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Early Saturday morning, an unmanned Air Force space plane landed by itself at a California military base, wrapping up a 15-month clandestine mission. The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in March 2011 and conducted in-orbit experiments during the mission. This was the second autonomous landing at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is located 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The previous space plane landed in 2010, seven months after it had been launched....

Questions about safety, side effects preclude youth from getting COVID shot, UCSF study shows. Vaccine skepticism among young adults may stall efforts to achieve herd immunity — a threshold in which approximately 80 percent of a population is vaccinated against the coronavirus. A study by UC San Francisco researchers found that about one in four unvaccinated people aged 18 to 25 said that they “probably will not” or “definitely will not” get the COVID vaccination, despite the fact that this demographic has been found to be more likely than other age-groups to transmit coronavirus, jeopardizing the health of older unvaccinated adults and facilitating the rise of virulent vaccine variants....

When the asteroid passed in front of the galaxy, radio waves coming from the galaxy were slightly bent around the asteroid’s edge, in a process called diffraction. As these waves interacted with each other, they produced a circular pattern of stronger and weaker waves, similar to the patterns of bright and dark circles produced in terrestrial laboratory experiments with light waves. “By analyzing the patterns of the diffracted radio waves during this event, we were able to learn much about the asteroid, including its size and precise position, and to get some valuable clues about its shape,” said Jorma Harju, of the University of Helsinki in Finland....

Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a ‘traffic jam’ of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life. Rather than being seen directly, the new planet candidates were found by Planethunters.org volunteers looking for a telltale dip in the brightness as planets pass in front of their parent stars....

Study is a wake-up call for the potential of another such outbreak, as vaccination rates plummet during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings are published in the journal Science Advances. “Measles Parties” Accelerated Measles Spread Yang, an infectious disease modeler who previously published analyses on the spread of influenza and COVID-19, designed a computer model to simulate the transmission of measles in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York City from October 2018 to July 2019 based on city data of measles cases....

University Of California San Francisco researchers explain why some lotions do more harm than good, especially for people with sensitive skin, and how moisturizers play a role in “Swiss cheesing” of the skin. Visit any drugstore and you’ll find a dizzying array of choices for skin-care products. That’s no surprise, says UC San Francisco dermatology professor Peter Elias, MD, since at least half of Americans, maybe more, have sensitive skin or a diagnosed skin condition such as eczema, atopic dermatitis, or rosacea....

I’m an astronomer with a specialty in observational cosmology – I’ve been studying distant galaxies for 30 years. Some of the biggest unanswered questions about the universe relate to its early years just after the Big Bang. When did the first stars and galaxies form? Which came first, and why? I am incredibly excited that astronomers may soon uncover the story of how galaxies started because James Webb was built specifically to answer these very questions....

Days warmed more quickly in some locations, and nights did in others – but the total area of disproportionately greater night-time warming was more than twice as large. The study shows this “warming asymmetry” has been driven primarily by changing levels of cloud cover. Increased cloud cover cools the surface during the day and retains the warmth during the night, leading to greater night-time warming. Whereas, decreasing cloud cover allows more warmth to reach the surface during the day, but that warmth is lost at night....

The COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. has been characterized by rapidly changing information, a high degree of uncertainty, and conflicting information about transmission, vulnerability, and mitigation methods. Several studies focused on public perceptions of the pandemic and the impact of media will be presented during two sessions on December 15, from 2:30-4:00 during the Society for Risk Analysis virtual Annual Meeting, December 13-17, 2020. In the first of a pair of studies on public attitudes about the pandemic, Zhuling Liu, University at Buffalo, examined Americans’ support for various measures such as stay-at-home orders and the temporary closure of nonessential businesses....

Over millions of years, Earth’s summits and valleys have moved and shifted, resulting in the dramatic landscapes of peaks and shadows we know today. Mountains often form when pressure under Earth’s surface pushes upward, yet many factors impact their ultimate height, including the erosion of the areas between mountains, known as channels. Scientists have long assumed that as land is pushed faster upward to form a mountain, its height increases in a continuous and predictable way....

The research both upends the previous theory and establishes a new geological concept. Professor Sutherland from the University’s School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences was part of the team of predominantly GNS Science researchers that made global headlines in 2017 when they announced Zealandia should count as a new fully-fledged continent, Earth’s seventh and smallest. New Zealand to the south and New Caledonia to the north are the only major land masses of the otherwise mostly underwater Zealandia, which, at 4....

A $51 “lab-in-a-backpack” has been developed by researchers that could expand the ability of resource-poor regions to offer fast, reliable, noninvasive detection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. E. Emily Lin and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London outline the new system in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 26, 2022. Efforts to bring COVID-19 vaccines to resource-poor countries are underway, but will take two to three more years to achieve full vaccination....

Researchers at Rice’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology have come up with a set of facts and figures about carbon nanotubes that appear to collapse during the growth process; they found that these unique configurations have properties of both nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons. What the researchers call “closed-edge graphene nanoribbons” could kick-start research into their usefulness in electronics and materials applications. The pioneering work led by Robert Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice, is detailed in a paper that appeared online this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano....

All the planets of our solar system are encased in a magnetic bubble, carved out in space by the Sun’s constantly outflowing material, the solar wind. Outside this bubble is the interstellar medium — the ionized gas and magnetic field that fills the space between stellar systems in our galaxy. One question scientists have tried to answer for years is on the shape of this bubble, which travels through space as our Sun orbits the center of our galaxy....

The Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) traveled from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland, where it was built and tested, to Lockheed Martin Space, in Littleton, Colorado, where the spacecraft is being assembled. It was received safely at Lockheed Martin on October 25 and was successfully integrated onto the spacecraft on October 30, 2020. “Lucy is an amazing spacecraft, but I’m always looking forward to the day when we start getting data from these never before seen fossils of the solar system,” says Lucy principal investigator, Hal Levison....

Next-generation vaccines for COVID-19 should aim to induce an immune response against ‘replication proteins’, essential for the very earliest stages of the viral cycle, concludes new research carried out by University College London (UCL) scientists. By designing vaccines that activate immune memory cells, known as T cells, to attack infected cells expressing this part of the virus’s internal machinery, it may be possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 at the very outset, thereby helping stop its spread....

Usually, an hour seems like an insignificant amount of time, but even this minimal loss can cause problems. There can be significant health repercussions of this forcible shift in the body clock. Springing forward is usually harder than falling backward. Why? The natural internal body clock rhythm in people tends to be slightly longer than 24 hours, which means that every day we tend to delay our sleep schedules. Thus, “springing forward” goes against the body’s natural rhythm....

A new report combining forecasting and expert prediction data, predicts that 125,000 lives could be saved by the end of 2021 if 50% or more of the U.S. population initiated COVID vaccination by March 1, 2021. “Meta and consensus forecast of COVID-19 targets,” developed by Thomas McAndrew, a computational scientist and faculty member at Lehigh University’s College of Health, and colleagues, incorporates data from experts and trained forecasters, combining their predictions into a single consensus forecast....

So you want to start eating a healthier diet, but you’re not sure where to start. The good news is that you’re not alone. Nutrition and healthy eating are mysteries to most of us, with hundreds of misconceptions, myths, and even lies making it hard to know what’s right and what isn’t. Some of the biggest myths are designed to set us back in our nutrition journey, making us dependent on unhealthy diet plans, self-help and recipe books, or particular brands of food....

In collaboration with colleagues from Queen’s University Canada, the University of Cambridge, the University of Aberdeen, and the China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, the Southampton researchers—led by Dr. Tom Gernon—studied the effects of land plant evolution on Earth’s chemical composition over the course of the previous 700 million years. The researchers’ findings were recently published in Nature Geoscience. Around 430 million years ago, during the Silurian Period, when North America and Europe were connected to form the continent known as Pangaea, the evolution of land plants took place....