“‘Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below.’ – John Muir on Mount Rainier.”

Flight Engineers Nicole Mann of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will set their Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), or spacesuits, to battery power at 8:15 a.m. EST (5:15 a.m. PST) on Thursday. After their EMUs are set to battery power, the astronauts’ spacewalk officially begins and they will exit the Quest airlock into the vacuum of space and maneuver to the starboard truss structure. Once they arrive at the Starboard-4 truss, they will complete a modification kit installation job they began on January 20 to prepare the station for its next roll-out solar array....

A massive star — known as an O-type star and about 15 to 20 times heavier than the Sun — is likely responsible for sculpting this cosmic pumpkin. A recent study of the region suggests that the powerful outflow of radiation and particles from the star likely swept the surrounding dust and gas outward, creating deep gouges in this cloud, which is known as a nebula. Spitzer, which detects infrared light, saw the star glowing like a candle at the center of a hollowed-out pumpkin....

An antiviral drug used to treat SARS-CoV-2 remains effective against the newest variants of the evolving virus, according to Rutgers researchers. The study, published in the journal Cell Research, is one of the first to explore the full extent of SARS-CoV-2 mutations. Researchers concluded that the Pfizer antiviral drug Paxlovid still quashes COVID by jamming the cell machinery of a key protein, known as the “main protease” or Mpro, involved in replicating the virus....

MicroRNA are the tiny non-coding RNA molecules that help determine whether genes are expressed or silenced. One particular microRNA — miR-107 — plays a key role in early brain development, and perhaps in the development of brain-related disease, a Yale School of Medicine team has found. Experts have long known that miRNAs are involved in brain development but not precisely how. Assistant professor of medicine Stefania Nicoli and her team set out to describe the process by studying miR-107 in zebrafish....

“People have been arguing about whether these long-lived pioneers contribute much to carbon storage over the long term,” said Caroline Farrior, an assistant professor of integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin and a primary investigator on the study. “We were surprised to find that they do.” It is unclear the extent to which tropical rainforests can help soak up excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced by burning fossil fuels....

A new study by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Washington University in St. Louis tackled these questions by leveraging data from nuclear scattering experiments to make stringent constraints on how nucleons (neutrons and protons) arrange themselves in the nucleus. The research appears in two corresponding papers in Physical Review C and Physical Review Letters. Robert J. Charity, research professor of chemistry, Willem H. Dickhoff, professor of physics, and Lee G....

In the study, published on January 27, 2023, in the journal Neuron, the team found that prairie voles bred without receptors for oxytocin and showed the same monogamous mating, attachment, and parenting behaviors as regular voles. In addition, females without oxytocin receptors gave birth and produced milk, though in smaller quantities, than ordinary female voles. The results indicate that the biology underlying pair bonding and parenting isn’t purely dictated by the receptors for oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “love hormone....

Although the study was small—lung samples from 18 cases and plasma samples from six of those cases—the scientists say their data revealed trends that could help develop new COVID-19 therapeutics and fine-tune when to use existing therapeutics at different stages of disease progression. The findings include details about how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads in the lungs, manipulates the immune system, causes widespread thrombosis that does not resolve, and targets signaling pathways that promote lung failure, fibrosis and impair tissue repair....

Making eye contact repeatedly when you’re talking to someone is common, but why do we do it? When two people are having a conversation, eye contact occurs during moments of “shared attention” when both people are engaged, with their pupils dilating in synchrony as a result, according to a Dartmouth study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Eye contact is really immersive and powerful,” says lead author Sophie Wohltjen, a graduate student in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth....

In another blow to the “Everything is Everywhere” tenet of bacterial distribution in the ocean, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) have found “bipolar” species of bacteria that occur in the Arctic and Antarctic, but nowhere else. And, surprisingly, they found even fewer bipolar species than would turn up by chance if marine bacteria were randomly distributed everywhere. “That suggests that there are forces that are limiting the dispersal of bacteria in the ocean,” says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a scientist in the MBL’s Bay Paul Center and faculty member in the Brown-MBL Partnership....

These micro swimmers mimic biological behavior and might one day deliver targeted drugs or stir samples in labs-on-a-chip — a miniature device that mimics a full laboratory on a microchip. “These donuts may eventually have medical applications as active materials,” said Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics, Penn State. Active materials are those that move on their own like bacteria or artificial micro swimmers. “It’s really hard to get things to mix when using a lab-on-a-chip,” said Remmi Danae Baker, a doctoral candidate in material science and engineering, Penn State....

Razors, scalpels, and knives are commonly made from stainless steel, honed to a razor-sharp edge and coated with even harder materials such as diamond-like carbon. However, knives require regular sharpening, while razors are routinely replaced after cutting materials far softer than the blades themselves. Now engineers at MIT have studied the simple act of shaving up close, observing how a razor blade can be damaged as it cuts human hair — a material that is 50 times softer than the blade itself....

Two mRNA vaccines, which were granted emergency authorization in late 2020, have proven crucial in the fight against COVID-19. These vaccines, which are the first of their kind, were the culmination of decades of research on RNA. Delivered as strands of mRNA that encode a viral protein, the vaccines enter cells and begin producing proteins, allowing the immune system to recognize the virus if encountered later. Following the success of COVID-19 vaccines, scientists hope that mRNA vaccines and therapies will prove beneficial against many other diseases....

Researchers at Western University have shown for the first time the molecular mechanisms at work that cause cannabidiol, or CBD, to block the psychiatric side effects caused by tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis. It has been previously shown that strains of cannabis with high levels of THC and low levels of CBD can cause increased psychiatric effects, including paranoia, anxiety, and addictive behaviors, but why that was occurring was not fully understood....

The center image, captured from Xiamen, China, has the Moon’s center directly in front of the Sun’s center. The Moon, though, was too far from the Earth to completely block the entire Sun. Light that streamed around all of the edges of the Moon is called a ring of fire. Images at each end of the sequence show sunlight that streamed through lunar valleys. As the Moon moved further in front of the Sun, left to right, only the higher peaks on the Moon’s perimeter could block sunlight....

Items such as drinking mugs, missile heads, thermal barrier coatings on engine blades, auto parts, electronic, and optic components are commonly made with ceramics. The ceramics are mechanically strong, but tend to fracture suddenly when just slightly strained under a load unless exposed to high temperatures. Purdue University researchers have developed a new process to help overcome the brittle nature of ceramics and make it more ductile and durable. The Purdue team calls the process “flash sintering,” which adds an electric field to the conventional sintering process used to form bulk components from ceramics....

The so-called orphan or lonely cloud is full of hot gas with temperatures of 10,000-10,000,000 degrees Kelvin (K) and a total mass 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That makes it larger than the mass of small galaxies. The cloud was discovered in Abell 1367 by a group led by Dr. Ming Sun, an associate professor of physics at UAH, which is a part of the University of Alabama System....

Just how much promise some well-equipped gut-friendly bacteria hold for improving treatments of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, has been demonstrated in a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The research builds on technology the team, led by Quanyin Hu, a biomedical engineer and professor in the UW–Madison School of Pharmacy, had previously designed. That prior technology helped beneficial bacteria survive an onslaught of stomach acids and competing microbes long enough to establish and multiply in the guts of mice by encasing them within a very thin protective shell....

Liftoff of Crew-5 is still targeted for noon EDT on Wednesday, October 5, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A little over a day later, at 4:57 p.m. on Thursday, October 6, the Dragon spacecraft, named Endurance, is scheduled to dock to the space station. Throughout the day on Tuesday, mission teams reviewed the status of the Falcon 9 recovery ship, called Just Read the Instructions, which is ready to support booster recovery....