Although life expectancy in the Western world increased quickly in the 20th century, women still have a higher life expectancy than males. In Finland, women typically live five more years than men do. The gender gap was largest in the 1970s when women’s life expectancy at birth was over ten years greater than men’s. However, this disparity has been rapidly closing in recent years. According to a newly released study, the difference between the sexes can also be observed in biological aging....

Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed a new device that can detect and analyze cancer cells from blood samples, enabling doctors to avoid invasive biopsy surgeries and monitor treatment progress. Cancer is a leading cause of illness and death in Australia, with more than 150,000 Australians diagnosed every year. Those with suspected cancer, particularly in organs such as the liver, colon, or kidney, often require surgery for a definitive diagnosis....

A paper in Science Advances by Rice engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan, Jacob Robinson, Richard Baraniuk, and their labs describes a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to sit on a fingertip and capable of micrometer resolution over a volume of several cubic millimeters. FlatScope eliminates the tradeoff that hinders traditional microscopes in which arrays of lenses can either gather less light from a large field of view or gather more light from a smaller field....

New station residents Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg of NASA, who commanded and piloted the SpaceX Crew-6 mission respectively, reviewed docked Crew Dragon procedures first thing on Monday. The duo, along with Crew-6 mission specialist Sultan Alneyadi of UAE (United Arab Emirates) and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos, automatically docked Crew Dragon Endeavour to the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 1:40 a.m. EST on Friday. The quartet will live and work aboard the orbital outpost for six months....

“Finding an HIV vaccine has proven to be a daunting scientific challenge,” said Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. NIAID director. “With the success of safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, we have an exciting opportunity to learn whether mRNA technology can achieve similar results against HIV infection.” An mRNA vaccine works by delivering a piece of genetic material that instructs the body to make a protein fragment of a target pathogen (such as a virus), which the immune system recognizes and remembers, so it can mount a substantial response if later exposed to that pathogen....

With the recent legalization of cannabis edibles in Canada, physicians and the public must be aware of the novel risks of cannabis edibles, argue authors in a commentary in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). “Although edibles are commonly viewed as a safer and more desirable alternative to smoked or vaped cannabis, physicians and the public should be aware of several risks related to the use of cannabis edibles,” write Drs....

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, set its X-ray eyes on a spiral galaxy and caught the brilliant glow of two black holes lurking inside. The new image is being released Monday along with NuSTAR’s view of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California. “These new images showcase why NuSTAR is giving us an unprecedented look at the cosmos,” said Lou Kaluzienski, NuSTAR program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington....

Neptune’s tiny, innermost moon, Naiad, has now been seen for the first time since it was discovered by Voyager’s cameras in 1989. Dr. Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the result today in Denver, Colorado, at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. He and collaborators Dr. Jack Lissauer of the NASA Ames Research Center, Dr....

The results? Three doomed planets. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and other planet-hunting endeavors have found thousands of exoplanets in the last few years and decades. The exoplanets vary widely, from Earth-like planets in their stars’ quiet habitable zones to planets so hot that vaporized iron falls as rain. But these three exoplanets have something in common. They have very short-period orbits—some of the shortest ever found—around sub-giant or giant stars....

The cardiac pacemaker of the future could be powered by the heart itself, according to researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. During the AIP Publishing Horizons — Energy Storage and Conversion virtual conference, which will be held August 4-6, 2021, Yi Zhiran, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, will present research on a way for a batteryless pacemaker to harvest kinetic energy from the heart to power the lifesaving device. The presentation, “Mechanism on Buckled Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting for Batteryless Heartworn Pacemaker,” will be available during the three-day conference....

In 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote the novel Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions as a satire of Victorian hierarchy. He imagined a world that existed only in two dimensions, where the beings are 2D geometric figures. The physics of such a world is somewhat akin to that of modern 2D materials, such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides, which include tungsten disulfide (WS2), tungsten diselenide (WSe2), molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2)....

Researchers are fine-tuning the application of plasma to agriculture to speed up germination and help plants grow strong. Ever since scientists discovered that plasma treatment leads to faster growth and higher yields of some agricultural crops, physicists, chemists, and biologists have been working together to tease out the mechanisms driving this phenomenon. Today researchers are fine-tuning the application of plasma to agriculture in order to reap the benefits of a robust harvest without triggering unwanted side effects....

Superconducting quantum bits (qubits) are artificial atoms that use various methods to produce bits of quantum information, the fundamental component of quantum computers. Similar to traditional binary circuits in computers, qubits can maintain one of two states corresponding to the classic binary bits, a 0 or 1. But these qubits can also be a superposition of both states simultaneously, which could allow quantum computers to solve complex problems that are practically impossible for traditional computers....

One viral protein may provide clues for preventing pneumonia, which is brought on by the body’s heightened inflammatory response to respiratory viruses like the COVID-19 virus. According to a study, if the Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) lacks the viral protein NS2, the immune system of the host may eliminate the virus before excessive inflammation starts. The study was completed at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and published in the journal MBio on January 18, 2022....

Study shows how ferroic materials could be used to create adaptable neuromorphic electronics. A phenomenon that is well known from chaos theory was observed in a material for the first time ever, by scientists from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. A structural transition in the ferroelastic material barium titanate, caused by an increase or decrease in temperature, resembles the periodic doubling seen in non-linear dynamical systems. This ‘spatial chaos’ in a material was first predicted in 1985 and could be used in applications such as adaptable neuromorphic electronics....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Optics Express. The team was able to reduce reflexivity and capture more of the light that isn’t reflected. The resulting solar cell is thinner, less reflective and utilizes sandwiched plastic and metal with the nanomesh. The so-called “Plasmonic Cavity with Subwavelength Hole array,” or “PlaCSH,” reduces the potential for losing light itself and reflects only 4% of direct sunlight, leading to a 52% increase in efficiency compared to conventional, organic solar cells....

However, very little is known about how these compounds evolved and what role they play in the natural world. To address that knowledge gap, scientists from the University of Plymouth are conducting a first-of-its-kind research study using advanced genetic methods and behavioral experiments to address previously untested hypotheses about the origin of psychedelic compounds in fungi. This includes exploring whether such traits have evolved as a form of defense against fungus-feeding invertebrates, or whether the fungi produce compounds that manipulate insect behavior for their own advantage....

However, Neşe Devenot, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cincinnati, claims the field is riddled with ethical issues and financial interests. In a peer-reviewed article that was published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness, Devenot and her co-authors envision a society that honors the traditions behind these medicines by making them accessible in a safe and affordable way. “Psychedelics have a lot of potential. But how they are approached matters,” said Devenot, who works at UC’s Institute for Research in Sensing....

At present, theoretical and experimental physicists think of quantum networks as made of stationary nodes between which the quantum information is mediated by photons via optical fibers. Quantum mechanical entanglement between the stationary quantum systems plays a key role for large distance communication. However, due to the loss of photons in the glass fibres the extension of such networks is limited. A solution to this problem is offered by a so-called quantum repeater which passes the entanglement on over a sequence of many small sections, thus extending an entangled state over a long way....

Currently, researchers rely on various measurements from an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to assess level of consciousness in the brain. A Michigan Medicine team was able to demonstrate, using rats, that the EEG doesn’t always track with being awake. “EEG doesn’t necessarily correlate with behavior,” says Dinesh Pal, Ph.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology at the U-M Medical School. “We are raising more questions and asking that people are more cautious when interpreting EEG data....