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Like earthquakes and other geophysical processes and events, humans are a major source of seismic signals detected by seismometers worldwide. Everyday human activity — from our involvement in industrial processes and construction projects to our raucous outbursts at football stadiums — generates vibrations in the earth that are recorded as a near-continuous stream of high-frequency seismic waves. In general, this seismic noise closely tracks with human behavior; it’s typically stronger during the day than at night and weaker on weekends and holidays than it is on typical weekdays....

Neuroscience has been taking an interest in dreams for a number of years, focusing on the areas of the brain that are active when we dream. The scientists employed high-density electroencephalography (EEG), which uses several electrodes positioned on the skull to measure brain activity. They recently discovered that certain regions of the brain are responsible for the formation of dreams, and that certain other regions are activated depending on the specific content within a dream (such as perceptions, thoughts, and emotions)....

TOI 700 d is one of only a few Earth-size planets discovered in a star’s habitable zone so far. Others include several planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system and other worlds discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. “TESS was designed and launched specifically to find Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars,” said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Planets around nearby stars are easiest to follow-up with larger telescopes in space and on Earth....

“The information collected with these tags gives us a good description of the scale of whales’ feeding behavior over periods of hours, days, and weeks, which is something we’ve not been able to do before,” said Ladd Irvine, a senior faculty research assistant in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and the study’s lead author. The whales feed mostly during the day, usually in short bursts lasting one to two hours, but would also feed continuously throughout the daytime, and in rare circumstances for an entire day....

Now, that is changing. In a new study led by Petra Fromme and Nadia Zatsepin at the Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery, the School of Molecular Sciences, and the Department of Physics at Arizona State University, researchers investigated the structure of Photosystem I (PSI) with ultrashort X-ray pulses at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (EuXFEL) in Hamburg, Germany. PSI is a large biomolecular system that acts as a large converter transforming solar energy into chemical energy....

A thermoelectric device is an energy conversion device that utilizes the voltage generated by the temperature difference between both ends of a material; it is capable of converting heat energy, such as waste heat from industrial sites, into electricity that can be used in daily life. Existing thermoelectric devices are rigid because they are composed of hard metal-based electrodes and semiconductors, hindering the full absorption of heat sources from uneven surfaces....

In a paper published today in Nature, the team reports that a surface covered in a fine mist of transparent droplets and lit with a single lamp should produce a bright color if each tiny droplet is precisely the same size. This iridescent effect is due to “structural color,” by which an object generates color simply due to the way light interacts with its geometric structure. The effect may explain certain iridescent phenomena, such as the colorful condensation on a plastic dish or inside a water bottle....

For the first time, scientists have successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms. The achievement was accomplished by JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson’s team of researchers. Einstein originally referred to entanglement as creating spooky action at a distance—the strange effect of quantum mechanics where what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom located somewhere else....

This region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) glows in striking colors in this image captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The region, known as LHA 120-N 180B — N180 B for short — is a type of nebula known as an H II region (pronounced “H two”), and is a fertile source of new stars. The LMC is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, visible mainly from the Southern Hemisphere....

Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest supernovae in more than 400 years. The stellar explosion, SN 1987A, blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months after its discovery on February 23, 1987. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, SN 1987A was the nearest supernova explosion observed in centuries and it quickly became the best-studied supernova of all time....

Delirium is a prevalent issue among women who have urinary tract infections (UTIs), particularly those who have undergone menopause. Researchers from Cedars-Sinai have found that administering estrogen, a hormone commonly used in hormone replacement therapy can prevent symptoms of delirium in laboratory mice. The study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that estrogen may have a protective effect against delirium. “There has been a resurgence of interest in hormone replacement therapy, and this study, which builds on our previous work, shows that it may be a tool to mitigate delirium,” said Shouri Lahiri, MD, director of the Neurosciences Critical Care Unit and Neurocritical Care Research at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study....

“Our study shows that mammal biodiversity in the tropics and subtropics today is still being shaped by ancient human events and climate changes,” said study lead author John Rowan of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In some cases, we found that ancient climate or human events were more important than their present-day counterparts in explaining present patterns of biodiversity.” The research was published today (December 16, 2019) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Even dying stars could host planets with life — and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars. Researchers found that we could detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a white dwarf’s planet much more easily than for an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. “In the quest for extraterrestrial biological signatures, the first stars we study should be white dwarfs,” said Avi Loeb, theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation....

Researchers urge a closer examination of sunlight’s efficacy in inactivating the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A year ago scientists everywhere were scrambling to get their minds around the SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic from which we are only now beginning to emerge. The world clung to every new development, every bit of science that could provide clues to managing life in the presence of this mysterious killer. Many science-backed COVID-19 management concepts remain unchanged to this day: handwashing with soap and warm water disrupts the virus’ lipid membrane....

The COVID-19 Serology Studies workshop was convened by an interagency working group comprised of experts from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—including scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), parts of the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority—and the Department of Defense....

The Scoresby Sound (Danish: Scoresby Sund, Greenlandic: Kangertittivaq), one of the widest and longest fjord systems in the world, is a deep inlet that penetrates east Greenland for about 68 miles (110 km). The town of Ittoqqortoormiit, considered one of the most remote settlements on Earth, lies in the south part of the peninsula along the northern shore of the Scoresby Sound. It is the only permanent settlement in the region and has a population of fewer than 500 people....

A general question in developmental and evolutionary biology is how tissues shape themselves to create the diversity of forms we find in nature such as leaves, flowers, hearts, and wings. Study of leaves has led to progress in understanding the mechanisms that produce the simpler, flatter forms. But it’s been unclear what lies behind the more complex curved leaf forms of carnivorous plants. Previous studies using the model species Arabidopsis thaliana which has flat leaves revealed the existence of a polarity field running from the base of the leaf to the tip, a kind of inbuilt cellular compass which orients growth....

“Looking at many years of data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), we picked up indications of a roughly two-year-long variation of gamma rays from a galaxy known as PG 1553+113,” said Stefano Ciprini, who coordinates the Fermi team at the Italian Space Agency’s Science Data Center (ASDC) in Rome. “This signal is subtle and has been seen over less than four cycles, so while this is tantalizing we need more observations....

“It was one of those chance discoveries,” says researcher Boris Gänsicke, from the University of Warwick in the UK, who led the study, published today in the journal Nature. The team had inspected around 7,000 white dwarfs observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and found one to be unlike any other. By analyzing subtle variations in the light from the star, they found traces of chemical elements in amounts that scientists had never before observed at a white dwarf....

Researchers have discovered one more way the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) exploits the immune system. Not only does HIV infect and destroy a class of immune cells called CD4-positive helper T cells – which normally direct and support the infection-fighting activities of other immune cells – the virus also appears to use those cells to travel through the body and infect other CD4 T cells. The study, which appeared online on August 1 in the journal Nature is the first to visualize the behavior of HIV-infected human T cells within a lymph node of a live animal, using a recently developed “humanized” mouse model of HIV infection....