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Sea level rise is occurring as Earth warms due to two main factors: melting of land-based ice such as glaciers and ice sheets, and the expansion of seawater as it warms — termed thermal expansion. Previously unknown was whether the rate of thermal expansion, which accelerates with warming, will also affect the variability of sea level. In a study published this week in Communications Earth & Environment, the team led by Matthew Widlansky, associate director of the UH Sea Level Center, assessed future sea level projections from global climate models....

“All instruments returned data that not only serves for calibration, but also captures glimpses of what we expect them to measure near the Sun to solve the mysteries of the solar atmosphere, the corona,” said Nour Raouafi, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. The mission’s first close approach to the Sun will be in November 2018, but even now, the instruments are able to gather measurements of what’s happening in the solar wind closer to Earth....

Researchers are coming to understand that the best-performing materials in sustainable energy applications, such as converting sunlight or waste heat to electricity, often use collective fluctuations of clusters of atoms within a much larger structure. This process is often referred to as “dynamic disorder.” Dynamic disorder Understanding dynamic disorder in materials could lead to more energy-efficient thermoelectric devices, such as solid-state refrigerators and heat pumps, and also to better recovery of useful energy from waste heat, such as car exhausts and power station exhausts, by converting it directly to electricity....

A camera aboard the European Space Agency’s Philae lander snapped this “selfie” of one of the Rosetta spacecraft’s 52-foot-long (16-meter) solar arrays, with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko hovering in the background some 10 miles (16 kilometers) away. The image, taken by the Comet Infrared and Visible Analyzer (CIVA), was taken on October 7. Philae, which is connected to the Rosetta orbiter at this time, will make its descent to the surface of the comet on November 12....

Arylpyrazole insecticides such as fipronil display broad-spectrum insecticidal activity against insect pests, but their high toxicity to honeybees prohibits their agronomic use. In this study, published on February 7 in the SCI journal Pest Management Science, the researchers designed and synthesized a series of new spiro-pyrazolo quinazoline derivatives intended to reduce the toxicity of arylpyrazole analogs to bees. Spiro motifs are compounds that have at least two molecular rings with only one common atom....

Metamaterials are substances whose properties are determined not so much by the atoms they consist of, but by the atoms’ structural arrangement. Each structure is hundreds of nanometers, and has its own set of properties that disappear when scientists try to separate the material into its components. That is why such a structure is called a meta-atom (not to be confused with the common atoms of Mendeleevs Periodic Table). Any substance consisting of meta-atoms is called a meta-material....

Computer simulations have been used to examine the sex lives of ancient hominids for many years, by measuring the circumferences of ancient bones, and by applying the rules of evolution and economics. Currently, only 1 in 6 societies enforces monogamy as a rule. There’s evidence of monogamy going back as far as Hammurabi’s Code, dating back 1772 BC. The practice was further codified in ancient Greece and Rome. Whilst formal concubines were frowned upon, sex with slaves wasn’t problematic....

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took numerous images during the past few years that showed channels attributed to catastrophic flooding in the last 500 million years. During this period, Mars had been otherwise considered cold and dry. These channels are essential to understanding the extent to which recent hydrologic activity prevailed during such arid conditions. They also help scientists determine whether the floods could have induced episodes of climate change. The estimated size of the flooding appears to be comparable to the ancient mega-flood that created the Channeled Scablands in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, in eastern Washington....

In 2015, the first commercial nanopore DNA sequencing device was introduced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Based on a synthetically engineered transmembrane protein, nanopore sequencing allows long DNA strands to be channeled through the central lumen of the pore where changes in the ionic current work as a sensor of the individual bases in the DNA. This technique was a key milestone for DNA sequencing and the achievement was only made possible after decades of research....

The discovery, which is reported in Nature Communications, means that scientists have a new way to study diseases that are related to malfunctioning cell death processes, like some cancers, and infections that can be complicated by out-of-control inflammation caused by the process. These infections include sepsis, for example, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is among the major complications of COVID-19 illness. Pyroptosis is a series of biochemical reactions that uses gasdermin, a protein, to open large pores in the cell membrane and destabilize the cell....

