University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers have developed a structural nanofiber that is both strong and tough, a discovery that could transform everything from airplanes and bridges to body armor and bicycles. Their findings are featured on the cover of this week’s April issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal, ACS Nano. “Whatever is made of composites can benefit from our nanofibers,” said the team’s leader, Yuris Dzenis, McBroom Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a member of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience....

Thankfully, heavy rain yesterday means that most of the flames have now been extinguished. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian authorities also reported yesterday that there was still more than 500 firefighters, 124 fire engines and several helicopters still working to contain the smoldering. In 1986, the nuclear site suffered a disastrous meltdown that spread radioactive fallout across Europe. The concerns were that the fires could reach the defunct nuclear reactor and a storage site for radioactive waste, and that there could be a risk of exposure to increased radiation from the burning of contaminated forest and soil....

A survey of nurses caring for children with heart problems has revealed that more than half are emotionally exhausted. The analysis, presented today at ESC Congress 2020, also found that good working environments were linked with less burnout. “Nurses’ wellbeing is central to ensuring the best outcomes for patients,” said study author Dr. Annamaria Bagnasco of the University of Genoa, Italy. “When wards have poor leadership and fragmented teams with no development prospects for nurses this should raise an alarm that there is a risk of burnout....

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter can be seen here taking off, hovering and then landing on the Martian surface on April 19, 2021. The Mastcam-Z imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shot video of the helicopter’s flight. The video is presented here in side-by-side formats that have both been enhanced to show a dust plume swirling during takeoff and again on landing. The view on the left uses motion filtering to show where dust was detected during liftoff and landing and the view on the right is enhanced with the motion filtering....

The study — led by the University of Exeter and Okayama University — examined broad-horned flour beetles, whose males have exaggerated mandibles, while females do not. Male beetles with the largest mandibles win more fights and mate with more females — an example of “sexual selection,” where certain characteristics (like a male peacock’s tail) improve mating success. However, having bigger mandibles requires a masculinized body (large head and neck), and a smaller abdomen — which, for females, limits the number of eggs they can carry....

RIKEN physicists have engineered a highly efficient LED that is deadly to microbes and viruses but safe for humans. One day it could help countries emerge from the shadows of pandemics by killing pathogens in rooms full of people. Lamps of this type can be constructed with LEDs, making them energy efficient. However, these LEDs produce ultraviolet light in a range that damages DNA and therefore cannot be used around people....

From the perspective of future societies, in extremely closed environments such as a space station, self-sufficiency in food cultivation and waste management is critical. However, the technology to achieve this is still lacking. In a new study, scientists from Japan shed light on their most recent breakthrough: a cheap and efficient method to make liquid fertilizer (ammonia) from simplified artificial urine, serving an ideal dual purpose of growing food and treating waste....

As of Thursday, January 5, the Department of Defense predicted that the 5,400-pound satellite will reenter the atmosphere at approximately 6:40 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 8 with an uncertainty of +/- 17 hours. NASA and the Defense Department will continue to monitor the reentry and update the predictions. NASA expects most of the satellite to burn up as it travels through the atmosphere, but some components are expected to survive the reentry....

Researchers have developed a genetically modified tomato that produces a certain peptide which will lower the plaque buildup in the arteries of mice. This could also work in humans. The researchers presented their findings at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2012. The GM tomato produces 6F, a small peptide that mimics the action of ApoA-1, the chief protein in high-density lipoprotein (HDL). They used this in mice that were unable to remove low-density lipoprotein and fed them a high-fat diet....

“These ancient fossils provide us with evidence of how at least two predator species hunted these vegetarian dinosaurs 210 million years ago. It is amazing to follow the clues left behind in fossilized teeth, jaws, limbs, and other fossils to help us tell the ancient story of life in southern Africa,” says Tolchard. The fossils studied by Tolchard include teeth, pieces of jaws, hind limbs, and body armor, all of which can be described as parts of rauisuchians....

