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In a study of 1,377 patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases—such as inflammatory arthritis and lupus—flares of their conditions were uncommon following two-dose COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. In a study of 1,377 patients with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases—such as inflammatory arthritis and lupus—flares of their conditions were uncommon following two-dose COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. In the Arthritis & Rheumatology study, 11% of patients reported flares after vaccination that required treatment, and there were no reports of severe flares....

Each year, LLNL releases flow charts that illustrate the nation’s consumption and use of energy. Americans used 92.9 quads (quadrillion BTU) of energy, which is 7.2 quads less or 7 percent less than 2019. The highest recorded energy use in American history was in 2018, when 101.2 quads were consumed. A BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is a unit of measurement for energy; 3,412 BTUs is equivalent to 1 kilowatt-hour, which is the amount of energy it takes to light an efficient LED lightbulb for a week....

Recently, HBO’s John Oliver opened a Last Week Tonight segment with a series of video clips about gene editing—some of them news reports promising amazing breakthroughs, others movie scenes depicting genetic engineering gone terribly wrong. “It seems gene editing is going to eliminate all disease,” he concluded. “Or kill every last one of us.” For decades, advances in genetic engineering have prompted both breathless predictions of a wondrous future and warnings of the apocalypse....

Information security, in online banking for example, often works with a combination of a public key and a private key. The public key is known to everyone, but for creating a digital signature, a private key is necessary. This is a cryptographic method that only works if private keys are kept secret. But are we certain that these keys can’t be intercepted, by negligence or by a computer hack? The alternative the researchers present in their paper, is a physical key that cannot be cloned, a PUK (Physical Unclonable Key)....

Most people are familiar with the concept of RADAR. Radio frequency (RF) waves travel through the atmosphere, reflect off of a target, and return to the RADAR system to be processed. The amount of time it takes to return correlates to the object’s distance. In recent decades, this technology has been revolutionized by electronically scanned (phased) arrays (ESAs), which transmit the RF waves in a particular direction without mechanical movement....

If the Arctic continues to melt, there could be more military and commercial activity in this environment. DARPA is working on an all-seeing network of sensors that will track what is happening in the Arctic all year long. This network will include sensors placed on icebergs. DARPA wants to leverage icebergs for electromagnetic and acoustic sensors to help track ships and submarines. This was part of a DARPA briefing (PDF)....

NASA’s InSight Mars lander is progressively losing power and will likely end science operations later this summer. InSight’s team expects the lander to become inoperative by December, concluding a mission that has thus far detected more than 1,300 marsquakes – most recently, a magnitude 5 that occurred on May 4, 2022 – and located quake-prone regions of the Red Planet. The information gathered from those quakes has allowed scientists to measure the depth and composition of Mars’ crust, mantle, and core....

“This evidence demonstrating enhanced pain sensitivity warrants changing the common belief that autistic individuals experience less pain,” according to the report by Professor Irit Weissman-Fogel of the University of Haifa, Israel, and colleagues. They believe their findings highlight the need for increased awareness, which may impact the effective treatment of pain in people with autism. New evidence questions the assumptions about pain in autism The researchers aimed to test the “prevailing assumption” that people with autism are hypo-sensitive to pain....

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found opioids were responsible for more than half of all fatal poisonings in children ages 5 and younger, more than double the proportion of fatal poisonings caused by opioids in 2005. Additionally, over-the-counter drugs still contribute to fatal poisonings in this age group despite increased regulation. The findings, published today in the journal Pediatrics, underscore the need for improved intervention to prevent further fatal poisonings....

The study also finds that adults aged 40 and older without underlying health conditions may see some benefits from light alcohol consumption (between one and two standard drinks per day[1]), including a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes. Using estimates of alcohol use in 204 countries, researchers calculated that 1.34 billion people worldwide consumed harmful amounts in 2020. In every region, the largest segment of the population drinking unsafe amounts of alcohol were males aged 15-39....

For a study published today (May 21, 2021) in Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, the investigators examined data on the usage rates of 10 different medicines and medicine categories to map how drugs were used on people hospitalized with the viral infection. The authors got their data from the University of California COVID Research Data Set and tracked 22,896 patients admitted to UC Health medical centers in Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco between March 10 and December 31, 2020....

Engineers have found the root cause of a computer reset that occurred two months ago on NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory and have determined how to correct it. The fix involves changing how certain unused data-holding locations, called registers, are configured in the memory management of the type of computer chip used on the spacecraft. Billions of runs on a test computer with the modified register configuration yielded no repeat of the reset behavior....

Vesta was recently observed by the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) — the SPHERE image is shown on the left, produced using the MISTRAL algorithm, with a synthetic view derived from space-based data shown on the right for comparison. SPHERE, the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument, is a powerful planet-finding and direct imaging instrument. ZIMPOL is one of its subsystems: a specialized camera perfectly suited to taking very sharp images of small objects — like Vesta....

An international team led by ZHAO Gang, a professor from the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) discovered a chemically peculiar star accreted from a disrupted dwarf galaxy. According to results obtained through the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and Subaru telescope, the star has an unusually low amount of magnesium which is the eighth most abundant element in the universe. Meanwhile, it contains an excessive amount of heavy elements, such as europium, gold, and uranium....

Scientists at Harvard Medical School developed algorithms that allowed them to use evolution as their guide to deduce the three-dimensional structure of 18 families of transmembrane proteins. The molecules that drugmakers would most like to target are also among the hardest to study: Transmembrane proteins. These proteins connect our cells to their environment to sense, communicate and organize into tissue. A quarter of human proteins, transmembrane proteins constitute almost half of all drug targets....

Geared toward formerly sighted people who now live in complete blackness, the wireless device helps patients distinguish light from dark, enabling them to regain a measure of independence and complete daily tasks like sorting laundry or quickly finding and picking up items from a table. Seven years ago, Jason Esterhuizen was in a horrific car crash that destroyed his eyes, plunging him into total darkness. Today, he’s regained visual perception and more independence, thanks to an experimental device implanted in his brain by researchers at UCLA Health....

The finding at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has the potential to help resolve several astrophysical mysteries, including star formation, the source of large-scale magnetic fields in the universe, and the prediction of space weather events that can cause cell phone outages and power grid failures on Earth. Understanding the heating process also has significant implications for fusion energy research. First clear 3D explanation “Our direct numerical simulation is the first to provide clear identification of this heating mechanism in 3D space,” said Chuanfei Dong, a physicist at PPPL and Princeton University who unmasked the process by conducting 200 million hours of computer time for the world’s largest simulation of its kind....

Physicists believe that in the Universe’s first ten microseconds, free quarks and gluons filled all of spacetime, forming a new phase of matter named ‘quark-gluon plasma’ (QGP). Experimental and theoretical work at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of this hot soup of primordial matter, which is recreated today in accelerator-based lab experiments. To discover QGP in such experiments, the observation of exotic ‘strange’ quarks is very important. If QGP is created, strangeness is readily produced through collisions between gluons....

Wigner crystallization has been observed in a variety of systems, ranging from particulates the size of sand grains suspended in small clouds of electrons and ions (called a dusty plasma) to the dense interiors of planet-sized stars, known as white dwarfs. Professor Alex Bataller of North Carolina State University has recently discovered that Wigner crystallization inside white dwarfs can be studied in the lab using a new class of classical systems, called gravity crystals....

Published recently in the journal Pharmaceutics, the findings could not be timelier or more in demand: Over 150 people die every day from overdoses of synthetic opioids including fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Consumption of about 2 milligrams of fentanyl (the size of two grains of rice) is likely to be fatal depending on a person’s size. “We believe these findings could have a significant impact on a very serious problem plaguing society for years – opioid misuse....