Since astronomers discovered the Smith Cloud, a giant gas cloud plummeting toward the Milky Way, they have been unable to determine its composition, which would hold clues as to its origin. University of Notre Dame astrophysicist Nicolas Lehner and his collaborators have now determined that the cloud contains elements similar to our sun, which means the cloud originated in the Milky Way’s outer edges and not in intergalactic space as some have speculated.

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One bacterial pathogen is responsible for a range of diseases, from pharyngitis and impetigo to more severe diagnoses such as toxic shock syndrome and necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating disease), a serious bacterial skin infection that spreads quickly and kills the body’s soft tissue. The pathogen, known as Group A Streptococcus, remains a global health burden with an estimated 700 million cases reported annually, and more than half a million deaths due to severe infections.

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On Monday (Jan. 25), the World Health Organization announced that Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness that in the past year has swept quickly throughout equatorial countries, is expected to spread across the Americas and into the United States.

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Five Notre Dame faculty members have been named to the Thomson Reuters’ 2015 Highly Cited Researchers list, the top 1 percent of the almost 9 million scholars and scientists, accounting for more than 2 million journal papers, who publish their academic findings every year.

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Dominic Acri is a sophomore taking full advantage of all that Notre Dame has to offer. He has a double major in Neuroscience & Behavior and Film, Television, and Theatre. He is a member of the Balfour-Hesburgh Scholars Program. He is a Writing Center tutor. He is a Student Intern on the Multicultural Student Programs and Services team. He works in the lab of Dr. Giles Duffield. And those are only the things he has done since he arrived on campus.

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Physicists around the world were puzzled recently when an unusual bump appeared in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing them to wonder if it was a new particle previously unknown, or perhaps even two new particles. The collision cannot be explained by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics.

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If they successfully invade Lake Erie, Asian carp could eventually account for about a third of the total weight of fish in the lake and could cause declines in most fish species — including prized sport and commercial fish such as walleye, according to a new computer modeling study.

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