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The buckyball, formally known as buckminsterfullerene, is extremely complex. Due to its enormous 60-atom size, the overall molecule has a staggeringly high number of ways to vibrate—at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 vibrational quantum states when the molecule is warm. That’s in addition to the many different energy states for the buckyball’s rotation and other properties. As described in the January 4 issue of Science, the JILA team used an updated version of their frequency comb spectroscopy and cryogenic buffer gas cooling system to observe isolated, individual energy transitions among rotational and vibrational states in cold, gaseous buckyballs....

An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the hidden ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy by scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences & Lettres University. Giant water plumes erupting from Enceladus have long fascinated scientists and the public alike, inspiring research and speculation about the vast ocean that is believed to be sandwiched between the moon’s rocky core and its icy shell....

Findings could decouple overeating from harmful health effects. Promising news in the effort to develop drugs to treat obesity: University of Virginia scientists have identified 14 genes that can cause and three that can prevent weight gain. The findings pave the way for treatments to combat a health problem that affects more than 40% of American adults. “We know of hundreds of gene variants that are more likely to show up in individuals suffering obesity and other diseases....

It’s a challenge that’s long been one of the holy grails of quantum computing: how to create the key building blocks known as quantum bits, or qubits, that exist in a solid-state system at room temperature. Most current systems, by comparison, rely on complex and expensive equipment designed to trap a single atom or electron in a vacuum and then cool the entire system to close to absolute zero. A group of Harvard scientists, led by Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and including graduate students Georg Kucsko and Peter Maurer and postdoctoral researcher Christian Latta, say they’ve cracked the problem, and they did it by turning to one of the purest materials on Earth: diamonds....

The northern goshawk is a fast, powerful raptor that flies effortlessly through forests. This bird was the design inspiration for the next-generation drone developed by scientifics of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems of EPFL led by Dario Floreano. They carefully studied the shape of the bird’s wings and tail and its flight behavior, and used that information to develop a drone with similar characteristics. “Goshawks move their wings and tails in tandem to carry out the desired motion, whether it is rapid changes of direction when hunting in forests, fast flight when chasing prey in the open terrain, or when efficiently gliding to save energy,” says Enrico Ajanic, the first author and PhD student in Floreano’s lab....

The emerging field of point-of-care diagnostics is therefore working on cheaper, faster, and easier-to-use tests. An international pair of engineering labs are championing this approach and have developed a tool that changes the color of mouse urine when colon cancer, also known as bowel cancer, is present. The findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology. The early-stage technology, developed by teams led by Imperial’s Professor Molly Stevens and MIT’s Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, works by injecting nanosensors into mice, which are cut up by enzymes released by tumors known as proteases....

The research comes from the Complex Flow Lab, based within the Institute for Innovative Materials, Processing and Numerical Technologies (IMPACT). The lab studies the intricate flow patterns that often develop in granular materials, porous media, and complex fluids such as foams, gels, and pastes. This latest study looks at fluids that have a solid-like response to stress, a phenomenon called Discontinuous Shear Thickening (DST). This is when liquid (in this case, a corn starch mixture) abruptly thickens and becomes solid when disturbed....

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population may not have access to a COVID-19 vaccine until at least 2022, warns a study published by The BMJ today. A second study estimates that 3.7 billion adults worldwide are willing to have a COVID-19 vaccine, highlighting the importance of designing fair and equitable strategies to ensure that supply can meet demand, especially in low and middle income countries. Taken together, these findings suggest that the operational challenges of the global COVID-19 vaccination program will be at least as difficult as the scientific challenges associated with their development....

The spacecraft backed away from the space station, and a few hours later, Progress’ engines fired in a deorbit maneuver to send the cargo craft into a destructive re-entry in the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. The uncrewed Russian Progress 80 launched on a Soyuz rocket at 11:25 p.m. EST (9:25 a.m. on February 15 Baikonur time) on Monday, February 14, 2022, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The unpiloted cargo craft delivered almost three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the International Space Station....

Sandia National Laboratories’ wind energy researchers are re-evaluating vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) to help solve some of the problems of generating energy from offshore breezes. Though VAWTs have been around since the earliest days of wind energy research at Sandia and elsewhere, VAWT architecture could transform offshore wind technology. The economics of offshore wind power are different from land-based turbines, due to installation and operational challenges. VAWTs offer three big advantages that could reduce the cost of wind energy: a lower turbine center of gravity; reduced machine complexity; and better scalability to very large sizes....

This week, scientists of the Institute of Bee Health of the University of Bern have published an article in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Biology, which shows how even low doses of neonicotinoid insecticides, as they may realistically occur in contaminated soils, adversely affect the development of black garden ants (Lasius niger). This study highlights the need to overthink current deployment and management of chemical pest control for more sustainable agriculture....

“Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have long been used for treating depression, but we don’t know much about their mechanism. It’s like a black box,” says senior author Lin Tian (@LinTianLab), an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis. “This sensor allows us to image serotonin dynamics in real time when animals learn or are stressed and visualize the interaction between the compound of interest and the receptor in real time....

Researchers at the University of British Columbia, University of California Irvine, and McGill University have discovered three liquid phases in aerosol particles, changing our understanding of air pollutants in the Earth’s atmosphere. While aerosol particles were known to contain up to two liquid phases, the discovery of an additional liquid phase may be important to providing more accurate atmospheric models and climate predictions. The study was published recently in PNAS....

Because COVID-19 symptoms range from mild to severe, with some people apparently having no symptoms, the number of people who have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus at some point is likely much higher than the number of confirmed cases. As U.S. states begin to ease lockdown restrictions, widespread testing of the general population will be important to identify people at early stages of disease, or people who lack symptoms but can still infect others....

Marijuana is the most-commonly smoked substance after tobacco and one of the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world. Amid the legalization of recreational marijuana in Canada and many states in the U.S., its use has increased substantially in recent years. With the growing use, there is an urgent need for information on marijuana’s effects on the lungs, something that is currently lacking. “We know what cigarettes do to the lungs,” said study author Giselle Revah, M....

On September 11, 2022, at a diamond mine in Jagersfontein, South Africa, a dam collapsed, releasing a watery mixture of mining waste known as tailings. The sludge streamed across the landscape, inundating rivers and grazing land, destroying homes, and injuring dozens. Almost one month after the incident, satellite images reveal that the landscape remains altered by the coating of sludge. This can be seen in the image above, which was captured on October 4, 2022, by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9....

Researchers have just made a finding that could provide insights into how genetics can make someone more susceptible to developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following trauma exposure. In the study, stem cell-derived neurons from combat veterans with PTSD were found to react differently to a stress hormone than those from veterans without PTSD. Published on October 20 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the study is the first to use induced pluripotent stem cell models to study PTSD....

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were vitamin D sufficient, with a blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D of at least 30 ng/mL (a measure of vitamin D status), had a significant decreased risk for adverse clinical outcomes including becoming unconscious, hypoxia (body starved for oxygen) and death. In addition, they had lower blood levels of an inflammatory marker (C-reactive protein) and higher blood levels of lymphocytes (a type of immune cell to help fight infection)....

But as fascinating as their superpower is, it remains poorly understood. Until now, scientists have believed super-recognizers were so good with faces because they processed them holistically by taking a facial snapshot and memorizing it. Researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong (UOW) challenged this theory in a paper published in the journal Psychological Science that demonstrated that super-recognizers—who account for about 2% of society—look at faces in the same way as everyone else but do so more quickly and accurately....

Dwivedi led a team that estimated the break-even price and life cycle carbon emissions of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) derived from oil obtained from Brassica carinata, a non-edible oilseed crop. The study was published in GCB Bioenergy. “If we can secure feedstock supply and provide suitable economic incentives along the supply chain, we could potentially produce carinata-based SAF in the southern United States,” said Dwivedi, associate professor in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources....