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The research team was led by Dr. Ines Zucker from the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Ivy and Eldar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at the Tel Aviv University. Dr. Zucker collaborated with Dr. Moshe Dessau from the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine at Bar Ilan University in the Galilee and Dr. Yaal Lester from the Azrieli College in Jerusalem in order to investigate the feasibility of ozone for indoor inactivation of SARSCoV-2....

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tested samples from autopsies that were performed from April 2020 to March 2021. They conducted extensive sampling of the nervous system, including the brain, in 11 of the patients. RNA and viable virus in various organs All of the patients died with COVID-19, and none were vaccinated. The blood plasma of 38 patients tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, 3 tested negative, and plasma was unavailable for the other 3....

Since its outbreak, the COVID-19 virus has infected more than 220.9 million people worldwide and has claimed more than 4.5 million lives, according to the World Health Organization coronavirus dashboard as of September 7, 2021. However, many medical professionals attribute the consequential role of face masks in slowing the spread of the virus and protecting human health. Innovations to improve mask efficacy, with increasing focus on nanofiber manufacturing, have resulted in higher filtration efficiency, greater comfort, and easier breathing capacity....

An observational study of patients in London hospitals suggests that the B.1.1.7. variant is not associated with more severe illness and death, but appears to lead to higher viral load, consistent with emerging evidence that this lineage is more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain.A separate observational study using data logged by 37,000 UK users of a self-reporting COVID-19 symptom app found no evidence that B.1.1.7. altered symptoms or likelihood of experiencing long COVID....

Their work, published last week in the journal Science Advances, showed that graphene — a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms — is more likely to become a superconductor than originally thought possible. “Graphene by itself can conduct energy, as a normal metal is conductive, but it is only recently that we learned it can also be a superconductor, by making a so-called ‘magic angle’ — twisting a second layer of graphene on top of the first,” said Jeanie Lau, a professor of physics at Ohio State and lead author of the paper....

“We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer, and co-author of the study. “It’s an amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.” The XENON Collaboration runs XENON1T, a 1,300-kilogram vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1,500 meters beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy....

New results from the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument on NASA’s Juno mission reveal for the first time the birth of auroral dawn storms – the early morning brightening unique to Jupiter’s spectacular aurorae. These immense, transient displays of light occur at both Jovian poles and had previously been observed only by ground-based and Earth-orbiting observatories, notably NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Results of this study were published March 16 in the journal AGU Advances....

For warfighters operating in the field, the ability to detect threats from standoff distances can be life-saving. When advanced radar and drone coverage is not available, warfighters typically rely on their own vision to scan their surroundings. Scanning over a wide area, though, is challenging because of the amount of territory that must be reviewed, the limited field of view of the human eye, and the effects of fatigue. Current technologies like binoculars, cameras, and portable radars can help to improve visibility and increase the threat detection rate....

As scientists continue to search for alternatives to platinum catalysts, Caltech chemists have determined the dominant mechanism for cobalt catalysts, paving the way for the development of better catalysts. Scientists and engineers around the world are working to find a way to power the planet using solar-powered fuel cells. Such green systems would split water during daylight hours, generating hydrogen (H2) that could then be stored and used later to produce water and electricity....

The camera study, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, reports that over 267,000 wildlife photos recorded more than 20 species, including wild boar, Japanese hare, macaques, pheasant, fox, and the raccoon dog—a relative of the fox—in various areas of the landscape. UGA wildlife biologist James Beasley said speculation and questions have come from both the scientific community and the general public about the status of wildlife years after a nuclear accidents like those in Chernobyl and Fukushima....

Radiative energy enters Earth’s system from the sunlight that shines on our planet. Some of this energy reflects off of Earth’s surface or atmosphere back into space. The rest gets absorbed, heats the planet, and is then emitted as thermal radiative energy the same way that black asphalt gets hot and radiates heat on a sunny day. Eventually, this energy also heads toward space, but some of it gets re-absorbed by clouds and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere....

Excess carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere created by the widespread burning of fossil fuels is the major driving force of global climate change, and researchers the world over are looking for new ways to generate power that leaves a smaller carbon footprint. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products. Their discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air that is responsible for trapping the sun’s rays and raising global temperatures....

What’s Up for May? The planets of dusk and dawn, a lunar eclipse, and the Coma star cluster. May begins and ends with a couple of great planet-spotting opportunities. On May 2nd, look to the west about 45 minutes after sunset to find Mercury about 10 degrees off the horizon, accompanied by a slim crescent moon. Just to the south of the Moon is brilliant red giant star Aldebaran, which should be roughly the same brightness as Mercury....

The warm temperatures arrived on February 5 and continued until February 13, 2020. The images above show melting on the ice cap of Eagle Island and were acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 on February 4 and February 13, 2020. The heat is apparent on the map below, which shows temperatures across the Antarctic Peninsula on February 9, 2020. The map was derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) model, and represents air temperatures at 2 meters (about 6....

The scientists published their findings in The Journal of the American Medical Association. There are more than 321,000 cases of gonorrhea reported each year in the USA and the actual number infected may be a lot higher because many people do not suffer from symptoms. The infection has also lost much of its social stigma, but left untreated it can cause pelvic inflammation, severe pregnancy complications and female infertility. Its presence also increases the odds of HIV infection, and babies born to women with untreated gonorrhea risk blindness....

Meteorite material presumed to be devoid of water because it formed in the dry inner Solar System appears to have contained sufficient hydrogen to have delivered to Earth at least three times the mass of water in its oceans, a new study shows. While the idea that enstatite chondrite (EC) meteorites contained enough hydrogen to provide water to the growing proto-Earth has been proposed, efforts to rigorously test this scenario have been hampered by difficulties in measuring hydrogen concentrations in ECs — an obstacle this study overcame....

Historically, wheatgrass has been used as a crop in animal feed. However, a partnership between The Land Institute and the University of Minnesota changed that. The University of Minnesota recently released the first food-grade wheatgrass variety for public use. Now, this eco-friendly and cost-effective crop can be commonly grown as human food, too. “The Land Institute has been breeding intermediate wheatgrass since 2002,” explains James Anderson, a professor at the University of Minnesota....

Instead of dealing with such drawbacks of thermal catalysis systems for DRM reaction, researchers have attempted to drive the conversion of methane at dramatically lower temperatures using photocatalysts activated by light. Although various photocatalyst-like materials have been proposed, it has proven challenging to obtain acceptable conversion performance at low temperatures. Fortunately, a team of researchers, including Professor Mashiro Miyauchi, identified a promising combination of materials that can act as an effective photocatalyst for methane conversion into synthesis gas....

Due to their ultralow vapor pressure and environmentally friendly features, ionic liquids are considered a new type of CO2 adsorbent. They are composed of only cations (positively charged ions) and anions (negatively-charged ions). Recently, a scientists found that two-dimensional ionic liquids show a completely different melting behavior than the bulk phase, leading to a high CO2 adsorption capacity and structural robustness during the CO2 adsorption-desorption process. The research group was led by Profs Suojiang Zhang and Hongyan He from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)....

A new approach that allows objects to become “invisible” has now been applied to an entirely different area: letting particles “hide” from passing electrons, which could lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices and new kinds of electronics. The concept — developed by MIT graduate student Bolin Liao, former postdoc Mona Zebarjadi (now an assistant professor at Rutgers University), research scientist Keivan Esfarjani, and mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen — is described in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters....