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The scientists published their findings in the journal Biological Conservation. Rainfall is also limited, with an annual accumulation of 110 mm in the north and 600 mm in the south. Researchers equipped GPS collars to nine of the animals, four females in four separate herds, and five randomly selected males. Their movements were tracked for two years. The data revealed that the Gourma elephants traverse a vast home range of 32,000 square kilometers, the largest ever reported for elephants, in their search for food and water....

Hopping, tumbling and flipping over are not typical maneuvers you would expect from a spacecraft exploring other worlds. Traditional Mars rovers, for example, roll around on wheels, and they can’t operate upside-down. But on a small body, such as an asteroid or a comet, the low-gravity conditions and rough surfaces make traditional driving all the more hazardous. Enter Hedgehog: a new concept for a robot that is specifically designed to overcome the challenges of traversing small bodies....

A new way of switching the magnetic properties of a material using just a small applied voltage, developed by researchers at MIT and collaborators elsewhere, could signal the beginning of a new family of materials with a variety of switchable properties, the researchers say. The technique could ultimately be used to control properties other than magnetism, including reflectivity or thermal conductivity, they say. The first application of the new finding is likely to be a new kind of memory chip that requires no power to maintain data once it’s written, drastically lowering its overall power needs....

This newly released ESO image shows a spiral disc around HD 100453, which is located 350 light-years away. ESO’s SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, has uncovered an unusual structure around a nearby adolescent star named HD 100453. HD 100453 lies over 350 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), and is engulfed by a swirling disc of gas and dust, visible in red and white in this image....

This intriguing new picture from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295 surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3,300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). This is the most detailed picture of this object ever taken. Stars the size of the Sun end their lives as tiny and faint white dwarf stars. But as they make the final transition into retirement their atmospheres are blown away into space....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In response, the birds change their behaviors, like stashing nuts in quieter places. The findings indicate that the jays may be able to understand another’s point of view, which is an ability that is rarely seen in animals. Corvids cache food to eat at a later date. They also spy on each other and steal from others’ caches....

Spitzer’s Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) instrument took this image during Spitzer’s “cold mission,” which ran from the spacecraft’s launch in 2003 until 2009, when the space telescope exhausted its supply of liquid helium coolant. (This marked the beginning of Spitzer’s “warm mission.”) Infrared light can’t be seen by the human eye, but warm objects, from human bodies to interstellar dust clouds, emit infrared light. Infrared radiation from warm dust generates much of the glow seen here from the Perseus Molecular Cloud....

The first fruits of a cooperative venture between scientists at Rice University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have appeared in a paper that brings together a wealth of information for those who wish to use the unique properties of metallic carbon nanotubes. The feature article published recently in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Nanoscale gathers research about the separation and fundamental characteristics of armchair carbon nanotubes, which have been of particular interest to researchers trying to tune their electronic and optical properties....

A study including more than 22,000 female nurses in Denmark evaluated exposure over 15-20 years to air pollution and road traffic noise to evaluate the impact on heart failure.Exposure to small particulate matter and road traffic noise over three years was associated with an increased risk for heart failure.The risks were greater among women who were former smokers or women who had high blood pressure. Exposure to air pollution and road traffic noise over the course of many years may be associated with an increased risk of developing heart failure, and the correlation appears to be even greater in people who are former smokers or have high blood pressure, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association....

Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue University’s College of Engineering and other Purdue researchers at the FlexiLab have developed a new class of entirely soft robots and actuators capable of re-creating bioinspired high-powered and high-speed motions using stored elastic energy. These robots are fabricated using stretchable polymers similar to rubber bands, with internal pneumatic channels that expand upon pressurization....

Fingerprints may be more useful to us than helping us nab criminal suspects: they also improve our sense of touch. Sensory neurons in the finger can detect touch on the scale of a single fingerprint ridge, according to new research published in JNeurosci. The hand contains tens of thousands of sensory neurons. Each neuron tunes in to a small surface area on the skin — a receptive field — and detects touch, vibration, pressure, and other tactile stimuli....

Researchers at Yokohama National University have developed an interface approach to control the diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers in a way that allows direct translation to quantum devices. They published their method today (December 15, 2021) in Communications Physics. “To realize the quantum internet, a quantum interface is required to generate remote quantum entanglement by photons, which are a quantum communication medium,” said corresponding author Hideo Kosaka, professor in the Quantum Information Research Center, Institute of Advanced Sciences and in the Department of Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, both at Yokohama National University....

Rice University engineers have created a light-powered catalyst that can break the strong chemical bonds in fluorocarbons, a group of synthetic materials that includes persistent environmental pollutants. In a study published this month in Nature Catalysis, Rice nanophotonics pioneer Naomi Halas and collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Princeton University showed that tiny spheres of aluminum dotted with specks of palladium could break carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds via a catalytic process known as hydrodefluorination in which a fluorine atom is replaced by an atom of hydrogen....

“Probably in the next couple of years, we are the only lab that can do this,” said Ming-Guang Hu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Ni lab and the first author on their paper published today (November 29, 2019) in Science. Five years ago, Ni, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a pioneer of ultracold chemistry, set out to build a new apparatus that could achieve the lowest temperature chemical reactions of any currently available technology....

Mars Express was ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet. Launched 19 years ago, on June 2, 2003, the orbiter has spent almost two decades studying Earth’s neighbor and revolutionizing our understanding of the history, present, and future of Mars. MARSIS – Water on the Red Planet The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on Mars Express was crucial in the search for and discovery of signs of liquid water on Mars, including a suspected 20-by-30 km (12-by-19 mile) lake of salty water buried under 1....

Specifically, the scientists examined about 3.5 billion-year-old barites from the Dresser Formation in Western Australia. The barite thus dates from a time when early life developed on Earth. “In the field, the barites are directly associated with fossilized microbial mats, and they smell like rotten eggs when freshly scratched. Thus, we suspected that they contained organic material that might have served as nutrients for early microbial life,” said Dr. Helge Missbach of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy and lead author of the study....

Researchers in Spain provide details of a 31-year-old woman who contracted COVID-19 twice within three weeks, in a case report that will be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal on April 23-26. The 20-day interval between infections is the shortest ever recorded The woman, a healthcare worker, first tested positive in a PCR test during staff screening at her place of work on December 20, 2021....

Twelve years after the first draft of the human genome was published, back in 2000, geneticists have discovered that very few diseases are linked to changes in the genes themselves. Genome-wide studies searching for the genetic components of common diseases, such as lung cancer or autism, have pointed to regions between protein-inducing genes, areas where there is “junk” DNA. An international consortium of scientists has published their findings in 30 linked papers in the journal Nature....

“Studies have shown that getting the flu increases your risk of having a stroke, but research is still being collected on whether getting the flu vaccine can help protect against a stroke,” said study author Francisco J. de Abajo, MD, MPH, Ph.D., of the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. “This observational study suggests that those who have a flu shot have a lower risk of stroke. To determine whether this is due to a protective effect of the vaccine itself or to other factors, more research is needed....

Astronomers have detected about 180 molecules in interstellar space, from simple ones like carbon monoxide (one atom of carbon and one of oxygen) to complex species like buckminsterfullerene (sixty atoms of carbon) or anthracene (fourteen atoms of carbon and ten of hydrogen). These chemicals are found in a wide variety of environments in the galaxy, and in principle can provide the backbone for the subsequent production of the molecules essential to life....