Proteins are so fundamental that DNA – the genetic material that makes each of us unique – is essentially just a long sequence of protein blueprints. That’s true for animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, and even viruses. And just as those groups of organisms evolve and change over time, so too do proteins and their component parts. A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in the journal Scientific Reports, maps the evolutionary history and interrelationships of protein domains, the subunits of protein molecules, over 3....

Children and teenagers are less likely than adults to develop severe COVID-19 or die from the disease, according to the world’s largest study of hospital patients with COVID-19. Obesity, Black ethnicity and being under one month old are factors that increased the risk of a child being admitted into intensive care with the condition, the report said. The findings also identify new symptoms of a severe inflammation syndrome that significantly increases the risk of children with COVID-19 needing intensive care....

U.S. physicians are increasingly ordering medications for children for conditions that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, according to a Rutgers study. The findings highlight the need for more education, research, and policies addressing effective, safe pediatric drug prescribing. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, analyzed data collected from 2006 to 2015 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys, which provide information on doctor office visits across the U....

She found the temperature to be between 1,300 and 1,470 degrees Celsius (2,400 and 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), which is at the high end of an 800 degree range that previous scientists had determined. “In order to understand the interior structure of the Moon today, we needed to nail down the thermal state better,” said Ananya Mallik, a URI assistant professor of geosciences who joined the University faculty in December 2018....

The method is similar to what land surveyors use on earth, by measuring the physical and angular, or ‘apparent’, size of a standard ruler in the galaxy, to calibrate the distance from this information. The research, which is published in the journal Nature, was used to identify the accurate distance of the nearby NGC4151 galaxy, which wasn’t previously available. The galaxy NGC4151, which is dubbed the ‘Eye of Sauron’ by astronomers for its similarity to the film depiction of the eye of the character in The Lord of the Rings, is important for accurately measuring black hole masses....

Color saturation is a term used to describe how vibrant and rich the reds, greens, and blues are in a picture. However, the visual distance of the food in the image and even whether customers expect to eat alone or with others affect how effectively color saturation works to make food appetizing. These findings provide a straightforward way to boost sales in the competitive restaurant industry, according to Stephanie Liu, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University....

New 3D model provides evidence that Venus is churning inside. A new study identified 37 recently active volcanic structures on Venus. The study provides some of the best evidence yet that Venus is still a geologically active planet. A research paper on the work, which was conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland and the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, was published in the journal Nature Geoscience on July 20, 2020....

They discovered that participation in clubs, religious organizations, athletic or artistic endeavors, educational attainment by age 26, employment, and reading proficiency may all have an impact on the brain’s cognitive reserve. According to the research, learning new things throughout one’s life may help protect the brain, especially for those who performed worse on cognitive tests as children. Previous research has indicated that those with poor scores in childhood are more likely to have a greater cognitive decline in old age than individuals with high scores....

Cancer cells consume exorbitant amounts of glucose, a key source of energy, and shutting down this glucose consumption has long been considered a logical therapeutic strategy. However, good pharmacological targets to stop cancers’ ability to uptake and metabolize glucose are missing. In a new study published in Cell Reports, a team of University of Colorado Cancer Center researchers, led by Matthew Galbraith, Ph.D., and Joaquin Espinosa, Ph.D., finally identifies a way to restrict the ability of cancer to use glucose for energy....

Some episodes in the Milky Way’s history, however, were so cataclysmic that they are difficult to hide. Scientists have known for some time that the Milky Way’s halo of stars drastically changes in character with distance from the galactic center as revealed by the composition of the stars (their “metallicity”), the stellar motions, and the stellar density. CfA astronomer Federico Marinacci and his colleagues analyzed a suite of computer cosmological simulations and the galaxy interactions in them....

