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Dark matter plays an important role in cosmic evolution. Galaxies grew as gas cooled and condensed at the center of enormous clumps of dark matter, so-called dark matter halos. The halos themselves separated from the overall expansion of the universe as a result of the gravitational pull of their own dark matter. Astronomers can infer the structure of big dark matter halos from the properties of the galaxies and gas within them, but they have no information about halos that might be too small to contain a galaxy....

Current standards for classifying foods as “whole grain” are inconsistent and, in some cases, misleading, according to a new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. The Whole Grain Stamp, one of the most widely used industry standards, actually identified grain products that were higher in both sugars and calories than products without the stamp. The researchers urge adoption of a consistent, evidence-based standard for labeling whole-grain foods to help consumers and organizations make healthy choices....

Study of 6.2 million patients by Kaiser Permanente and CDC researchers will continue for 2 years. Federal and Kaiser Permanente researchers combing the health records of 6.2 million patients found no serious health effects that could be linked to the 2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The study published September 2 in JAMA reports the first comprehensive findings of the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which studies patient records for 12 million people in 5 Kaiser Permanente service regions along with HealthPartners in Minneapolis, the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, and Denver Health....

“The JWST allowed us to study ices that exist on dust grains within the darkest regions of interstellar molecular clouds,” said SwRI Research Scientist Dr. Danna Qasim, co-author of the study published in Nature Astronomy. “The clouds are so dense that these ices have been mostly protected from the harsh radiation of nearby stars, so they are quite pristine. These are the first ices to be formed and also contain biogenic elements, which are important to life....

On March 25 2020, the Indian government placed its population of more than 1.3 billion citizens under lockdown in an effort to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 disease. All non-essential shops, markets and places of worship were closed with only essential services including water, electricity and health services remaining active. New satellite maps, produced using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, show averaged nitrogen dioxide concentrations over India from January 1 to March 24, 2020 and March 25 (the first day of the lockdown) to April 20, 2020 – compared to the same time-frame as last year....

Supercontinuum generation is when intense laser light of one color travels within a material, like glass, and broadens into a spectrum of colors. The effect lets scientists produce light at colors tailored to particular applications in sectors like bioimaging, optical communications and fundamental studies of materials. Until now, there were two ways to create a supercontinuum. A special optical fiber, around 10% of the width of a human hair, could be used to concentrate light to a very high intensity, over lengths of a few meters....

The research found that an increase of 25g of protein per day was associated with a 14% reduction in the risk of hip fractures on average. Additionally, the study revealed that every additional cup of tea or coffee consumed was linked to a 4% decrease in the risk of suffering a hip fracture. Writing in the journal Clinical Nutrition, the researchers noted that the protective benefits were greater for women who were underweight, with a 25g/day increase in protein reducing their risk by 45%....

Nanobodies, small antibodies found in camels and llamas, are promising as tools against viruses due to their high stability and small size. Although obtaining them from animals is time consuming, technological advances now allow for rapid selection of synthetic nanobodies, called sybodies. A technology platform to select sybodies from large synthetic libraries was recently developed in the lab of Markus Seeger at the University of Zurich, and made available for this study....

The two hemispheres have distinct functional specializations. For instance, most individuals process language mostly in their left hemisphere whereas spatial attention is primarily processed in their right hemisphere. Work can thus be distributed more effectively to both sides, and the overall range of tasks is expanded. However, this so-called lateralization, or the tendency for brain regions to process certain functions more in the left or right hemisphere, differs between people....

This was stated in a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), in Geneva, Switzerland, and the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) project in Boulder, Colorado. There has been a rapid rise in megacities in developing countries. There are currently 23 megacities in the world. Sixty years ago, there were just 2. Half of the population of the world currently dwells in a megacity, and the urban population is expected to double by 2050, which could mean that 70% of the population would live in a megacity....

When Johnson Space Center wanted to upgrade the cooling system in astronaut space suits, it funded research into the best approach. A non-toxic material proposed as an alternative for balancing temperature extremes ultimately led Columbia, Missouri-based ThermAvant International LLC to develop a thermal mug to transform scalding-hot coffee into a drinkable beverage in seconds and keep it warm for hours. What does the blue freezer pack you throw into your cooler have in common with an astronaut spacesuit?...

Along with the woolly mammoth and the giant ground sloth, the saber-toothed cats were probably among the most famous animals that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch and went extinct before the end of the last ice age. Over the years, saber-toothed cats have also been the subject of many research projects. Now, for the first time, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in mapping the entire nuclear genome of a saber-toothed cat, the scimitar-toothed cat “Homotherium latidens....

Researchers from the California Academy of Sciences (Rick Overson and Brian Fisher) have described six new species of strange subterranean ants from the genus Prionopelta in Madagascar and Seychelles. Members of the ant genus Prionopelta are fierce, social predators that hunt down their prey with dagger-like teeth. These ants live throughout the tropics of the world, but usually go completely unnoticed for two main reasons. Firstly, they are tiny. The smallest of the newly described species makes a fruit fly look huge....

The pair of cosmonauts, with assistance from European robotic arm operator Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, was slated to relocate a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka science module on the ISS. Today’s spacewalk would have continued the duo’s previous spacewalk on November 17 where they prepared the radiator for its relocation. A backup date for today’s spacewalk is to be determined.

A completely new genus and species of spiders was discovered in the Pacific Northwest, by spelunkers. Trogloraptor marchingtoni was first discovered by a group of amateur spelunkers in a cave in Grants Pass, Oregon 2010. They sent specimens to the California Academy of Sciences, who confirmed that it was a new species. Since then, more specimens have been found in the Redwoods of Northern California. A team of entomologists led by Charles Griswold of the California Academy of Sciences, published their findings in the journal Zookeys....

One way to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now at its highest point in 800,000 years, would be to capture the potent greenhouse gas from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and use renewable energy to turn it into things we need, says Thomas Jaramillo. As director of SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, a joint institute of Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, he’s in a position to help make that happen....

Engineers from the University of Illinois and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are a step closer to human-operated robotics with their two-legged unit, named Little Hermes, which can walk, run, jump and interact with the environment in synchrony with a human operator. João Ramos, a U. of I. mechanical science and engineering professor and former MIT researcher, collaborated with professor Sangbae Kim at MIT to develop Little Hermes, a small-scale bipedal robot designed to go places deemed unsafe for humans....

Aaron Chou, a senior scientist at Fermilab, works on detecting dark matter through quantum science. As part of DOE’s Office of High Energy Physics QuantISED program, he has developed a way to use qubits, the main component of quantum computing systems, to detect single photons produced by dark matter in the presence of a strong magnetic field. How quantum computers could detect dark matter A classical computer processes information with binary bits set to either 1 or 0....

Fat is stored in the body in two distinct ways, Yale researchers have discovered. While the finding may not help people shed excess pounds, it may shed light on how to prevent health problems associated with weight gain. “We need a better understanding of how cells actually package fat,” said Tobias Walther, associate professor of cell biology at Yale and senior author of the study published online on February 14 in the journal Developmental Cell....

The electronic and optical devices that we use on a daily basis, such as mobile phones, LEDs, and solar cells use transistors and other constituents that are consistently getting smaller and more compact. With an ever-growing need for computing power, storage, and energy efficiency, this trend will only continue to new extremes. Producing such small components for electronic devices requires the machining and preparation of structures on sub-micron scales, up to hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair....