News and Events

Wed, Sep 16, 4 pm (C215 ESC, and online)
(Broadcast) Faith, Freedom and the Common Good

President Dallin H. Oaks of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will deliver a keynote address at the Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

The event, titled “Faith, Freedom and the Common Good,” will explore the relationship between religious faith and American democracy. President Oaks will speak on faith, religious liberty and the United States Constitution on the eve of Constitution Day.

President Oaks has spoken and written extensively on religious freedom, the United States Constitution and the importance of faith in civic life. Before his call as an Apostle in 1984, he served as a justice on the Utah Supreme Court and was a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

The hydrogen in your body and present in every molecule of water came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present in our bodies in only small amounts but are essential to the functioning of all known life. The featured periodic table is color coded to indicate humanity's best guess as to the nuclear origin of all known elements. The sites of nuclear creation of some elements, such as copper, are not really well known and are continuing topics of observational and computational research. APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Temp:  73 °FN2 Boiling:75.9 K
Humidity: 22%H2O Boiling:   368.4 K
Pressure:85 kPaSunrise:7:07 AM
Wind:3 m/s   Sunset:7:38 PM
Precip:0 mm   Sunlight:315 W/m²  
41 years of launches, demos, and unforgettable labs: Celebrating Dr. Grant Hart
Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne Inspires BYU Students with the Future of Gravitational-Wave Science
Four Decades Under the Stars: Honoring Dr. Mike Joner and the Legacy of West Mountain Observatory.

Selected Publications

William P. Heaps, Anne Elise Packard, Kristina M. McCammon, Tyler P. Green, Joseph P. Talley, Bradley C. Bundy, and Dennis Della Corte

The glomerular filtration barrier poses a significant challenge for circulating proteins, with molecules below ~60–70 kDa facing rapid renal clearance. Endogenous proteins have evolved sophisticated evasion mechanisms including oligomerization, carrier binding, electrostatic repulsion, and FcRn-mediated recycling. Understanding these natural strategies provides blueprints for engineering therapeutic proteins with improved pharmacokinetics. This review examines how endogenous proteins resist filtration, evaluates their application in protein engineering, and discusses clinical translation including established technologies (PEGylation, Fc-fusion) and emerging strategies (albumin-binding domains, glycoengineering). We address critical challenges of balancing half-life extension with tissue penetration, biological activity, and immunogenicity—essential considerations for the rational design of next-generation therapeutics with optimized dosing and enhanced efficacy.

The AGN Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping (STORM) 2 campaign targeted Mrk 817 with intensive multiwavelength monitoring and found its soft X-ray emission to be strongly absorbed. We present results from 157 near-IR spectra with an average cadence of a few days. Whereas the hot dust reverberation signal as tracked by the continuum flux does not have a clear response, we recover a dust reverberation radius of ∼90 lt-days from the blackbody dust temperature light curve. This radius is consistent with previous photometric reverberation mapping results when Mrk 817 was in an unobscured state. The heating/cooling process we observe indicates that the inner limit of the dusty torus is set by a process other than sublimation, rendering it a luminosity-invariant “dusty wall” of a carbonaceous composition. Assuming thermal equilibrium for dust optically thick to the incident radiation, we derive a luminosity of ∼6 × 1044 erg s−1 for the source heating it. This luminosity is similar to that of the obscured spectral energy distribution, assuming a disk with an Eddington accretion rate of . Alternatively, the dust is illuminated by an unobscured lower luminosity disk with , which permits the UV–optical continuum lags in the high-obscuration state to be dominated by diffuse emission from the broad-line region. Finally, we find hot dust extended on scales ≳ 140–350 pc, associated with the rotating disk of ionised gas we observe in spatially resolved [S III] λ9531 images. Its likely origin is in the compact bulge of the barred spiral host galaxy, where it is heated by a nuclear starburst.

Volume 1 of the FCC Feasibility Report presents an overview of the physics case, experimental programme, and detector concepts for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). This volume outlines how FCC would address some of the most profound open questions in particle physics, from precision studies of the Higgs and EW bosons and of the top quark, to the exploration of physics beyond the Standard Model. The report reviews the experimental opportunities offered by the staged implementation of FCC, beginning with an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee), operating at several centre-of-mass energies, followed by a hadron collider (FCC-hh). Benchmark examples are given of the expected physics performance, in terms of precision and sensitivity to new phenomena, of each collider stage. Detector requirements and conceptual designs for FCC-ee experiments are discussed, as are the specific demands that the physics programme imposes on the accelerator in the domains of the calibration of the collision energy, and the interface region between the accelerator and the detector. The report also highlights advances in detector, software and computing technologies, as well as the theoretical tools/reconstruction techniques that will enable the precision measurements and discovery potential of the FCC experimental programme. The content and structure of this report are guided by the scope and priorities defined in the mandate of the FCC Feasibility Study. It is therefore not intended to serve as an exhaustive review of the full physics potential of FCC. Several topics, already covered in earlier reports such as the FCC CDR, are not reiterated here or are addressed only briefly, in alignment with the study’s focus. This volume reflects the outcome of a global collaborative effort involving hundreds of scientists and institutions, aided by a dedicated community-building coordination, and provides a targeted assessment of the scientific opportunities and experimental foundations of the FCC programme.

Micah R. Shepherd, Carson F. Cunningham, and Kent L. Gee

In August 2023, the Antares 230 launched successfully for the NG-19 resupply mission to the International Space Station. Acoustic measurements were taken at various locations around the launch pad, ranging from 60 to 200 m away from the vehicle. The analysis focused on azimuthal and polar angles to investigate the vehicle’s sound directivity during the launch. Spectral data were evaluated as functions of frequency, angular position around the pad, and orientation relative to the vehicle. A spatio-spectral analysis was conducted to interpret the data effectively. Initial findings reveal that maximum sound levels are associated with wider angles relative to the plume for stations closer to the source. The peak frequency at all stations was observed to be between 20 and 60 Hz, which is common for vehicles of this size. Although proximity to the rocket complicates distinguishing between angles, making directivity analysis challenging, a spatio-spectral analysis best reveals the spectral features of the noise.

Molecule generation is advancing rapidly in chemical discovery and drug design. Flow-matching methods have recently set the state of the art (SOTA) in unconditional molecule generation, surpassing score-based diffusion models. However, diffusion models still lead in property-guided generation. In this work, we introduce PropMolFlow, an approach for property-guided molecule generation based on geometry-complete SE(3)-equivariant flow matching. Integrating five different property embedding methods with a Gaussian expansion of scalar properties, PropMolFlow achieves competitive performance against previous SOTA diffusion models in conditional molecule generation while maintaining high structural stability and validity. Additionally, it enables higher sampling speed with fewer time steps compared with baseline models. We highlight the importance of validating the properties of generated molecules through density functional theory calculations. Furthermore, we introduce a task to assess the model’s ability to propose molecules with under-represented property values, assessing its capacity for out-of-distribution generalization.