Prior to the emergence of new mutants of the COVID-19 coronavirus, such as the British variant B.1.1.7, the SARS-CoV-2 variant named D614G had already mutated from the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen that triggered the pandemic. D614G has rapidly spread to become the most abundant variant worldwide and this D614G mutation remains in all the new emerging variants. An international team including researchers from Bern has now been able to demonstrate in both the laboratory and in animal models why the D614G variant was able to gain the upper hand over the original SARS-CoV-2 virus....

While the majority of analyses had focused on the effects of a single nutrient on a single outcome, a conventional, unidimensional approach to understanding the effects of diet on health and aging no longer gives us the full picture. A healthy diet needs to be thought of based on the balance of ensembles of nutrients, rather than by optimizing a series of nutrients one at a time. Up until recently, little was understood about how dietary variation that occurs naturally in humans impacts aging....

Video Transcript: I came across this video recently that shows a person sneezing in slow motion. Other than thinking ‘that’s disgusting,’ I thought, what if this person was infected with SARS-CoV-2? It could be in all of those droplets and these droplets were traveling more than 20 feet from the person’s mouth. The CDC is now telling us that cloth masks might cut down on virus transmission, but that wasn’t the original message at first....

Some pollinators not only provide fertilization services for flowering plants, they also lay their eggs on the plants’ leaves after they have visited the flowers. Voracious caterpillars hatch from these eggs and their enormous appetite can easily kill the plants. So when plants advertise for pollinators they frequently also attract herbivores. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, demonstrated in field trials that the flowers of the coyote tobacco Nicotiana attenuata are able to solve this dilemma....

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal magnesium and iron gas streaming from the strange world outside our solar system known as WASP-121b. The observations represent the first time that so-called “heavy metals”—elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—have been spotted escaping from a hot Jupiter, a large, gaseous exoplanet very close to its star. Normally, hot Jupiter-sized planets are still cool enough inside to condense heavier elements such as magnesium and iron into clouds....

The intricate, near-perfect symmetry on display here reveals the incredible complexity of NGC 2985. Multiple tightly-wound spiral arms widen as they whorl outward from the galaxy’s bright core, slowly fading and dissipating until these majestic structures disappear into the emptiness of intergalactic space, bringing a beautiful end to their starry splendor. Over eons, spiral galaxies tend to run into other galaxies, often resulting in mergers. These coalescing events scramble the winding structures of the original galaxies, smoothing and rounding their shape....

The stars populating globular clusters are very similar to one another, with similar properties such as metallicity. The similarity of these stellar doppelgängers is due to their formation early in the history of the galaxy. As the stars in a globular cluster all formed at around the same time, they tend to display reasonably homogeneous properties. It was believed that this similarity also extended to the stellar helium content; that is, it was thought that all stars in a globular cluster would contain comparable amounts of helium....

“The Hubble observations are definitely telling us that the peak of quasar activity in the early universe is driven by galaxies colliding and then merging together,” said Eilat Glikman of Middlebury College in Vermont. “We are seeing the quasars in their teenage years, when they are growing quickly and all messed up.” Discovered in the 1960s, a quasar, contraction of “quasi-stellar object,” pours out the light of as much as one trillion stars from a region of space smaller than our solar system....

NGC 1803 was discovered in 1834 by astronomer John Herschel. Herschel is a big name in astronomy; John, his father William, and his aunt Caroline all made huge contributions to the field, and their legacies remain today. William systematically cataloged many of the objects he viewed in the night sky, named many moons in the Solar System, discovered infrared radiation, and more. Caroline discovered several comets and nebulae. John took this aforementioned catalog of night-sky objects and reworked and expanded it into his General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars....

Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). They scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging. Hubble’s ability to observe at infrared wavelengths — particularly with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) — has made it an indispensable tool for understanding starbirth and the origin of exoplanetary systems....

While some of the colors in this frame have been enhanced and tweaked during the process of creating the image from the observational data, different stars do indeed glow in different colors. Stars differ in color according to their surface temperature: very hot stars are blue or white, while cooler stars are redder. They may be cooler because they are smaller, or because they are very old and have entered the red giant phase, when an old star expands and cools dramatically as its core collapses....

Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, only Hubble has had the sharpness in blue light to track these elusive features that have played a game of peek-a-boo over the years. Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015, but is now shrinking. Like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS), the storm swirls in an anti-cyclonic direction and is dredging up material from deep inside the ice giant planet’s atmosphere....

The brilliant cascade of stars through the middle of this image is the galaxy ESO 318-13 as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Despite being located millions of light-years from Earth, the stars captured in this image are so bright and clear you could almost attempt to count them. Although ESO 318-13 is the main event in this image, it is sandwiched between a vast collection of bright celestial objects....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a sharp image of NGC 4634, a spiral galaxy seen exactly side-on. Its disk is slightly warped by ongoing interactions with a nearby galaxy, and it is crisscrossed by clearly defined dust lanes and bright nebulae. NGC 4634, which lies around 70 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Coma Berenices, is one of a pair of interacting galaxies. Its neighbor, NGC 4633, lies just outside the upper right corner of the frame, and is visible in wide-field views of the galaxy....

This dazzling image shows the globular cluster Messier 69, or M69 for short, as viewed through the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are dense collections of old stars. In this picture, foreground stars look big and golden when set against the backdrop of the thousands of white, silvery stars that make up M69. Another aspect of M69 lends itself to the bejeweled metaphor: As globular clusters go, M69 is one of the most metal-rich on record....

This image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals an exquisitely detailed view of part of the disc of the spiral galaxy NGC 4565. This bright galaxy is one of the most famous examples of an edge-on spiral galaxy, oriented perpendicularly to our line of sight so that we see right into its luminous disc. NGC 4565 has been nicknamed the Needle Galaxy because, when seen in full, it appears as a very narrow streak of light on the sky....

Emerging fluctuation-based functionalities are expected to open a way to novel memory device technology. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has been rapidly advancing in recent years and has begun impacting our lives in various ways. Although AI processes information in a manner similar to the human brain, the mechanisms by which human brains operate are still largely unknown. Fundamental brain components, such as neurons and the junctions between them (synapses), have been studied in detail....

Most of the actions that people take for granted are the result of a set of complex decisions that the brain deals with. The decisions about how to aim the body, how hard to hold handles, and how to raise cups are something that no one often consciously thinks of, yet the brain does all of these without missing a beat. A new Northwestern University study shows that not only does the brain handle such complex decisions, it also hides this information from the conscious mind....

“Our study indicates that avenues exist for producing more accurate forecasts for tropical cyclones using available yet underutilized data,” said Yunji Zhang, assistant research professor in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State. “This could lead to better warnings and preparedness for tropical cyclone-associated hazards in the future.” Adding microwave data collected by low-Earth-orbiting satellites to existing computer weather forecast models showed improvements in forecasting storm track, intensity, and rainfall when using Hurricane Harvey as a case-study, the scientists said....

People with hand amputations experience difficult daily life challenges, often leading to lifelong use of prosthetic hands and services. An electronic glove, or e-glove, developed by Purdue University researchers can be worn over a prosthetic hand to provide humanlike softness, warmth, appearance, and sensory perception, such as the ability to sense pressure, temperature, and hydration. The technology is published in the August 30 edition of NPG Asia Materials. While a conventional prosthetic hand helps restore mobility, the new e-glove advances the technology by offering the realistic human hand-like features in daily activities and life roles, with the potential to improve their mental health and well-being by helping them more naturally integrate into social contexts....