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They also demonstrate that the healthspan and lifespan benefits of rilmenidine treatment in the roundworm C. elegans are mediated by the I1-imidazoline receptor nish-1, identifying this receptor as a potential longevity target. Unlike other drugs previously studied for this purpose by the researchers, the widely-prescribed, oral antihypertensive rilmenidine has the potential for future translatability to humans as side effects are rare and non-severe. To date, a caloric restriction diet has been considered the most robust anti-aging intervention, promoting longevity across species....

Although well studied in animals, plants, and bacteria, circadian rhythms all share an enigmatic property—the oscillation period is not significantly affected by temperature, even though the rate of most biochemical reactions changes exponentially with temperature. This clearly indicates that some sort of temperature-compensation mechanism is at play. Interestingly, some scientists have managed to replicate such temperature-invariant qualities in certain oscillating chemical reactions. However, these reactions are often troublesome and require extremely precise adjustments on the reacting chemicals....

Ever wonder how tiny creatures can so easily slice, puncture, or sting? New research reveals that ants, worms, spiders, and other tiny creatures have a built-in set of tools that would be the envy of any carpenter or surgeon. A recent study, published today (September 1) in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, shows for the first time how individual atoms of zinc are arranged to maximize cutting efficiency and maintain the sharpness of these exquisitely constructed tiny animal tools....

1. What do vaccines do? A vaccine activates the immune system to produce antibodies that remain in your body to fight against exposure to a virus in the future. All three vaccines currently approved for use in the U.S. – the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines – showed impressive success in clinical trials. 2. What is the difference between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness? All new vaccines must undergo clinical trials in which researchers test the vaccines on thousands of people to examine how well they work and whether they are safe....

A new research study led by Professor Kathleen Alexander of the College of Natural Resources and Environment explores the ways that landscapes can influence animal behavior, fostering dynamics that either encourage or limit the spread of infectious diseases. By observing banded mongoose populations across a range of environments in Botswana, researchers were able to gain insight into the manner in which land type and animal behavior interact to influence the spread of a novel tuberculosis pathogen that is transmitted through olfactory communication behaviors....

The mass of the Milky Way is one of the most fundamental measurements astronomers can make about our galactic home. However, despite decades of intense effort, even the best available estimates of the Milky Way’s mass disagree wildly. Now, by combining new data from the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission with observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the Milky Way weighs in at about 1....

This cluster, called SDSSJ0150+2725, lies some three billion light-years away and was first documented by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), hence its name. The SDSS uses a 2.5-meter optical telescope located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to observe millions of objects and create detailed 3D maps of the Universe. This particular cluster was part of the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (SGAS), which detected galaxy clusters with strong lensing properties; their gravity stretches and warps the light of more distant galaxies sitting behind them, creating weird and spectacular arcs such as those seen here....

Herbig-Haro objects like HH 7–11 are transient phenomena. Traveling away from the star that created them at a speed of up to 250,000 kilometers (150,000 miles) per hour, they vanish into oblivion within a few tens of thousands of years. SVS 13 is the young star that is the source of HH 7-11, and all five objects are moving away from SVS 13 toward the upper left. The current distance between HH 7 and SVS 13 is about 20,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun....

The Hubble team is focusing its efforts to isolate the problem on hardware that commands the instruments and is part of the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit. Specifically, the team is analyzing the circuitry of the Control Unit, which generates synchronization messages and passes them onto the instruments. While analyzing the Control Unit, the team is working to identify potential workarounds for the issue. These include possible changes to instrument flight software that could check for these lost messages and compensate for them without putting the instruments into safe mode....

These galaxies were imaged in spectacular detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. The WFC3 was intended to operate until 2014, but 12 years after it was installed it continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images, such as this one. The central pair of galaxies in this image are genuinely two separate galaxies....

The Hubble movie starts at 1.3 hours before impact. The first post-impact snapshot is 20 minutes after the event. Debris flies away from the asteroid in straight lines, moving faster than four miles per hour (fast enough to escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull, so it does not fall back onto the asteroid). The ejecta forms a largely hollow cone with long, stringy filaments. At about 17 hours after the impact the debris pattern entered a second stage....

This galaxy, a spiral galaxy named NGC 772, is no exception. It actually has much in common with our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Each boasts a few satellite galaxies, small galaxies that closely orbit and are gravitationally bound to their parent galaxies. One of NGC 772’s spiral arms has been distorted and disrupted by one of these satellites (NGC 770 — not visible in the image here), leaving it elongated and asymmetrical....

The two galaxies featured in this image, named NGC 6285 (left) and NGC 6286 (right), have done just that! Together, the duo is named Arp 293 and they are interacting, their mutual gravitational attraction pulling wisps of gas and streams of dust from them, distorting their shapes, and gently smudging and blurring their appearances on the sky — to Earth-based observers, at least. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has viewed a number of interacting pairs....

The soft glow in this image is NGC 2768, an elliptical galaxy located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear). NGC 2768 appears here as a bright oval on the sky, surrounded by a wide, fuzzy cloud of material. This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the dusty structure encircling the center of the galaxy, forming a knotted ring around the galaxy’s brightly glowing middle....

The scientists published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE. The researchers studied elk (Cervus canadensis) in Alberta, Canada. The results come from a year-long study that tracked 424 herds and 870 individuals on public, private, and protected land. The scientists observed the animals from a safe distance and recorded their behavior. They researchers found that humans accounted for the greatest degree of disturbance to the elk, even more so than natural predators, such as wolves, cougars and grizzly bears....

Zymoseptoria tritici is often a headache for European farmers. This ascomycete originating from the Middle East attacks the leaves of wheat plants triggering “speckled leaf blotch”, which can cut crop yields by up to 50 percent. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg and Aarhus University in Denmark have now taken a close look at the genome of a close relative, Zymoseptoria pseudotritici and have made a surprising discovery....

The loss and return of consciousness is linked to the same network of brain regions for both sleep and anesthesia, according to new research published in JNeurosci. The biological basis of consciousness has confounded scientists for centuries. Our experimental techniques falter, as the effects of sleep and anesthetic drugs alter brain activity beyond changes in consciousness. In addition, behavior does not always reveal someone’s state of consciousness. An unresponsive person might still be aware of their surroundings (connected), or unaware but still experiencing their internal world (disconnected)....

On October 19, 2017, astronomers working with the NASA-funded Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS1) at the University of Hawaii spotted an object zipping through our solar system at a very high speed. Scientists at the Minor Planet Center, funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, confirmed it was the first object of interstellar origin that we’ve seen. The team dubbed it ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), which means “a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian — and it’s already living up to its name....

McGill Physics student Evelyn Macdonald and her supervisor Prof. Nicolas Cowan used over a decade of observations of Earth’s atmosphere taken by the SCISAT satellite to construct a transit spectrum of Earth, a sort of fingerprint for Earth’s atmosphere in infrared light, which shows the presence of key molecules in the search for habitable worlds. This includes the simultaneous presence of ozone and methane, which scientists expect to see only when there is an organic source of these compounds on the planet....

Neurons, take your places. The cells that eventually become neurons must first travel across the embryo to reach their final destinations in the nervous system. There, they blossom from undefined cells into neurons with specific roles, working together in circuits to direct an animal’s behavior. But exactly how this journey unfolds is still somewhat mysterious. “There are lots of things we’re guessing are happening that we don’t actually see,” says Yinan Wan, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus....