Posts

Skoltech scientists and their colleagues have looked at the genetic makeup of the dominant strain of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the delta variant, in Russia. According to them, just one viral subvariant quickly came to be responsible for an overwhelming majority of the cases, unlike in many other countries. The team concluded this probably happened by sheer chance and not because the substrain is more infectious or resistant to immunity. Reported in a preprint on medRxiv, the findings suggest that early on in a new pandemic wave, every case counts and tight travel regulations are an effective countermeasure....

An international team of researchers, led by marine scientists at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia and including researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the USA, has performed an extensive study of whale shark movement and residency using a combination of three scientific techniques; visual census, acoustic monitoring, and satellite telemetry. Their six-year study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, tracked long-term whale shark movement patterns near the Shib Habil reef (Arabic for “Rope Reef”), a known whale shark hotspot in the Red Sea....

Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Spitzer enabled scientists to confirm the presence of seven rocky, Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. The telescope has also provided weather maps of hot, gaseous exoplanets and revealed a hidden ring around Saturn. It has illuminated hidden collections of dust in a wide variety of locations, including cosmic nebulas (clouds of gas and dust in space), where young stars form, and swirling galaxies....

Invisible to human eyes, terahertz describes a band of frequencies between microwave and infrared light. These frequencies are alluring to scientists because they can be used to control and study magnetic and electric states in materials, and have been applied to fields ranging from data storage to biological imaging and explosives detection. They provide an atomic-scale window into fundamental processes such as magnetism, molecular motion, and protein vibrations. But observations in the terahertz range were until recently largely out of reach for scientists, said Matthias Hoffman, a SLAC scientist specializing in terahertz laser research who worked on the latest experiments....

Phosphine is a gas found in Earth’s atmosphere. In 2020, the announcement of phosphine discovered above Venus’s clouds made headlines because it has strong potential as a biomarker. In other words, the presence of phosphine could be an indicator of life. Although it is common in the atmospheres of gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn, phosphine on Earth is associated with biology. On our planet, it’s formed by decaying organic matter in bogs, swamps, and marshes....

For some solar cells, the future may be fluorescent. Scientists at Yale have improved the ability of a promising type of solar cell to absorb light and convert it into electrical power by adding a fluorescent organic dye to the cell layer. This squaraine dye boosts light absorption and recycles electrons, improving the conversion of light into energy. The results suggest a new route for the development of lower-cost, higher-efficiency photovoltaics, the scientists said....

The microhabitats are grown by microbes within tiny bubbles of oil and water found in sheets of frozen gas and ice, and offer a tantalizing clue as to the potential for life on other planets. The tiny bubbles are scattered within large underwater rafts of hydrate, known as ‘flammable ice’ or methane hydrate, which forms when ice traps methane within its molecular structure. The discovery of the microhabitats is revealed in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, a Nature publication....

This radiation was detected in visible light by the HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (La Palma, Canary Islands) and in X-rays by NASA’s NICER observatory aboard the International Space Station. The black hole system studied is named MAXI J1820+070, and was first discovered in early 2018. It is only about 10,000 lightyears away, in our own Milky Way. It has a mass of about 7 Suns, with this collapsed down to a region of space smaller than the City of London....

The adult skin epidermis is built of different layers. Stem cells reside in the bottom layer where their task is to produce new cells which then differentiate and move upwards into the more specialized upper layer. This differentiation process involves permanent changes in the cell’s properties to best suit to serve skin’s barrier function. The skin must maintain balanced numbers of stem and differentiated cells as loss of proper balance would result in aberrant tissue structure and therefore function....

Study points to need for programs to prevent drug-related harm among workers in risky industry. Construction workers are more likely to use drugs than workers in other professions, finds a study by the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research (CDUHR) at NYU College of Global Public Health. The study, published today (October 30, 2019) in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, shows that construction workers are the most likely of all occupations to use cocaine and misuse prescription opioids (taking them for nonmedical purposes), and the second most likely to use marijuana....

