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Providence, Rhode Island (Brown University) — A new study provides evidence from lab experiments that a drug already used in people to fight tapeworms might also prove effective against strains of the superbug MRSA, which kills thousands of people a year in the United States. The paper, published in the journal PLoS ONE, showed that niclosamide, which is on World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines, suppressed the growth of dozens of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) cultures in lab dishes and preserved the lives of nematode worms infected with the superbug....

During pandemics, protective behaviors need to be motivated by effective communication. A critical factor in understanding a population’s response to such a threat is the fear it elicits, since fear both contributes to motivating protective responses, but can also lead to panic-driven behaviors. Furthermore, lockdown measures affect well-being, making it important to identify protective factors that help to maintain high perceived levels of health during restrictions. An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Vienna has now identified psychological predictors of fear and health during the lockdowns....

In the summer of 2022, record-breaking heat waves in California and elsewhere have triggered a flurry of health alerts and warnings, strained power grids, and left millions of the most vulnerable Americans sweltering through uncomfortable and sometimes deadly conditions. Oppressively hot and humid summers like this one are going to become much more common if current trends continue. That is the key finding from a set of new climate projections conducted by a team of scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and several universities....

Zoom into an artist’s concept of AY Sextantis, a binary star system whose pulsar switched from radio emissions to high-energy gamma rays in 2013. This transition likely means the pulsar’s spin-up process is nearing its end. In late June 2013, an exceptional binary containing a rapidly spinning neutron star underwent a dramatic change in behavior never before observed. The pulsar’s radio beacon vanished, while at the same time the system brightened fivefold in gamma rays, the most powerful form of light, according to measurements by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope....

The contract award, for just under $112 million, is a commercial lunar delivery targeted to launch in 2026 through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative, and part of the agency’s Artemis program. This delivery targets a landing site on the far side of the Moon for the two payloads, a place that permanently faces away from Earth. Scientists consider this one of the best locations in the solar system for making radio observations shielded from the noise generated by our home planet....

It’s one of the most audacious projects in biology today – reading the entire genome of every bird, mammal, lizard, fish, and all other creatures with backbones. And now comes the first major payoff from the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP): near complete, high-quality genomes of 25 species, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Erich Jarvis with scores of coauthors report April 28, 2021, in the journal Nature. These species include the greater horseshoe bat, the Canada lynx, the platypus, and the kākāpō parrot – one of the first high-quality genomes of an endangered vertebrate species....

The 39-meter-diameter primary mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope will be by far the largest ever made for an optical-infrared telescope. Such a giant is much too large to be made from a single piece of glass, so it will consist of 798 individual hexagonal segments, each measuring 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) across and about 5 centimeters (2 inches) thick. The segments will work together as a single huge mirror to collect tens of millions of times as much light as the human eye....

He also noted that such a lens, at least broadly speaking, resembles the eye of a fish. The lens configuration he devised has since been known in physics as Maxwell’s fish-eye lens — a theoretical construct that is only slightly similar to commercially available fish-eye lenses for cameras and telescopes. Now scientists at MIT and Harvard University have for the first time studied this unique, theoretical lens from a quantum mechanical perspective, to see how individual atoms and photons may behave within the lens....

A combination of genetic and emotional differences may lead to post-traumatic stress (PTS) in police officers, a new study finds. Based on biological studies of officers in major cities, the study showed that the most significant PTS predictors are the tendency to startle at sudden sounds, early career displays of mental health symptoms (e.g., anxiety and depression), and certain genetic differences, including some known to influence a person’s immune system....

The average area covered by the Antarctic ozone hole this year was the second smallest in the last 20 years, according to data from NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. Scientists attribute the change to warmer temperatures in the Antarctic lower stratosphere. The ozone hole reached its maximum size on September 22, covering 8.2 million square miles (21.2 million square kilometers), or the area of the United States, Canada and Mexico combined....

Talk about getting your ducks in a row. There are roughly 50 billion individual birds in the world, a new big data study by UNSW Sydney suggests — about six birds for every human on the planet. The study — which bases its findings on citizen science observations and detailed algorithms — estimates how many birds belong to 9700 different bird species, including flightless birds like emus and penguins. It found many iconic Australian birds are numbered in the millions, like the Rainbow Lorikeet (19 million), Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (10 million) and Laughing Kookaburra (3....

This surprising result comes from an analysis performed by Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix, from the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany. They took brightness and positional data from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) dataset and combined it with measurements of the stars’ chemical compositions, as given by data from China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) for roughly 250,000 stars to derive their ages. They chose to look at sub giant stars....

“Drought is the No. 1 cause, closely tied with flooding, of annual crop failures worldwide,” said Sean Cutler, a plant cell biology professor at UC Riverside, who led the research. “This chemical is an exciting new tool that could help farmers better manage crop performance when water levels are low.” Details of the team’s work on the newer, more effective anti-water-loss chemical is described in a paper published today (October 25, 2019) in Science....

The research was published in the journal Science on August 26. It was led by Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. “Termites are only a few millimeters in length, but their nests can stand as high as 4 meters—the equivalent of a human constructing a house the height of California’s Mount Whitney,” says Daraio. If you peer inside a termite nest you will see a network of asymmetrical, interconnected structures, similar to the interior of a sponge or a loaf of bread....

With four years of data from 268 seismometers on the ocean floor and several hundred on land, researchers have found anomalies in the upper mantle below both ends of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They may influence the location, frequency, and strength of earthquake events along the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The anomalies, which reflect regions with lower seismic wave velocities than elsewhere beneath the fault line, point to pieces of the Earth’s upper mantle that are rising and buoyant because of melting rock and possibly elevated temperatures, said Miles Bodmer, a University of Oregon doctoral student who led a study now online as an accepted paper by the journal Geophysical Research Letters....

Since then, astronomers have debated their origin. Now, a study including University of Michigan research suggests the bubbles are a result of a powerful jet of activity from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, also shows the jet began spewing out material about 2.6 million years ago, and lasted about 100,000 years. The team’s results suggest that Fermi bubbles, discovered in 2010, and microwave haze—a fog of charged particles roughly at the center of the galaxy—were formed by the same jet of energy from the supermassive black hole....

Reproduction and migration are the two most demanding tasks in a bird’s life, and the vast majority of species separate them into different times of the year. Only two bird species have been shown to undertake what scientists call “itinerant breeding”: nesting in one area, migrating to another region, and nesting again there within the same year, to take advantage of shifting food resources. New research just published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances provides strong evidence that a third bird species takes on this unusual challenge—the Phainopepla, a unique bird found in the southwestern U....

Rita Perelroizen, a Ph.D. student, served as the study’s lead researcher. She collaborated with Professor Eytan Ruppin of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and was supervised by Dr. Lior Mayo of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv. The study was recently published in the journal Brain and was highlighted with scientific commentary. A short video explaining the research....

Each of the three enterotypes was characterized by high levels of a single microbial genus, Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Ruminococcus. Manimozhiyan Arumugam, molecular biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, the author of the original paper, and his team repeated the analysis of 663 Danish and Spanish adults. The results show that a genus of archae, called Methanobrevibacter, joins Ruminococcus as a defining microbe in the third enterotype....

While occasional sleep difficulties are common, a significant portion of the population, between 10-20%, experience chronic and severe sleep issues. A study of over 34,000 adults suggests that exercise may be a more effective solution for insomnia than sleeping aids. Many individuals who experience insomnia turn to medication, but this new research suggests that physical activity may be a better alternative. “We’ve observed that people who are in better physical condition have a lower risk of taking prescription sleeping pills,” says Linda Ernstsen, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Public Health and Nursing....