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Living cells inside the body could be placed under surveillance—their location and migration noninvasively tracked in real time over many days—using a new method developed by researchers at KAUST. The technique uses magnetic core-shell iron nanowires as nontoxic contrast agents, which can be implanted into live cells, lighting up those cells’ location inside a living organism when scanned by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The technique could have applications ranging from studying and treating cancer to tracking live-cell medical treatments, such as stem cell therapies....

“It is crucial that we know the number of severe mass extinctions and their timing in order to investigate their causes,” explains Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University’s Department of Biology and a co-author of the analysis, which appears in the journal Historical Biology. “Notably, all six major mass extinctions are correlated with devastating environmental upheavals—specifically, massive flood-basalt eruptions, each covering more than a million square kilometers with thick lava flows....

Capturing images of our home planet from the perspective of faraway spacecraft has become a tradition at NASA, ever since Voyager, 28 years ago, displayed our “pale blue dot” in the vastness of space. But the view of Earth from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is quite something else. This Kepler image of Earth was recently beamed back home. Captured on December 10, 2017, after the spacecraft adjusted its telescope to a new field of view, Earth’s reflection as it slipped past was so extraordinarily bright that it created a saber-like saturation bleed across the instrument’s sensors, obscuring the neighboring Moon....

New research indicates that children who are kinder are also happier and more popular. Simple acts of kindness could help reduce bullying in schools. The scientists published their findings in the journal PLoS ONE. Happy people often do good for others, but being more prosocial increases people’s sense of well-being. Scientists carried out an experiment analyzing kindness in pre-teens. They followed 400 kids, aged between 9 and 12, attending elementary schools in Vancouver, Canada....

The findings, which were published in the journal Science Advances on December 7, provide the strongest evidence yet that dinosaurs were struck down in their prime. At the time the Chicxulub asteroid hit, dinosaurs were not in decline. Scientists have long debated why non-bird dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, became extinct – whereas mammals and other species such as turtles and crocodiles survived. Led by an international team of paleontologists and ecologists, the study analyzed 1,600 fossil records from North America....

UConn Assistant Professor of Anthropology Dimitris Xygalatas studies rituals and how they impact our health. In new research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Xygalatas and collaborators from Masaryk University, Czech Republic, including former UConn student Martin Lang, examine the important roles rituals play in reducing our anxiety levels. “In the current context of the pandemic, if you were a completely rational being — perhaps an extraterrestrial who’s never met any actual humans — you would expect that given the current situation people wouldn’t bother doing things that do not seem crucial to their survival....

Synchrotrons like the Advanced Light Source at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) allow scientists to explore samples in a variety of ways using this light, in fields ranging from materials science, biology, and chemistry to physics and environmental science. Researchers have found ways to upgrade these machines to produce more intense, focused, and consistent light beams that enable new, and more complex and detailed studies across a broad range of sample types....

“As far as we know, it’s unprecedented,” says senior author Ken Otter, a biology professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. “We don’t know of any other study that has ever seen this sort of spread through cultural evolution of a song type.” Although it’s well known that some bird species change their songs over time, these cultural evolutions tend to stay in local populations, becoming regional dialects rather than the norm for the species....

Scientists at the University of Toronto have successfully tested the use of machine learning models to guide the design of long-acting injectable drug formulations. The potential for machine learning algorithms to accelerate drug formulation could reduce the time and cost associated with drug development, making promising new medicines available faster. The study will be published today (January 10, 2023) in the journal Nature Communications and is one of the first to apply machine learning techniques to the design of polymeric long-acting injectable drug formulations....

This model, which consists of many layers of information-processing units that can be trained on huge volumes of data to perform specific tasks, was used by the researchers to shed light on how the human brain may be performing the same tasks. “What these models give us, for the first time, is machine systems that can perform sensory tasks that matter to humans and that do so at human levels,” says Josh McDermott, the Frederick A....