Researcher suggests lawmakers ensure measure is being implemented as intended. Although many Americans favor expanding background checks for gun purchases, gun-control measures in Congress have failed to garner enough votes to pass. In contrast, some state legislatures have enacted measures to reduce gun violence in their communities. A new study examined the impact changes to background checks and licensing policies has made on different types of violent crime in Massachusetts....

A new paper led by a NASA researcher shows that hydrogen peroxide is abundant across much of the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The authors argue that if the peroxide on the surface of Europa mixes into the ocean below, it could be an important energy supply for simple forms of life, if life were to exist there. The paper was published online recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Life as we know it needs liquid water, elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur, and it needs some form of chemical or light energy to get the business of life done,” said Kevin Hand, the paper’s lead author, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California....

High-end simulations In their search for scenarios that could explain the present-day Earth-Moon system, the researchers simulated hundreds of different impacts at high resolution, varying the angle and speed of the collision as well as the masses and spins of the two colliding bodies. These calculations were performed using the SWIFT open-source simulation code, run on the DiRAC Memory Intensive service (“COSMA”), hosted by Durham University on behalf of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility....

Globular clusters are the oldest visible objects in the Universe – each contains hundreds of thousands to occasionally over ten million stars all born at essentially the same time, and densely packed into a spherical volume with a diameter over a thousand times smaller than the diameter of our Galaxy. Globular clusters are thought to have formed soon after the Universe began nearly 13.8 billion years ago, at the same time as, or perhaps even before, the first galaxies formed....

The team, led by the University of Warwick as part of the EUTOPIA community of European universities, have simulated movements in nearly 300 protein structures of the COVID-19 virus spike protein by using computational modeling techniques, in an effort to help identify promising drug targets for the virus. In a new paper published today (February 19, 2021) in the journal Scientific Reports, the team of physicists and life scientists detail the methods they used to model the flexibility and dynamics of all 287 protein structures for the COVID-19 virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, identified so far....

Wuhan City in China was the first place to report COVID-19 in the world and — between December 2019 and May 2020 — caused nearly two-thirds of all COVID-19 cases in China. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have tested more than 60,000 healthy individuals in China for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and concluded that thousands of Wuhan residents were infected with asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 after the infection was believed to be under control in China....

The Karoo Basin of southern Africa is well-known for its massive deposits of igneous rocks left behind by extensive basaltic lava flows during the Early Jurassic. At this time, intense volcanic activity is thought to have had dramatic impacts on the local environment and global atmosphere, coincident with a worldwide mass extinction recorded in the fossil record. The fossils of the Karoo Basin thus have a lot to tell about how ecosystems responded to these environmental stresses....

The end is nigh for NASA’s Mars InSight lander. The day is fast approaching when the spacecraft will fall silent, ending its history-making mission to reveal secrets of the Red Planet’s interior. Since the spacecraft’s power generation continues to decline as windblown dust on its solar panels thickens, the engineering team has already taken steps to continue as long as possible with what power remains. Despite these efforts, it won’t be long now, as the end is expected to come in the next few weeks....

As a demonstration, the researchers printed a flat mesh that, when exposed to a certain temperature difference, deforms into the shape of a human face. They also designed a mesh embedded with conductive liquid metal, that curves into a dome to form an active antenna, the resonance frequency of which changes as it deforms. The team’s new design method can be used to determine the specific pattern of flat mesh structures to print, given the material’s properties, in order to make the structure transform into the desired shape....

Combining distinctive properties of two-dimensional materials inspires research to reveal a new frontrunner. Evolutionary search has helped scientists predict the lowest energy structure of a two-dimensional (2D) material, B2P6, with some remarkable features, including structural anisotropy and Janus geometry. Janus materials—named after the two-faced Greek god of duality—have two surfaces with distinct physical properties. As such, they offer unique benefits, such as high solar-to-hydrogen efficiency. Anisotropic materials exhibit different properties when measured along different directions....