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Carpenter is the lead author of a study that reviewed more than a century’s worth of learning research which was recently published in Nature Reviews Psychology. “The benefits of spacing and retrieval practice have been confirmed over and over in studies in labs, classrooms, and workplaces, but the reason why we’re showcasing this research is because these two techniques haven’t fully caught on. If they were utilized all the time, we’d see drastic increases in learning,” said Carpenter....

As if space travel was not already filled with enough dangers, a new study out today in the journal PLOS ONE shows that cosmic radiation – which would bombard astronauts on deep space missions to places like Mars – could accelerate the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. “Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant threat to future astronauts,” said M. Kerry O’Banion, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy and the senior author of the study....

The patients had Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), a congenital blindness caused by GUCY2D gene mutations. The findings were published in the journal iScience. The researchers administered AAV gene therapy, which contains the DNA of the healthy form of the gene, into the retina of one eye for each of the patients in line with the clinical trial protocol. Each patient had significant gains in rod-type photoreceptor cell-mediated visual functions in the treated eye within days after treatment....

Now, researchers have constructed a high-quality, chromosome-scale genome of pearl oysters, which they hope can be used to find resilient strains. The research, by scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), in collaboration with a number of other research institutes including K. MIKIMOTO & CO., LTD, Pearl Research Institute and Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, was published recently in the journal DNA Research. “It’s very important to establish the genome,” said one of the two first authors, Dr....

In a recently published study, researchers from Cornell University detail how they developed gold-plated nanoparticles that are able to find and destroy cancer cells. Comparable to nano-scale Navy Seals, Cornell scientists have merged tiny gold and iron oxide particles to work as a team, then added antibody guides to steer the team through the bloodstream toward colorectal cancer cells. And in a nanosecond, the alloyed allies then kill the bad guys – cancer cells – with absorbed infrared heat....

The findings, published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could help pave the way toward new kinds of astronomical observatories for long-wavelength emissions, new heat sensors for buildings, and even new kinds of quantum sensing and information processing devices, the multidisciplinary research team says. The group includes recent MIT postdoc Dmitri Efetov, Professor Dirk Englund of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Kin Chung Fong of Raytheon BBN Technologies, and colleagues from MIT and Columbia University....

Much has been made of graphene’s exceptional qualities, from its ability to conduct heat and electricity better than any other material to its unparalleled strength: Worked into a composite material, graphene can repel bullets better than Kevlar. Previous research has also shown that pristine graphene — a microscopic sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern — is among the most impermeable materials ever discovered, making the substance ideal as a barrier film....

Rice University scientists who created a de-icing film for radar domes have now refined the technology to work as a transparent coating for glass. The new work by Rice chemist James Tour and his colleagues could keep glass surfaces from windshields to skyscrapers free of ice and fog while retaining their transparency to radio frequencies (RF). The technology was introduced this month in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces....

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules. A team led by the University of Graz, Austria, used unique four-probe scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM, to move a single molecule between two independent probes and observe it disappear from one point and instantaneously reappear at the other. The STM, made available via the CNMS user program, operates under an applied voltage, scanning material surfaces with a sharp probe that can move atoms and molecules by nudging them a few nanometers at a time....

Squat lobsters, a term derived from the habit of folding their tail or abdomen beneath their bodies, are more closely related to hermit crabs than to well-known lobsters or crabs. With over 1,000 species, they can be found in a wide range of aquatic environments, from the chilly Antarctic waters to the tropical regions of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. Among these, the greatest diversity of squat lobsters is observed in the tropical waters of the West Pacific....

Several new papers in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, published by Oxford University Press, suggest Sofosbuvir/daclatasvir are successful treatments for COVID-19. Three articles all researched the use of sofosbuvir and daclatasvir for the treatment of COVID-19. These three papers come from Iran, which has developed its own pill containing sofosbuvir and daclatasvir, and is in a position to test this in a large clinical trial as Iran is a massively impacted country, reporting some 2500 cases and 200 deaths a day....

In spite of their tranquil appearance in the night sky, stars are scorching furnaces that spring to life through tumultuous processes – and our 4.5 billion-year-old Sun is no exception. To glimpse its harsh early days, astronomers gather clues not only in the Solar System but also by studying young stars elsewhere in our Galaxy. Using Herschel to survey the chemical composition of regions where stars are being born today, a team of astronomers has noticed that one object in particular is different....

Using images captured by satellites, researchers have confirmed that the January 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano produced the highest-ever recorded plume. The colossal eruption is also the first to have been directly observed to have broken through to the mesosphere layer of the atmosphere. The results, by a team of scientists from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and RAL Space, were published on November 3 in the journal Science....

A highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 variant was unknowingly spreading for months in the United States by October 2020, according to a new study from researchers with The University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. Scientists first discovered it in early December in the United Kingdom, where the highly contagious and more lethal variant is thought to have originated. The journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, which has published an early-release version of the study, provides evidence that the coronavirus variant B117 (501Y) had spread across the globe undetected for months when scientists discovered it....

The finding involves a new explanation for a set of results made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton, and Hitomi, a Japanese-led X-ray telescope. If confirmed with future observations, this may represent a major step forward in understanding the nature of the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 85% of matter in the universe. “We expect that this result will either be hugely important or a total dud,” said Joseph Conlon of Oxford University who led the new study....

The relationship between thermodynamics and quantum physics has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years. Researchers at TU Wien have used computer simulations to investigate this relationship, and have found that chaos plays a significant role. The simulations indicate that the laws of thermodynamics can only be derived from quantum physics when chaos is present. Boltzmann: Everything is possible, but it may be improbable The air molecules randomly flying around in a room can assume an unimaginable number of different states: Different locations and different speeds are allowed for each individual particle....

Below are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and clarity. How long have gene-based vaccines been in development? This type of vaccine has been in the works for about 30 years. Nucleic acid vaccines are based on the idea that DNA makes RNA and then RNA makes proteins. For any given protein, once we know the genetic sequence or code, we can design an mRNA or DNA molecule that prompts a person’s cells to start making it....

Sounds like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. However, looking for something that’s close to nothing is not easy. Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky. Like turning out the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets, and even the zodiacal light....

Peering deep into the Milky Way’s crowded central hub of stars, Hubble researchers have uncovered for the first time a population of ancient white dwarfs — smoldering remnants of once-vibrant stars that inhabited the core. Finding these relics at last can yield clues to how our galaxy was built, long before Earth and our sun formed. The observations are the deepest, most detailed study of the galaxy’s foundational city structure— its vast central bulge that lies in the middle of a pancake-shaped disk of stars, where our solar system dwells....

This hourglass-like feature, which dwarfs all other radio structures in the galactic center, is likely the result of a phenomenally energetic burst that erupted near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole a few million years ago. “The center of our galaxy is relatively calm when compared to other galaxies with very active central black holes,” said Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford and lead author of an article appearing in the journal Nature....