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Now, scientists have discovered that an especially “hoppy” brew might have unique health benefits. According to recent research, chemicals extracted from hop flowers can, in lab dishes, inhibit the clumping of amyloid beta proteins, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). These findings were recently published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, a scientific journal of the American Chemical Society. Alzheimer’s disease is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease, often marked by memory loss and personality changes in older adults....

Roughly 35 million years ago, Earth cooled rapidly. At roughly the same time, the Drake Passage formed between South America and the Antarctic, paving the way for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Thanks to these two factors, Antarctica was soon completely covered in ice. As a study from the Alfred Wegener Institute now shows, this massive glaciation was delayed in at least one region. This new piece of the puzzle concerning the early history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could help to predict its unstable future....

In a paper published in Light: Science & Applications today (February 4, 2020), the lab of Chunlei Guo, professor of optics also affiliated with Physics and the Material Sciences Program, describes using powerful femto-second laser pulses to etch metal surfaces with nanoscale structures that selectively absorb light only at the solar wavelengths, but not elsewhere. A regular metal surface is shiny and highly reflective. Years ago, the Guo lab developed a black metal technology that turned shiny metals pitch black....

Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have created light-activated composite devices able to execute precise, visible movements and form complex three-dimensional shapes without the need for wires or other actuating materials or energy sources. The design combines programmable photonic crystals with an elastomeric composite that can be engineered at the macro and nano scale to respond to illumination. The research provides new avenues for the development of smart light-driven systems such as high-efficiency, self-aligning solar cells that automatically follow the sun’s direction and angle of light, light-actuated microfluidic valves or soft robots that move with light on demand....

The use of music has become increasingly popular in human medicine, with studies showing a range of benefits, from improving motor and cognitive function in stroke patients to reducing anxiety associated with medical examinations, diagnostic procedures, and surgery. The benefits of music are also being investigated in cats and other animals. Research published previously in JFMS has indicated that cats that are under general anesthesia remain physiologically responsive to music;2 furthermore, they appear to be in a more relaxed state when played classical music, compared with pop and heavy metal....

However, our grasp of this intricate process has been limited, at best. Scientists have published new research revealing a detailed and dynamic model of the Earth’s surface over the past 100 million years. Working with scientists in France, University of Sydney geoscientists have published this new model in the prestigious journal Science. For the first time, it provides a high-resolution understanding of how today’s geophysical landscapes were created and how millions of tonnes of sediment have flowed to the oceans....

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have created new ultralight fabric solar cells, which can transform any surface into a power source with ease and speed. These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies....

The Arctic sea ice cap is an expanse of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas. Every year, it expands and thickens during the fall and winter and grows smaller and thinner during the spring and summer. But in the past decades, increasing temperatures have caused marked decreases in the Arctic sea ice extents in all seasons, with particularly rapid reductions in the minimum end-of-summer ice extent....

A team formed by Lukas Novotny (ETH Zurich), Markus Aspelmeyer (University of Vienna), Oriol Romero-Isart (University of Innsbruck), and Romain Quidant (Zurich) is attempting to answer precisely this question within the ERC-Synergy project Q-Xtreme. A crucial step on the way to this goal is to reduce the energy stored in the motion of the nanoparticle as much as possible, i.e. to cool the particle down to the so-called quantum ground-state....

Is our solar system located in a typical Milky Way neighborhood? Scientists have gotten closer to answering this question, thanks to the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, a citizen science collaboration between professional scientists and members of the public. Scientists tapped into the worldwide network of 150,000 volunteers using Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 to find new examples of brown dwarfs. These objects are balls of gas that are not heavy enough to be stars, since they can’t power themselves through nuclear fusion the way stars do....

1. Time is Strange on Venus A day in planetary terms depends on how long it takes for the planet to rotate one time around its axis. On earth, it takes 24 hours. But on Venus, it takes the equivalent of 243 Earth days for Venus to make a complete rotation around its axis. A year, in contrast, represents how long it takes for a planet to revolve one time around the sun....

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, produced a global model mapping pollution risk caused by 92 chemicals commonly used in agricultural pesticides in 168 countries. The study examined risk to soil, the atmosphere, and surface and ground water. The map also revealed Asia houses the largest land areas at high risk of pollution, with China, Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines at highest risk. Some of these areas are considered “food bowl” nations, feeding a large portion of the world’s population....

The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a versatile material known for its light weight and porosity. It has a range of uses, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation. Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and vice dean of innovation at Princeton, leads a lab that focuses on creating new materials, including aerogels, for engineering purposes. One day, sitting in a faculty meeting, he had an idea....

A recent study shows how politics and health outcomes have become more intertwined over time. From 2001 to 2019, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital looked at death rates and information on federal and state elections for all counties in the United States. The researchers discovered a “mortality gap,” or an increasing divergence in age-adjusted death rates in counties that had supported Democrats or Republicans in prior presidential and governor elections....

In this image, the brightest radio emission comes from the galaxy’s core, at bottom right. The jet is propelled by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole at the core, and moves outward, toward the upper left. The jet seen here extends some 1,600 light-years, and shows structure within it. At this distance, PSO J0309+27 is seen as it was when the universe was less than a billion years old, or just over 7 percent of its current age....

While today’s gold standard COVID-19 diagnostic test, which uses qRT-PCR — quantitative reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is extremely sensitive, detecting down to one copy of RNA per microliter, it requires specialized equipment, a runtime of several hours and a centralized laboratory facility. As a result, testing typically takes at least one to two days. A research team led by scientists in the labs of Jennifer Doudna, David Savage, and Patrick Hsu at the University of California, Berkeley, is aiming to develop a diagnostic test that is much faster and easier to deploy than qRT-PCR....

Stanford Engineering’s Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) has set a new record in computational science by successfully using a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to solve a complex fluid dynamics problem—the prediction of noise generated by a supersonic jet engine. Joseph Nichols, a research associate in the center, worked on the newly installed Sequoia IBM Bluegene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) funded by the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)....

Scientists researching this phenomenon believe that the vascular smooth muscle cells may be attempting to help, however, this aberrant behavior of these robust cells instead leads to coronary artery disease, which is the most prevalent form of heart disease in the United States. In a bit of a vicious cycle, stents as well as bypass grafts used to treat coronary artery disease can prompt the same response. Now Medical College of Georgia scientists report new insight into how the cells enable this unhealthy growth and a new target to intervene....

One of the perks of an academic’s pre-pandemic life was the chance, at least once a week, to take a break from problem sets and proofs, and walk down the hall or across campus to sit in on cutting-edge research presented by invited experts from around the world. Offered through a department’s regular seminar series, these talks were also opportunities to get some friendly face-to-face with colleagues who were otherwise buried in their own work....

New study finds if the United States vaccinates half its population by the summer vs fall, 6.8 million cases could be prevented and $9.8 billion in societal costs could be saved. With around 30 percent of the U.S. population now fully vaccinated, the rate of daily vaccinations has started to slow, raising concerns that greater efforts and investments may be needed to reach higher coverage levels. A study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on May 6, 2021, shows the lives, hospitalizations, and costs that can be saved by even relatively small increases in vaccination coverage and reaching higher vaccination coverage levels sooner (e....