula that can be used to estimate the maximum occurrence rate of EHs in the Galaxy, and applied this formulation to the galactic disk by considering only requirements that are already scientifically quantifiable.

University of Virginia mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. student Md. Rafiqul Islam and a team of researchers advance the race to design faster, smaller and more efficient devices.

The new lab will provide opportunities for UCF undergraduate, graduate, medical students, residents fellows and physicians to conduct interdisciplinary research.

 

A pioneering collaboration investigating the intricacies of biological clocks in bacteria has been awarded prestigious European Research Council (ERC) funding.

 

The American Physical Society has recognized the Graphite Reactor, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as an APS historic site. APS President Young-Kee Kim presented a plaque commemorating the recognition on Monday, Nov. 4, the 81st anniversary of the reactor’s first achieving criticality in 1943.