Two very salty stars
Astronomers in Japan have identified two newborn stars that are totally enveloped in a soup of water vapor and sodium chloride—the stuff known here on Earth as table salt. Spotted in data collected by the ALMA telescope in Chile, the stars are about 9,500 light-years from our planet and have a combined mass 25 times that of the sun. Sodium chloride is relatively rare in the universe and scientists had previously identified only one young star, Orion KL Source I, surrounded by a salty cloud, reports Axios .com. That was such a “peculiar” find, says study leader Kei Tanaka, “that we were not sure whether salt is suitable to see gas disks around massive stars. Our results confirmed that salt is actually a good marker.” The origins of the twin stars, which appear to orbit in different directions, are unclear: They may have formed separately before joining later in life. Most big stars have companions, so scientists are eager to understand more about how these celestial partnerships begin. The stars may also help shed light on the formation of our own solar system, which is rich in water vapor and sodium chloride.
amount floating on the surface and is the equivalent of 18 to 24 shopping bags full of plastic for every foot of coastline on every continent except Antarctica. Microplastics— fragments that are smaller than 5 millimeters (0.19 inches)—have been found in recent years in some of the world’s most remote places. To calculate how much is on the seafloor, researchers used a robotic submarine to dive as deep as 10,000 feet and collect 51 sediment samples in the Great Australian Bight, which sits some 240 miles off the coast of South Australia. Each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces, up to 25 times more than had been found in earlier deep-sea studies of microplastics, reports The New York Times. Study co-author Britta Denise Hardesty said the plastic pieces could be ingested by plankton and fish and end up in the human food chain. We need to stop treating “the big blue,” she says, like “a big trash pit.”
hold out until after breakfast. New research suggests that a cup of joe first thing in the morning can hamper blood sugar control, a risk factor for health issues such as diabetes and heart disease. For the study, 29 healthy men and women took part in three separate experiments: having a normal night’s sleep and then consuming a sugary drink on waking (the drink contained the same amount of calories as a typical breakfast), a disrupted night followed by the sugary drink, and then a disrupted night but with a strong black coffee 30 minutes before the sugary drink. One night of bad sleep didn’t worsen the participants’ blood sugar and insulin responses. But after the coffee, their blood glucose response increased by about 50 percent—suggesting the black stuff was impairing the body’s ability to cope with breakfast. “Nearly half of us will wake in the morning and, before doing anything else, drink coffee,” co-author James Betts, from the University of Bath in the U.K., tells ScienceDaily.com. “Up until now, we have had limited knowledge about what this is doing to our bodies.”