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Scientists warn, without good biosecurity measures ‘alien organisms’ on Earth may become a reality stranger than fiction. Published in international journal BioSciences, a team of scientists, including Dr. Phill Cassey, Head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Adelaide, are calling for greater recognition of the biosecurity risks ahead of the space industry. “In addition to government-led space missions, the arrival of private companies such as SpaceX has meant there are now more players in space exploration than ever before,” said Associate Professor Cassey....

Weightlessness reveals phenomena that are difficult or impossible to study in Earth’s gravity environment. Scientists on the ground use the space station’s research facilities to study and observe these unique phenomena and provide advanced solutions benefiting a host of space and Earth-bound industries. Four astronauts aboard the orbiting lab are in the middle of an experiment that is studying a bone graft adhesive that may reverse the effects of weightlessness on stem cells and bone tissue....

NASA Flight Engineers Kayla Barron and Raja Chari are set to switch their U.S. spacesuits to battery power at 8:05 a.m. EST on Tuesday and spend six-and-a-half hours installing a modification kit on the space station’s Starboard-3 truss structure. The new hardware will enable the upcoming installation of a third roll-out solar array increasing the station’s power output and augmenting the existing solar arrays. The duo was joined by fellow station astronauts Tom Marshburn of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) for a spacewalk procedures review and conference with specialists on the ground....

Teams on the Shannon recovery ship, including two fast boats, now are in the process of securing Dragon and ensuring the spacecraft is safe for the recovery effort. As the fast boat teams complete their work, the recovery ship will move into position to hoist Dragon onto the main deck of Shannon with the astronauts inside. Once on the main deck, the crew will be taken out of the spacecraft and receive medical checks before a helicopter ride to Tampa to board a plane for Houston....

Stockholm, Sweden: Scientists have found that some people being treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have a greater tendency to commit violent crime. In addition, this effect seems to continue for up to 12 weeks after stopping SSRI treatment. This work is published in the peer-reviewed journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, alongside a linked comment. The authors of both the paper and the comment note that the work indicates an association (rather than cause and effect) and urge caution in how the findings are interpreted....

Understanding why proteins interact with certain specific molecules and not with the myriad others in their environment is a major goal of molecular biology. Now, in a series of recent papers, researchers describe how they designed proteins from scratch to have a high affinity and high specificity for targets on flu viruses, and then validated the two best designs using X-ray diffraction data collected at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL)....

To learn about the star-formation history of the universe, we need to look back in time. Galaxies throughout the universe have been forming stars for the past 13 billion years. But most stars were born between 8 and 11 billion years ago, during an era called “cosmic noon.” It has been a challenge for astronomers to study the faint light coming from this era. Optical telescopes can see very distant galaxies, but new stars are largely hidden inside dusty clouds of gas....

Lizards can regrow severed tails, making them the closest relative to humans that can regenerate a lost appendage. But in lieu of the original tail that includes a spinal column and nerves, the replacement structure is an imperfect cartilage tube. Now, for the first time, a USC-led study in Nature Communications describes how stem cells can help lizards regenerate better tails. “This is one of the only cases where the regeneration of an appendage has been significantly improved through stem cell-based therapy in any reptile, bird or mammal, and it informs efforts to improve wound healing in humans,” said the study’s corresponding author Thomas Lozito, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC....

The study by geoscientists at Rice University offers a new theory to help explain the appearance of significant concentrations of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago, something scientists call the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). The research appears this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. “What makes this unique is that it’s not just trying to explain the rise of oxygen,” said study lead author James Eguchi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside who conducted the work for his Ph....

In a newly published study, researchers analyzed gene expression in human and macaque monkey neocortex, finding that human neocortical development is divided into three major phases. The human brain develops with an exquisitely timed choreography marked by distinct patterns of gene activity at different stages from the womb to adulthood, Yale researchers report in the December 26 issue of the journal Neuron. The Yale team conducted a large-scale analysis of gene activity in cerebral neocortex —an area of the brain governing perception, behavior, and cognition — at different stages of development....

GBO’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia — the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope — was outfitted with a new transmitter developed by Raytheon Intelligence & Space, allowing it to transmit a radar signal into space. The NRAO’s continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) received the reflected signal and produced images of the Apollo 15 moon landing site. The proof-of-concept test, culminating a two-year effort, paves the way for designing a more powerful transmitter for the telescope....

“This is what makes this type of microscopy really useful for applications in biology or medicine. The problem so far is that microscopes offering a sufficiently high resolution cannot display information at the corresponding speed,” says Professor Dr. Thomas Huser, who heads the Biomolecular Physics Working Group at Bielefeld University. The SR-SIM project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Union through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. SR-SIM stands for “super-resolution structured illumination microscopy” and is a fluorescence microscopy procedure....

Sars-Cov-2 viruses can be inactivated using certain commercially available mouthwashes. This was demonstrated in cell culture experiments by virologists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum together with colleagues from Jena, Ulm, Duisburg-Essen, Nuremberg, and Bremen. High viral loads can be detected in the oral cavity and throat of some COVID-19 patients. The use of mouthwashes that are effective against Sars-Cov-2 could thus help to reduce the viral load and possibly the risk of coronavirus transmission over the short term....

UQ’s Dr. Stephan Brouwer said health authorities globally were surprised when an epidemic was detected in Asian countries in 2011. “The disease had mostly dissipated by the 1940s,” Dr. Brouwer said. “Like the virus that causes COVID-19, Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria are usually spread by people coughing or sneezing, with symptoms including a sore throat, fever, headaches, swollen lymph nodes, and a characteristic scarlet-colored, red rash. “Scarlet fever commonly affects children, typically aged between two and 10 years....

Doctoral student Neil Mehta working with Prof. Deborah Levin looked at two different materials that are commonly used on the exterior surfaces of slender bodies — smooth graphene and rougher quartz. In the model, these materials were attacked by aggregates composed of argon atoms and silicon and oxygen atoms to simulate ice and dust particles hitting the two surface materials. These molecular dynamics studies taught them what stuck to the surfaces, the damage done, and the length of time it took to cause the damage — all at the size of a single angstrom, which is basically the length of an atom....

A unique new study suggests that the behavior public officials are now mandating or recommending unequivocally to slow the spread of surging COVID-19 — wearing a face covering — should come with a caveat. If not accompanied by proper public education, the practice could lead to more infections. The finding is part of a unique study, just published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, that was conducted by a team of health economists and public health faculty at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine in partnership with public health officials for the state of Vermont....

Berman, the Baskin Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has now developed new methods for the production of HIV vaccines. His approach solves major technical problems which have bedeviled the field. Berman described the new methods, and the candidate vaccines his lab has produced, in a talk at a conference on HIV vaccines held last week in Canada (“Emerging Technologies in Vaccine Discovery and Development,” a joint meeting with “Progress and Pathways Toward an Effective HIV Vaccine,” January 28 to February 1 in Banff, Alberta, part of the Keystone Symposia Global Health Series)....

Scientists estimate that summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will be largely gone within a generation. This is bad news for the world, as ice and snow reflect a high proportion of the sun’s energy into space, thus keeping the planet cool. As the Arctic loses snow and ice, bare rock and water become exposed and absorb more and more of the sun’s energy, making it warmer — a process known as the albedo effect....

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was established that SARS-CoV-2 infects cells by binding to the human protein ACE2, which plays a role in regulating blood pressure. But ACE2 is almost absent in human lung cells, so how can the lungs be one of the most affected organs in COVID-19? This gave researchers a hint that ACE2 might be more than just a blood pressure regulator, and might not be the only player in the SARS-CoV-2 infection mechanism....

Analysis of 260 million years of major geological events finds recurring clusters 27.5 million years apart. Geologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a “pulse,” according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers. “Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random,” said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University’s Department of Biology, as well as the study’s lead author....