The research, led by Nabil G. Seidah, the director of the Biochemical Neuroendocrinology Research Unit at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute and a professor of medicine at the University of Montreal, has been published in the journal Molecular Metabolism. His work was done in collaboration with Carole Fruchart Gaillard and colleagues at the Université de Paris-Saclay’s Department of Drugs and Technologies for Health, as well as with scientists in the pharmacy department of the University of Pisa, in Italy....

Groundbreaking research by UNLV geoscientist Oliver Tschauner and colleagues found diamonds pushed up from the Earth’s interior had traces of unique crystallized water called Ice-VII. The study, “Ice-VII inclusions in Diamonds: Evidence for aqueous fluid in Earth’s deep Mantle,” was published Thursday in the journal Science. In the jewelry business, diamonds with impurities hold less value. But for Tschauner and other scientists, those impurities, known as inclusions have infinite value, as they may hold the key to understanding the inner workings of our planet....

Researchers say viral transmission risk is low, even when candies are handled by infected persons, but handwashing and disinfecting collected sweets reduces risk even further. Like a specter, the question looms: How risky is trick-or-treating with SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in the air — and possibly on the candy? In a study published on October 29, 2020 in the journal mSystems, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and San Diego State University analyzed the viral load on Halloween candy handled by patients with COVID-19....

Since December 2019, croplands in Kenya have been inundated by the voracious insects. By January 2020, at least 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) of land were infested—Kenya’s worst locust event in 70 years. In February, the swarms spread to ten countries in eastern Africa, threatening food supplies for millions of people. Ethiopia and Somalia have seen their worst locust infestations in 25 years. The United Nations (UN) has warned that the upcoming rainy season may make things worse....

Despite experiencing the virus’s devastation firsthand, many health care workers did not intend to get vaccinated when the COVID-19 vaccinations became available. However, a recent Northwestern Medicine research illustrates how rapidly many of them changed their attitudes at a large urban health care system, resulting in a vaccination rate of 95 percent by spring 2021. The study found: Only three-fourths of the 4,180 health care workers in the study intended to get vaccinated in winter 2021, but by spring 2021, 95% had been vaccinated....

As NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity prepares to land on Mars, public audiences worldwide can take their own readiness steps to share in the adventure. Landing is scheduled for about 10:31 a.m. PDT on August 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT on August 6), at mission control inside NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Martian fans can help NASA test-drive a new 3D interactive experience that will allow the public to follow along with Curiosity’s discoveries on Mars....

Now MIT researchers have designed a model that demonstrates an understanding of some basic “intuitive physics” about how objects should behave. The model could be used to help build smarter artificial intelligence and, in turn, provide information to help scientists understand infant cognition. The model, called ADEPT, observes objects moving around a scene and makes predictions about how the objects should behave, based on their underlying physics. While tracking the objects, the model outputs a signal at each video frame that correlates to a level of “surprise” — the bigger the signal, the greater the surprise....

A beautiful blue butterfly flutters towards a nest of warm dust and gas, above an intricate network of cool filaments in this image of the Vela C region by ESA’s Herschel space observatory. Vela C is the most massive of the four parts of the Vela complex, a massive star nursery just 2300 light-years from the Sun. It is an ideal natural laboratory for us to study the birth of stars....

Surveying the sky for almost four years to observe the glow of cold cosmic dust embedded in interstellar clouds of gas, the Herschel Space Observatory has provided astronomers with an unprecedented glimpse into the stellar cradles of our Galaxy. “We are made of star stuff,” the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, as the atoms that make us – our bodies, our homes, our planet – come largely from previous generations of stars....

The dark spots in this enhanced-color infrared image are the recent impact craters that occurred in the Tharsis region between 2008 and 2014. These impact craters were first discovered by the Mars Context Camera (or CTX, also onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) as a cluster of dark spots. The meteoroid that formed these craters must have broken up upon atmospheric entry and fragmented into two larger masses along with several smaller fragments, spawning at least twenty or so smaller impact craters....