“Focusing on obtaining good sleep — seven to nine hours at night with a regular wake time along with waking refreshed and being alert throughout the day — may be an important behavior that helps people stick with their physical activity and dietary modification goals,” said Christopher E. Kline, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of health and human development at the University of Pittsburgh. “A previous study of ours reported that better sleep health was associated with a significantly greater loss of body weight and fat among participants in a year-long, behavioral weight loss program....

Adults who stay well-hydrated appear to be healthier, develop fewer chronic conditions, such as heart and lung disease, and live longer than those who may not get sufficient fluids, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study published on January 2, 2023, in the journal eBioMedicine. Using health data gathered from 11,255 adults over a 30-year period, researchers analyzed links between serum sodium levels – which go up when fluid intake goes down – and various indicators of health....

Water, both common and necessary for life on earth, behaves very strangely in comparison with other substances. How water’s density, specific heat, viscosity, and compressibility respond to changes in pressure and temperature is completely opposite to other liquids that we know. We all are aware that all matter shrinks when it is cooled resulting in an increase in density. We would therefore expect that water would have high density at the freezing point....

A class of materials that once looked as if it might revolutionize everything from solar cells to frying pans—but fell out of favor in the early 2000s—could be poised for commercial resurrection, findings from a University of Michigan-led research team suggest. Published in Nature Communications, the study demonstrates a way to make much larger quasicrystals than were possible before, without the defects that plagued past manufacturers and led quasicrystals to be dismissed as an intellectual curiosity....

Massospora manipulates male cicadas into flicking their wings like females – a mating invitation – which tempts unsuspecting male cicadas and infects them. It’s a recent discovery into the bizarre world of cicadas plagued by a psychedelic fungus that contains chemicals including those found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. The research, “Behavioral betrayal: How select fungal parasites enlist living insects to do their bidding,” was published in the journal PLOS Pathogens. Researchers with the Kasson Lab at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design discovered that cicadas infected with Massospora unknowingly engage in trickery with their fellow insects, resulting in disease transmission....

The scientists have published their findings in the journal Advanced Materials. Pablo Esquinazi and his team at the University of Leipzig report that flakes of graphite doped with water seem to continue to superconduct at temperatures greater than 100°C. Although this might seem like science fiction, the work has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It still merits further scrutiny, however tentative these results seem. Graphite can superconduct when doped with elements that provide it with additional free electrons....

The resupply ship reached preliminary orbit and deployed its solar arrays and navigational antennas as planned, on its way to meet up with the orbiting laboratory and its Expedition 68 crew members. Progress will dock to the aft port of the Zvezda service module two days later, on Saturday, February 11 at 3:49 a.m. EST. Live coverage on NASA TV of rendezvous and docking will begin at 3 a.m. Progress will deliver almost three tons of food, fuel, and supplies to the space station....

Its abundance in our solar system—despite its rarity on Earth—makes metallic hydrogen an intriguing focus for researchers at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory of Laser Energetics (LLE) who study planet formation and evolution, including how planets both inside and outside our solar system form magnetic shields. “Metallic hydrogen is the most abundant form of matter in our planetary system,” says Mohamed Zaghoo, a research associate at the LLE. “It’s a shame we don’t have it naturally here on earth, but on Jupiter, there are oceans of metallic hydrogen....

A new approach brings the hope of new therapeutic options for suppressing seasonal influenza and avian flu: On the basis of an empty – and therefore non-infectious – shell of a phage virus, researchers from Berlin have developed a chemically modified phage capsid that “stifles” influenza viruses. Perfectly fitting binding sites cause influenza viruses to be enveloped by the phage capsids in such a way that it is practically impossible for them to infect lung cells any longer....

“Inhibition is important for every aspect of brain function. But for over two decades, most sleep studies have focused on understanding excitatory synapses,” said Dr. Wei Lu, senior investigator at NINDS. “This is a timely study to try to understand how sleep and wakefulness regulate the plasticity of inhibitory synapses.” Kunwei Wu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Lu’s lab, investigated what occurs at inhibitory synapses in mice during sleep and wakefulness....

For the first time and in near-atomic detail, scientists at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have revealed the structure of the key part of the inner ear responsible for hearing. “This is the last sensory system in which that fundamental molecular machinery has remained unknown,” said senior author Eric Gouaux, Ph.D. He is a senior scientist with the OHSU Vollum Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The molecular machinery that carries out this absolutely amazing process has been unresolved for decades....

The primary visual cortex of different species achieves this goal using different strategies. In humans and macaques, the cortex splits the map of visual space in intercalated pairs of stripes for the left and right eyes forming a Zebra pattern. In carnivores, the cortex splits the map in blobs forming a Dalmatian pattern. In rodents and lagomorphs, the afferents from the two eyes mix and do not form any specific pattern....

As much as a third of food produced for human consumption is wasted or lost globally every year. New research published in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests one way to take a big bite out of food waste is to use bread destined for the dumpster as a medium for cultivating microbial starters for the food industry. While exact numbers regarding the amount of bread that is thrown away are hard to estimate, it is believed “hundreds of tons are wasted daily worldwide” from spoilage and other factors, including consumer preferences for products like crustless loaves....

Just five years later, in 1994, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took sharp images of Neptune from Earth’s distance of 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion kilometers). Scientists were eager to get another look at the storms. Instead, Hubble’s photos revealed that both the Earth-sized Great Dark Spot and the smaller Dark Spot 2 had vanished. “It was certainly a surprise,” recalls Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

Researchers at UC San Francisco and the University of Queensland have discovered a scorpion toxin that targets the “wasabi receptor,” a chemical-sensing protein found in nerve cells that’s responsible for the sinus-jolting sting of wasabi and the flood of tears associated with chopping onions. Because the toxin triggers a pain response through a previously unknown mechanism, scientists think it can be used as a tool for studying chronic pain, and inflammation, and may eventually lead to the development of new kinds of non-opioid pain relievers....

An international research team has measured the size of a star dating back 2 billion years after the Big Bang, or more than 11 billion years ago. Detailed images show the exploding star cooling and could help scientists learn more about the stars and galaxies that existed in the early Universe. Led by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, the study was published recently in Nature, the world’s leading peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary science journal....

Researchers in China have developed a rewriteable paper coating that can encrypt secret information with relatively low-tech invisible ink—water. A message printed out by a water-jet printer on a manganese-complex-coated paper is invisible to the naked eye, but the message reveals itself under 254 nm UV light. The paper can be ready for another round of printing after erasing the message by heating it with a blow dryer for 15-30 seconds....

During the spacecraft’s final moments before impact and obliteration, its Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) imager took four images capturing its terminal approach as its asteroid target Dimorphos increasingly filled the field of view. This video shows the final five-and-a-half minutes of images leading up to the DART spacecraft’s intentional collision with asteroid Dimorphos. As it approached the asteroid, the DART spacecraft streamed these images from its DRACO camera back to Earth in real time....

“We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now we’ve shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a senior author of the new paper, professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and holder of the Roger Guillemin Chair. “This gives us targets that we may eventually be able to act on with drugs to treat aging in humans....

Azithromycin, also known as Z-Pak, has already been shown to benefit women delivering by cesarean section. But the new findings reveal that the common antibiotic reduces mortality for women delivering vaginally and cuts their risk of developing sepsis, a potentially fatal full-body infection. Infections, particularly sepsis, are responsible for 10% of maternal deaths shortly before, during, and after childbirth, putting such infections in the top five causes of maternal mortality worldwide....