Nearly 2,000 planets beyond our solar system have been identified to date. Whether any of these exoplanets are hospitable to life depends on a number of criteria. Among these, scientists have thought, is a planet’s obliquity — the angle of its axis relative to its orbit around a star. Earth, for instance, has a relatively low obliquity, rotating around an axis that is nearly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun....
The Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering at Tohoku University has created a lymphatic drug delivery system (LDDS) that allows anticancer drugs to be injected directly into metastatic lymph nodes. The new LDDS has a better antitumor effect than conventional chemotherapy on early-stage lymph node metastasis when paired with total-body irradiation (TBI). TBI provides a uniform radiation dosage to the whole body, penetrating places where conventional chemotherapy cannot. TBI has recently demonstrated success in triggering immune responses and changing the tumor microenvironment....
Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed. Researchers hope the finding could bring about a new era of accelerators that would need just a few meters to bring particles to great speeds, rather than the many kilometers required of traditional accelerators. The research, from scientists at the U....
The research was published in Nature Physics. Let’s start with the basics. Topological insulators are materials that can conduct electricity on their surface or edge but not in the middle. The strange thing about these materials is that no matter how you cut them, the surface will always be conducting and the middle always insulating. These materials offer a playground for fundamental physics but are also promising for a number of applications in special types of electronics and quantum computing....
Cooling accounts for about 15% of global energy consumption, according to estimates from previous research studies. That demand could be lowered with a window coating that could block the sun’s ultraviolet and near-infrared light. These are parts of the solar spectrum that are not visible to humans, but they typically pass through glass to heat an enclosed room. Energy use could be even further reduced if the coating radiates heat from the window’s surface at a wavelength that passes through the atmosphere into outer space....
COVID-19 is a respiratory illness that spreads when infected individuals shed the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes it. While this seems to happen chiefly through close contact and respiratory droplets, evidence has mounted that the disease can also spread through airborne transmission. Distancing, masks, and improved ventilation are all critical interventions to interrupt this spread. Many suffering from COVID-19 also shed the virus in their stool. With adequate plumbing, this is an unlikely source of virus transmission — but with the right tools, it can also be an unlikely source of virus detection....
The lead author of the study was Katrin Fleischer of the Technical University of Munich (their release here). Holm was supported by DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE)-Tropics, and Berkeley Lab co-author Qing Zhu was supported by DOE’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes....
A team of scientists led by the international conservation charity ZSL (Zoological Society of London) discovered that ancient bones from the extinct Madagascan elephant birds (Aepyornis and Mullerornis) show cut marks and depression fractures consistent with hunting and butchery by prehistoric humans. Using radiocarbon dating techniques, the team were then able to determine when these giant birds had been killed, reassessing when humans first reached Madagascar. Previous research on lemur bones and archaeological artifacts suggested that humans first arrived in Madagascar 2,400-4,000 years ago....
“People easily recognize members of the mint family for their specialized metabolites,” said Björn Hamberger, an associate professor and James K. Billman Jr., M.D., Endowed Professor in the College of Natural Science. “Metabolites are an efficient way for plants to defend themselves because they can’t run away.” Since 2016, Hamberger has been studying specialized metabolites in plants called terpenoids, which are essential in protecting plants from predators and pathogens and are also common ingredients in green and sustainable agrochemicals, antioxidants, cosmetics, and fragrances....
Bionanomotors, like myosins that move along actin networks, are responsible for most methods of motion in all life forms. Thus, the development of artificial nanomotors could be game-changing in the field of robotics research. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory have been looking to identify a design that would allow the artificial nanomotor to take advantage of Brownian motion, the property of particles to agitatedly move simply because they are warm....
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are a useful model for studying gene behavior and function. Researchers have been able to make custom changes in the zebrafish’s genome, using artificial enzymes to cut portions of DNA out of targeted positions in a gene sequence, which were replaced by synthetic DNA. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. Stephen Ekker, molecular biologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, led the team that was able to do this for the first time....
Scientists have already documented the mutational landscapes of several forms of cancer. Somatic structural variations (SVs) have been found to account for over 50% of all cancer-causing mutations. These mutations occur in cells over time, such as through copying errors in DNA during cell division, resulting in alterations to the chromosome structure. They are not inherited and are found only in affected cells and in their daughter cells. As we age, such genomic alterations become more numerous, and a person’s mutational landscape increasingly comes to resemble a unique mosaic....
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and other telescopes a fossilized remnant of the early Milky Way harboring stars of hugely different ages has been revealed by an international team of astronomers. This stellar system resembles a globular cluster, but is like no other cluster known. It contains stars remarkably similar to the most ancient stars in the Milky Way and bridges the gap in understanding between our galaxy’s past and its present....
Kepler-186f is the first identified Earth-sized planet exoplanet orbiting a star in the habitable zone. This means it’s the proper distance from its host star for liquid water to pool on the surface. The Georgia Tech study used simulations to analyze and identify the exoplanet’s spin axis dynamics. Those dynamics determine how much a planet tilts on its axis and how that tilt angle evolves over time. Axial tilt contributes to seasons and climate because it affects how sunlight strikes the planet’s surface....
The new object was announced on Monday, December 17, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center and has been given the provisional designation 2018 VG18. The discovery was made by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard, the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen, and Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo. 2018 VG18, nicknamed “Farout” by the discovery team for its extremely distant location, is at about 120 astronomical units (AU), where 1 AU is defined as the distance between the Earth and the Sun....
In research published today, the international team of scientists used the telescopes to observe a nearby radio galaxy known as Centaurus A. “As the closest radio galaxy to Earth, Centaurus A is the perfect ‘cosmic laboratory’ to study the physical processes responsible for moving material and energy away from the galaxy’s core,” said Dr. Ben McKinley from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia....
As a consequence of the attractive and repulsive forces at play, a massive star can either become a neutron star, or turn into a black hole, says Carballo-Rubio. In neutron stars, stellar equilibrium is the result of the “fight” between gravity, which is an attractive force, and a repulsive force called degeneracy pressure, of quantum mechanical origin. But if the star’s mass becomes higher than a certain threshold, about 3 times the solar mass, the equilibrium would be broken and the star collapses due to the overwhelming pull of the gravitational force....
Intermediate-mass stars have a mass between 80% and 800% of the Sun’s mass. When these types of stars die, they expand to form red giants. The dying star will continue to expel gas, while simultaneously the remaining core of the star contracts and temporarily begins to radiate energy again. This energy causes the expelled gas to ionize, meaning that the atoms and molecules in the gas become charged and begin to emit light....
The findings have important implications for the effectiveness of public health measures to suppress transmission of COVID-19 among young adults, whether in military training, schools, or other aspects of the pandemic. The researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Naval Medical Research Center studied new Marine recruits while they were in a two-week supervised quarantine. The study results, publishing November 11 in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that few infected recruits had symptoms before diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, that transmission occurred despite implementing many best-practice public health measures, and that diagnoses were made only by scheduled tests, not by tests performed in response to symptoms....
Photographs and film footage have without a doubt left the world shocked, but the view from space shows the scale of what Australians are having to deal with. New South Wales has been the worst hit. The Copernicus Sentinel-3 image above shows smoke pouring from numerous fires in the state on January 3, 2020. While this image was captured by the mission’s ocean and land color instrument, which offers camera-like images, the mission’s sea, and land surface temperature radiometer instrument can record fire hotspots....