Bacteria move forward by coiling their long, threadlike appendages into corkscrew shapes, which serve as makeshift propellers. However, since the “propellers” are formed of a single protein, experts are puzzled as to how exactly they do this. The case has been solved by an international team headed by UVA’s Edward H. Egelman, Ph.D., a pioneer in the high-tech field of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Cryo-EM and powerful computer modeling were utilized by the researchers to reveal what no traditional light microscope could see: the unusual structure of these propellers at the level of individual atoms....

This connection influences how heat is conducted by the materials. The study also identified the ideal temperatures for energy conversion. It also provided fundamental scientific insights that may be used to assist researchers to create new materials with improved thermoelectric performance. The Impact Thermoelectric materials are critical for clean energy technology. Researchers used neutron scattering to uncover details about the phonon renormalization mechanism. This is the quantum mechanics process that explains the extraordinarily low thermal conductivity of two common thermoelectric materials....

The rocket carrying three national security payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), is scheduled for launch at 7a.m. June 15, from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s (MARS) Pad 0B on Wallops Island. The U.S. Space Force (USSF) Space and Missile Systems Center’s Launch Enterprise is providing the launch services for this mission. This mission, named NROL-111, will be the third small launch USSF mission and the NRO’s second dedicated launch from Wallops in the last 12 months....

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Today’s shape-shifting materials and structures can only transition between a few stable configurations but we have shown how to create structural materials that have an arbitrary range of shape-morphing capabilities,” said L Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics and senior author of the paper. “These structures allow for independent control of the geometry and mechanics, laying the foundation for engineering functional shapes using a new type of morphable unit cell....

Glaciologists often call the Tibetan Plateau and its many mountain ranges the “Third Pole” because the rugged, high-elevation landscapes contain the largest reserve of freshwater outside the polar regions. Much of that water is stored for now within tens of thousands of glaciers scattered across the region. However, rising temperatures, accelerating ice loss, and meltwater runoff are starting to change that. These images of lakes west of the Tanggula Mountains—a small range in the central part of the Tibetan Plateau—offer a view of changes caused, in part, by retreating glaciers....

Finding could explain why snoring and disrupted sleep are associated with behavioral problems including inattention, hyperactivity, and aggression. Children who regularly snore have structural changes in their brain that may account for the behavioral problems associated with the condition including lack of focus, hyperactivity, and learning difficulties at school. That is the finding of a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), which was published today (April 13, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications....

New antennae to access higher and higher frequency ranges will be needed for the next generation of phones and wireless devices. One way to make antennae that work at tens of gigahertz — the frequencies needed for 5G and higher devices — is to braid filaments about 1 micrometer in diameter. However, today’s industrial fabrication techniques won’t work on fibers that small. Now a team of engineers and scientists from the Harvard John A....

Named for a Roman god, Janus particles refer to nanoparticles that possess surfaces with two or more distinct physical chemical properties. The special nanoparticles were introduced to the scientific community by 1991 Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who pointed out that “objects with two sides of different wettability have the unique advantage of densely self-assembling at liquid-liquid interfaces,” and consequentially, generating new colloidal structures. The resulting chemical asymmetry led to the discovery of new and unusual molecular properties, making Janus particles relevant to a wide range of applications, from biomedicine to water-repellent textiles to fabrication of membranes with tunable properties....

Mason, a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., was searching for coronal rain: giant globs of plasma, or electrified gas, that drip from the Sun’s outer atmosphere back to its surface. But she expected to find it in helmet streamers, the million-mile tall magnetic loops — named for their resemblance to a knight’s pointy helmet — that can be seen protruding from the Sun during a solar eclipse....

Scientists from the University of Tsukuba and a scientist from the Institute of High Pressure Physics detected and mapped the electronic spins moving in a working transistor made of molybdenum disulfide. This research may lead to much faster computers that take advantage of the natural magnetism of electrons, as opposed to just their charge. Spintronics is a new area of condensed matter physics that attempts to use the intrinsic magnetic moment of electrons, called “spins,” to perform calculations....