The new research, published across two separate research papers, uses a combination of DNA analyses of ancient skeletons and modern samples, as well as archaeological evidence, to put together a complete timeline of migration to the island nation. The results confirm that Vanuatu’s first people were of the Lapita culture and arrived 3,000 years ago from South East Asia, followed by Papuan arrivals from the island of New Britain, in the Bismarck Archipelago just to the east of New Guinea and part of the nation of Papua New Guinea....

The active period is when animals fulfill their ecological role, but it is also the time when they may be exposed to dangers such as hunting or conflicts with humans and their activities. Sifting through 2.3 million camera-trap photos of tropical mammals, an international team of researchers has found remarkable consistent patterns of daily activity across continents. Size and diet dictate “The main determining factors of daily activity were body size and diet,” says Ph....

The green circular objects in the pictures are collagen cells and the red ‘dots’ are fat cells, both extracted from human bone marrow which Catarina has color-enhanced electronically to bring out their detail. Normally, the collagen cells that appear green on Catarina’s tree and wreath images would be bluer in color but, she says, the fat cells would certainly appear red with the lasers used. “I’ve chosen green for the collagen fibers in my images because when you use the labeling technique typically you use a stain that fluoresces as green and, because a scientist would usually relate to that green color when looking at labeled collagen fiber, I decided to use the same color and create something more festive at the same time,” says Catarina....

Their ensemble of predictive models of likely reservoir hosts, published January 10 in Lancet Microbe (“Optimizing predictive models to prioritize viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs”), was validated in an 18-month project to identify specific bat species likely to carry betacoronaviruses, the group that includes SARS-like viruses. “If you want to find these viruses, you have to start by profiling their hosts — their ecology, their evolution, even the shape of their wings,” explains the study’s senior author, Colin Carlson, PhD, an assistant research professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology and a member of Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center....

Published today (February 16, 2023) in the journal Human Reproduction, one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals, the study is the first to detect this association in the children of mothers who drank alcohol up to three months before becoming pregnant but stopped during pregnancy. In addition, it found the association with altered face shape existed even if mothers drank less than 12g of alcohol a week – the equivalent of a small, 6-ounce (175 ml) glass of wine or 12 ounces (330 ml) of beer....

People who have previously had COVID-19 have an enhanced antibody response with a single dose of RNA vaccine, finds new research co-led by UCL researchers. These are the findings of a study, published as a research letter* in the Lancet, of 51 UK healthcare workers, around half of whom had a previous laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. It showed that a single dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s RNA vaccine resulted in a significantly enhanced immune response against the virus, compared to a single dose in those without prior infection....

Providing adequate nutrition for crews is critical as NASA and its international partners plan expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The BioNutrients-2 investigation is using genetically engineered microbes to provide nutrients, and potentially other compounds and pharmaceuticals, on-demand in space. NASA Flight Engineer Nicole Mann nourished and incubated genetically engineered yeast samples for the study in the Space Automated Bioproduct Laboratory on Tuesday. The way humans adapt to the lack of an up-and-down reference in weightlessness is also important as researchers study how astronauts grip and manipulate objects....

New Flight Engineer Frank Rubio from NASA was back to work on space physics on Tuesday installing hardware for the Intelligent Glass Optics study inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox. The research investigates using artificial intelligence to adapt materials manufacturing, such as fiber optics, to the vacuum of space. Flight engineers Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin of Roscosmos, Rubio’s two cosmonaut partners, spent time unloading their Soyuz MS-22 crew ship and working on a variety of life support tasks....

This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Cat’s Paw Nebula, so named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint. The nebula is a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy, located in the constellation Scorpius. Estimates of its distance from Earth range from about 4,200 to about 5,500 light-years. Framed by green clouds, the bright red bubbles are the dominant feature in the image, which was created using data from two of Spitzer’s instruments....

A subarachnoid hemorrhage occurs when bleeding occurs in the space between the brain and the membrane that covers it, typically as a consequence of a burst blood vessel. This kind of stroke may result from an aneurysm rupture, excessive blood pressure, or trauma. For this study, researchers only looked at those that were not caused by trauma. “Subarachnoid hemorrhages unrelated to trauma account for 5% to 10% of all strokes in the United States, and are often deadly,” said study author Fadar Oliver Otite, M....

NGC 6441 is host to four pulsars that each complete a single rotation in a few milliseconds. Also hidden within this cluster is JaFu 2, a planetary nebula. Despite its name, this has little to do with planets. A phase in the evolution of intermediate-mass stars, planetary nebulae last for only a few tens of thousands of years, the blink of an eye on astronomical timescales. There are about 150 known globular clusters in the Milky Way....

The eruption caused the partial collapse of the crater terrace. This was followed by major flows of lava stretching to the sea and immense plumes of smoke rising several hundred meters above the volcano. Italian civil protection authorities raised the alert from yellow to orange as the ‘situation of enhanced volcano imbalance persists.’ This Sentinel-2 image (above) has been processed in true color, using the shortwave infrared channel to highlight the new flow of lava....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica¹. The key evidence is the structure of their relatively stubby tail, which was muscular and flexible at its base, but rigid at its tip, were the half-dozen vertebrae that are either fused together into a blade-like structure or tightly arranged so that they’re inflexible. There’s no indication that the dinosaur’s muscular tails were adorned with structures that would enable them to use these as weapons....

Research indicates perception of men as more intellectually gifted than women is nuanced. The stereotype that associates being “brilliant” with White men more than White women is shared by children regardless of their own race, finds a team of psychology researchers. By contrast, its study shows, children do not apply this stereotype to Black men and women. “Among adults, gender stereotypes apply differently to men and women depending on their race,” explains Andrei Cimpian, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Social Issues....

The largest multi-institutional international study to date on brain complications of COVID-19 has found that approximately one in 100 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 will likely develop complications of the central nervous system. These can include stroke, hemorrhage, and other potentially fatal complications. The study is being presented tomorrow at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “Much has been written about the overall pulmonary problems related to COVID-19, but we do not often talk about the other organs that can be affected,” said study lead author Scott H....

Inhaled cannabis reduces self-reported headache severity by 47.3% and migraine severity by 49.6%, according to a recent study led by Carrie Cuttler, a Washington State University assistant professor of psychology. The study, published online on November 9, 2019, in the Journal of Pain, is the first to use big data from headache and migraine patients using cannabis in real-time. Previous studies have asked patients to recall the effect of cannabis use in the past....

What do we know about distant stars aside from their brightness and colors? Is our Sun a typical star? Or does it show certain properties that make it special, or maybe even unique? One property that is not fully understood is rotation. In its outer layers the Sun has a rotation pattern that scientists refer to as `latitudinal differential rotation’. This means that different latitudes rotate at different rates. While at the Sun’s equator one full rotation takes approximately 25 days, the higher latitudes rotate more slowly....

The two identical Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites carry radar instruments to image Earth’s surface. Images acquired with radar are interpreted by studying the intensity of the signal scattered back to the satellite – which is related to the roughness of the ground. The colors of this week’s image come from the combination of two polarisations from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar mission, which have been converted into a single RGB image. Interpreting polarisation can help scientists analyze the Earth’s surface....

To date, the most luminous events occur in core-collapse supernovae in a gaseous environment, when the circumstellar medium near the explosion transforms the kinetic energy into radiation and thus increases the luminosity. The origin of the circumstellar material is usually the stellar wind from the massive star’s outer layers as they’re expelled prior to the explosion. A natural question is how will type Ia supernovae look like in a dense gaseous environment?...

A new survey of hot, X-ray-emitting gas in the Virgo galaxy cluster shows that the elements needed to make stars, planets and people were evenly distributed across millions of light-years early in cosmic history, more than 10 billion years ago. The Virgo cluster, located about 54 million light-years away, is the nearest galaxy cluster and the second brightest in X-rays. The cluster is home to more than 2,000 galaxies, and the space between them is filled with a diffuse gas so hot it glows in X-rays....