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Thought to have been introduced into Europe from China in 2004, the Asian Hornet has rapidly spread across the continent. While it has been thus far controlled in Britain, the hornet is well established across mainland Europe and the Channel Islands. In April 2021, the Irish National Parks and Wildlife Service confirmed that a single specimen had been found, ‘alive but dying’ in a private dwelling in Dublin, marking the first Irish record of this species....

Mountains cover 25% of the Earth’s surface, and the streams draining these mountains account for more than a third of the global runoff. But the role that mountain streams play in global carbon fluxes has not yet been evaluated; until now scientists have focused mainly on streams and rivers in low-altitude tropical and boreal regions. Åsa Horgby, a Ph.D. student at EPFL’s Stream Biofilm and Ecosystem Research Laboratory (SBER), along with a team of international scientists has performed the first large-scale study of the CO2 emissions of mountain streams and their role in global carbon fluxes....

But, does scientific evidence support the claims made for these diets? In a review article published in the December 26, 2019, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine neuroscientist Mark Mattson, Ph.D., concludes that intermittent fasting does. Mattson, who has studied the health impact of intermittent fasting for 25 years, and adopted it himself about 20 years ago, writes that “intermittent fasting could be part of a healthy lifestyle....

The genome of an extinct Australian frog has been revived and reactivated by a team of scientists using sophisticated cloning technology to implant a “dead” cell nucleus into a fresh egg from another frog species. The bizarre gastric-brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus – which uniquely swallowed its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth – became extinct in 1983. But the Lazarus Project team has been able to recover cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept for 40 years in a conventional deep freezer....

In a new study, a team of researchers reports the development of a new street lighting design that harnesses high-efficiency LEDs and ensures they shine only where they’re needed, cutting light pollution and glare and saving energy. Streetlights illuminate the night, shining upon roadways and sidewalks across the world, but these ubiquitous elements of the urban environment are notoriously inefficient and major contributors to light pollution that washes out the night sky....

Topological insulators: special electronics Verhagen and his collaborator Kobus Kuipers from TU Delft were inspired by electronic materials, where so-called topological insulators form a new class of materials with remarkable behavior. Where most materials are either conductive for electrons or not (which makes them an insulator), topological insulators exhibit a strange form of conduction. “The inside of a topological insulator does not allow electron propagation, but along the edge electrons can move freely”, says Verhagen....

Following Flight 12’s scouting images of “South Séítah,” which were the most valuable Ingenuity has taken to date, we are taking Winston’s advice for Ingenuity’s 13th flight. We will again be venturing across into Seítah to scout an area of outcrops glimpsed in Flight 12 imagery – but we’re taking these new pictures while looking back, pointing in the opposite direction. Taking place no earlier than Saturday, September 4 at 5:08 p....

More than 600,000 people worldwide have fallen victim to the lung disease COVID-19 so far, which is caused by the SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). In order to obtain an effective therapy for COVID-19 as quickly as possible, drugs that are being used to treat other diseases are currently being repurposed for COVID-19 treatment. The Infection Biology Unit of the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, together with colleagues at the Charité in Berlin, was able to show that the malaria drug chloroquine, which has been demonstrated to inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 infection of African green monkey kidney cells, is not able to prevent infection of human lung cells with the novel coronavirus....

Pharmacist Andreas Hensel and his team identify quality deficiencies in food supplements. Food supplements are available in a lot of places – in drugstores, health food shops, pharmacies, and on the Internet – and the market is booming. Many of these products contain plant extracts whose ingredients are supposed to have healthy benefits – provided they do actually contain what they claim. Because nowhere near all of these so-called botanicals deliver what they promise....

Bringing samples of Mars to Earth for future study would happen in several steps with multiple spacecraft, and in some ways, in a synchronized manner. This short animation features key moments of the Mars Sample Return campaign: from landing on Mars and securing the sample tubes to launching them off the surface and ferrying them back to Earth. Animation is contributed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the European Space Agency, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center....

These rocks – which formed in lake beds – are the best place to seek fossil evidence of life from billions of years ago, researchers say. A new study that sheds light on where fossils might be preserved could aid the search for traces of tiny creatures – known as microbes – on Mars, which it is thought may have supported primitive life forms around four billion years ago....

An ancient lakebed in New Mexico contains well-preserved footprints from various animals that lived there thousands of years ago, including giant sloths and mammoths, as well as humans. Previously, research published in September 2021 suggested that these human footprints offered “definitive evidence” of human occupation of North America during the last ice age, dating back to between 23 and 21 thousand years ago. However, a new study has cast doubt on this claim....

Dr. Frank Rubio was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class. He reported for duty in August 2017 and having completed the initial astronaut candidate training is now eligible for a mission assignment. The Florida native graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and earned a Doctorate of Medicine from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Prior to attending medical school, he served as a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot and flew more than 1,100 hours, including more than 600 hours of combat and imminent danger time during deployments to Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq....

On December 16, 2022, the international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. A new video series focuses on some of the engineers and scientists behind the satellite, which will be the first to observe nearly all water on Earth’s surface. Led by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), SWOT will measure the height of water in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and the ocean....

A newly published study from Rice University shows that graphene is 10 times better than steel at absorbing the energy of a penetrating projectile. Graphene’s great strength appears to be determined by how well it stretches before it breaks, according to Rice University scientists who tested the material’s properties by peppering it with microbullets. The two-dimensional carbon honeycomb discovered a decade ago is thought to be much stronger than steel....

The advent of the Mira supercomputer, along with more powerful Sequoia and K supercomputers, marks the first time that computers have enough computational power to simulate trillions of particles on the move, running a simulation of the Universe. Mira can process quadrillions of operations every second, which is rare in the machine world. It will track trillions of particles as they move, expand and react to each other. The simulation will use the known laws of physics and will try to give researchers a deeper understanding of how the cosmos came to be....

The research described in this article has been published on a preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed by scientific or medical experts. Using computational models of protein interactions, researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms have designed a peptide that can bind to coronavirus proteins and shuttle them into a cellular pathway that breaks them down. This type of peptide could hold potential as a treatment that would prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from reproducing itself within infected cells, the researchers say....

MIT team looks at classroom configurations and offers modifications to enhance safety during COVID-19 pandemic. Open windows and a good heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system are starting points for keeping classrooms safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they are not the last word, according to a new study from researchers at MIT. The study shows how specific classroom configurations may affect air quality and necessitate additional measures, beyond HVAC use or open windows, to reduce the spread of aerosols — those tiny, potentially COVID-carrying particles that can stay suspended in the air for hours....

Research shows granddaughters and great-granddaughters of men who start to smoke before puberty have more body fat than expected. A new study, led by the University of Bristol and published in Scientific Reports today (January 21, 2022), has reported increased body fat in females whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers began smoking before puberty. Experiments with model studies elsewhere have shown that exposure of males to certain chemicals before breeding can have effects on their offspring....

Today, the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on MSG-3 captured its first image of the Earth. This demonstrates that Europe’s latest geostationary weather satellite, launched on 5 July, is performing well and is on its way to taking over operational service after six months of commissioning. The European Space Agency (ESA) was responsible for the initial operations after launch (the so-called launch and early orbit phase) of MSG-3 and handed over the satellite to EUMETSAT on 16 July....