And, Mindell says, he couldn’t have done it anywhere but MIT. He joined MIT’s faculty 23 years ago after completing his Ph.D. in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and he currently holds a dual appointment in engineering and humanities as the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and professor of aeronautics and astronautics....
The fossil record dates the first animal life on Earth around 572-602 million years ago, right as the earth emerged from a massive ice age, although molecular studies suggest an earlier beginning, up to 850 million years ago. If true, this implies that animals have to have endured through a period of multiple global ice ages when most of the world was covered in ice (snowball and slushball Earths), larger than any ever seen since....
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) — the central region of a galaxy, which houses its supermassive black hole — are classified by how strong of a jet they produce, shooting matter away at near light speed. Since the jets are mostly visible at radio wavelengths, they are described as either radio loud or radio quiet. “We see that some AGN have very powerful radio jets and some don’t, even though all AGN are intrinsically the same — they all have a supermassive black hole in the center and accrete mass,” said Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and lead author on the new SOFIA finding....
Since the dawn of humanity, the stars in the night sky have captured our imagination. We even sing nursery rhymes to children pondering the nature of stars: “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” Telescopes are able to probe far into the universe, but astronomers have struggled to ‘see’ inside the stars. New space telescopes allow astronomers to ‘see’ the waves that originate in the deep interior of the stars....
“We showed that boosting TREM2 — at least in these mice and if you do it early enough — is beneficial,” said Dr. X. William Yang, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Having a therapeutic that could increase TREM2 levels or function should really be further explored.” More than 5 million people in the United States — and 47 million people worldwide — currently are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia....
New study by USC researchers shows bots evolving to better mimic humans during elections. USC Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI) computer scientist, Emilio Ferrara, has new research indicating that bots or fake accounts enabled by artificial intelligence on social media have evolved and are now better able to copy human behaviors in order to avoid detection. In the journal First Monday, research by Ferrara and colleagues Luca Luceri (Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana), Ashok Deb (USC ISI), Silvia Giordano (Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana), examine bot behavior during the US 2018 elections compared to bot behavior during the US 2016 elections....
Andrea K. Townsend, the study’s primary author and an associate professor of biology at Hamilton College, had recently finished a research project in which she examined the impact of infectious disease on the ability of American crows to solve problems. She was surprised by the lack of research she could find to compare how disease influences cognition in other species. She gathered and analyzed existing studies with her co-authors Kendra B....
Monash University researchers have made a breakthrough discovery that could pave the way for the development of novel non-opioid painkillers (analgesics) to safely and effectively treat neuropathic pain. The research was published today in the prestigious journal Nature. Neuropathic pain is a type of chronic pain that can occur if your nervous system is damaged or not working correctly, and can be caused by injury, virus infection or cancer treatment, or be a symptom or complication of conditions such as multiple sclerosis and diabetes....
Solar flares are massive explosions that occur on the surface of the Sun, unleashing tremendous amounts of energy that can cause significant disruptions in various technological systems on Earth. These powerful bursts of energy can cause disturbances in the Earth’s ionosphere, leading to interference with high-frequency (HF) radio communications, satellite navigation signals, and even electric power grids. In addition, solar flares and eruptions can also pose severe risks to spacecraft and astronauts in space....
The collaboration recently proved that the experiment has a sensitive dark matter detector and that it can reduce background rates in an underground experimental area at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. Now, the collaboration is running a bigger, exponentially quieter, more sensitive version of the experiment more than a mile underground at SNOLAB in Canada. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of the U.S.-Canada border, the experiment could have easily fallen behind schedule in 2020....
Just by breathing or wearing deodorant, you have more influence over your office space than you might think, a growing body of evidence shows. But could these basic acts of existence also be polluting the air in the office room where you work? To find out, a team of engineers at Purdue University has been conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in the office spaces of a building rigged with thousands of sensors....
Our body expends energy when we digest food for the absorption, digestion, transport, and storage of nutrients. This process, known as diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), is a measure of how well our metabolism is working, and can differ depending on mealtime. “Our results show that a meal eaten for breakfast, regardless of the amount of calories it contains, creates twice as high diet-induced thermogenesis as the same meal consumed for dinner,” said the study’s corresponding author, Juliane Richter, M....
A high blood caffeine level might curb the amount of body fat a person carries and their risk of type 2 diabetes, suggests research published in the open-access journal BMJ Medicine on March 14. In light of their findings, the potential role of calorie-free caffeinated drinks for lowering the risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes is probably now worth exploring, say the researchers. Previously published research indicates that drinking 3-5 daily cups of coffee, a rich source of caffeine, is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, note the researchers....
Scientists at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, collaborating with international researchers, have developed a sophisticated AI algorithm that performs advanced computational analysis to identify potential therapeutic targets for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and other cancers. Their research is described in the February 2 issue of the journal Nature Cancer and could have profound implications for future treatment of GBM, an aggressive, usually fatal type of brain cancer, and certain breast, lung, and pediatric cancers....
The groundbreaking discoveries, which were reported in the journal Nature Communications, are described as a “major step forward” in the understanding of disease and provide a tantalizing new hint in determining the most effective therapies for specific individuals. Cervical cancer is a major cause of cancer-related mortality in women. Every year, there are 528,000 new instances of cervical cancer and 266,000 deaths due to the condition globally. The human papillomavirus (HPV), a common virus that may be transmitted from one person to another through intercourse, is almost always to blame for its occurrence....
Our researchers found that f(R)-gravity – a so-called Chameleon Theory – could also explain the formation of structures in the cosmos. The simulations show that disc spiral galaxies like our Milky Way still form, even when a different law of gravity is applied. Scientists already know that f(R)-gravity can reproduce the success of General Relativity in demonstrating the evolution of our solar system. But our new research now shows that this theory can also be applied to galaxy formation on very large cosmological scales....
The new approach offers a detailed glimpse of mechanisms at the molecular level featuring two-atom catalysts and opens the door to improving reactions for an array of catalysts — including iridium, a rare element whose oxidized form is one of the best catalysts for splitting water molecules to generate H2 and O2. In addition, the discovery may have practical applications for producing fuels with sustainable solar energy. Catalysis is the process of increasing the rate of a chemical reaction by introducing an additional chemical, known as a catalyst....
Researchers led by Dr. LI Leping from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) analyzed the evolution of magnetic reconnection and its nearby filament. The result suggested that reconnection is significantly accelerated by the propagating disturbance caused by the adjacent filament eruption. The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal. The New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) is a 1-m ground-based solar telescope, located in the Fuxian Solar Observatory of the Yunnan Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (YNAO)....
For a long time, scientists have been working on how to treat obesity, a serious condition that can lead to diabetes, hypertension, chronic inflammation, and cardiovascular diseases. Studies have also revealed a strong correlation between obesity and cancer. In fact, recent data show that smoking, drinking alcohol, and obesity are the biggest contributors to cancer worldwide. The development of fat cells, which are produced from a tiny fibroblast-like progenitor, not only activates the fat cells’ specific genes but also grows them by storing more lipids (adipocytes and adipose tissue)....
Magnetars: what are they? Neutron stars are compact objects containing one to two solar masses within a radius of about 12 kilometers. Among them, magnetars are characterized by eruptive emission of X-rays and gamma rays. The energy associated with these bursts of intense radiation is probably related to ultra-strong magnetic fields. Magnetars should thus spin down faster than other neutron stars due to enhanced magnetic braking, and measurements of their rotation period evolution have confirmed this scenario....