The holiday season is a time of celebrations and festive drinks, some of which are made with apple liquors. These classic spirits have a long history, and surprisingly, many decisions about their processing are still subjectively determined. Now, researchers in ACS Food Science & Technology report that measuring the liquor’s conductivity could give a more objective assessment, and they also found a way to make the process more energy-efficient. For hundreds of years, apples have been a good base for liquors, such as Calvados in France and applejack in the U....

The universe abounds with dark matter. Nobody knows what it consists of. UiO physicists have now launched a very hard mathematical explanation that could solve the mystery once and for all. Astrophysicists have known for the last 80 years that most of the universe consists of an unknown, dark matter. The solution to the mystery may now be just around the corner. “We are looking for a new member of our particle zoo in order to explain dark matter....

Corals bred in public aquaria provide novel research opportunities and a healthy stock for outplanting into the wild. Both are essential components of a thriving future for coral reef ecosystems, which support around 25% of all life in Earth’s oceans. However, the long-term success of such efforts hinges in part on maintaining genetic diversity in aquarium-bred corals which leads to increased resilience to threats like ocean warming and acidification. In a study published today (November 14) in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, a diverse team of Steinhart Aquarium biologists and researchers from the California Academy of Sciences’ Coral Spawning Lab produce the first-ever pedigree, or ‘family tree’, for corals bred in an aquarium and provide a list of best practices to maintain genetic diversity in aquarium-bred corals....

A newly published study from Cornell University scientists suggests that the melting of Arctic sea ice due to climate change can lead to increased odds of severe winter weather outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s middle latitudes. The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans might think. That’s because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere’s middle latitudes — think the “Snowmageddon” storm that hamstrung Washington, D....

The intense cosmological event observed on August 17 also had other reverberations here on Earth: It ruled out a class of dark energy theories that modify gravity, and challenged a large class of theories. Dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe, is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. It makes up about 68 percent of the total mass and energy of the universe and functions as a sort of antigravity, but we don’t yet have a good explanation for it....

A new study looking at the genomes of more than 13,000 men identified four new genetic variants associated with an increased risk of testicular cancer, the most commonly diagnosed type in young men today. The findings from this first-of-its-kind meta-analysis were reported online on May 12 in the journal Nature Genetics by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The discovery of these genetic variations—chromosomal “typos,” so to speak—could ultimately help researchers better understand which men are at high risk and allow for early detection or prevention of the disease....

Microbial communities living in deep aquatic sediments have adapted to survive on degraded organic matter, according to a study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology and coauthored by professors at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “There are microbes living in deep ocean sediments eating carbon, like proteins and carbohydrates, that is hundreds of years old,” said Andrew Steen, lead author of the study and assistant professor of environmental geology at UT....

Microplastics are generally believed to originate directly from industry, for example as cosmetic exfoliates, or indirectly from the breakdown of larger plastic items over time. However, the contribution of daily tasks such as cutting, tearing or twisting open plastic packaging and containers has not been fully understood. Cheng Fang and colleagues monitored the generation of microplastics during the tearing open of chocolate packaging, cutting of sealing tapes, and opening of plastic bottle caps....

Engineers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a novel face mask that can diagnose the wearer with COVID-19 within about 90 minutes. The masks are embedded with tiny, disposable sensors that can be fitted into other face masks and could also be adapted to detect other viruses. The sensors are based on freeze-dried cellular machinery that the research team has previously developed for use in paper diagnostics for viruses such as Ebola and Zika....

As carbon dioxide continues to build up in the Earth’s atmosphere, research teams around the world have spent years seeking ways to remove the gas efficiently from the air. Meanwhile, the world’s number one “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the ocean, which soaks up some 30 to 40 percent of all of the gas produced by human activities. Recently, the possibility of removing carbon dioxide directly from ocean water has emerged as another promising possibility for mitigating CO2 emissions, one that could potentially someday even lead to overall net negative emissions....