The team of international researchers, including scientists from The Australian National University (ANU), used thousands of computer-modeled seismic waves to examine Ultra-Low Velocity Zones (ULVZs) beneath the Coral Sea between Australia and New Zealand. The area was selected because of the high frequency of earthquakes and the seismic waves these events unleash. ULVZs sit at the bottom of the planet’s mantle and on top of its liquid metal outer core, and are so thin that they are normally invisible to tomographic imaging....

Before the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein can interact with ACE2 on a human cell, it changes shape to expose its receptor binding domain (RBD), the part of the protein that interacts with ACE2. Like many viral proteins, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has a thick coat of glycans on its surface. These glycans, which are attached at specific sites, help shield the viral proteins from the host immune system. Rommie Amaro and colleagues at University of California San Diego, Maynooth University (Ireland) and the University of Texas at Austin wondered whether certain glycans in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein might also be active players in the process leading to infection....

Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated, more than from the rest of the entire host galaxy. Their luminosities allow quasars to be seen at cosmological distances and they are therefore likely candidates for strong lensing, with a few hundred gravitationally lensed quasars known so far. They have provided valuable information not only about quasars and lensing but also on cosmology since the distorted light paths of the distant objects have traveled across cosmological distances....

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a way to observe the movements of electrons with powerful X-ray laser bursts just 280 attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second, long. The technology, called X-ray laser-enhanced attosecond pulse generation (XLEAP), is a big advance that scientists have been working toward for years, and it paves the way for breakthrough studies of how electrons speeding around molecules initiate crucial processes in biology, chemistry, materials science and more....

Starting around 8,500 years ago, agriculture spread into Europe from the southeast, accompanied by a movement of people from Anatolia. This study reports data from the genomes of 225 ancient people who lived both before and after this transition, and documents the interaction and mixing of these two genetically different groups of people. “Southeastern Europe was the beachhead in the spread of farming from Anatolia into Europe. This study is the first to provide a rich genetic characterization of this process by showing how the indigenous population interacted with incoming Asian immigrants at this extraordinary moment in the past,” says Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg, a consulting anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, who identified and sampled many of the skeletons....

In a Nature Communications paper released today, aquatic chemists and hydrologists from The University of Texas at Austin’s Marine Science Institute and Jackson School of Geosciences, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Florida State University present evidence of significant, undetected concentrations and fluxes of dissolved organic matter entering Arctic coastal waters, with the source being groundwater flow atop of frozen permafrost. This water moves from land to sea unseen, but researchers now believe it carries significant concentrations of carbon and other nutrients to Arctic coastal food webs....

The men and women who live and work on the International Space Station take thousands of photographs of their home planet every year, and we asked the folks at the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for a few of their favorites from 2020. Here are the top 20 from ’20, and you can check out the images for yourself at the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth....

During winter, the skull of common shrews shrinks by up to 15 per cent, only to grow back during spring by up to nine per cent. The animals lose almost a fifth of their body weight in the cold months, and nearly double their body mass again during warmer periods. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell and Seewiesen found that not only bones, but also organs and even the brain itself take part in this depletion....

According to research led by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and published in JAMA Pediatrics, a saline (salt water) nasal spray was found to be as effective as an anti-inflammatory steroid nasal spray in alleviating sleep-disordered breathing in children after 6 weeks of treatment. The findings stated both nasal sprays cleared symptoms while asleep in about 40 percent of cases and those assessed by a surgeon as needing their tonsils and/or adenoids removed was reduced by half....

Two-year study examined walnut consumption among study groups in California and Spain. Eating walnuts may help slow cognitive decline in at-risk groups of the elderly population, according to a study conducted by researchers in California and Spain. The Walnuts and Healthy Aging Study, published this month in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that walnut consumption by healthy, elderly adults had little effect on cognitive function over two years, but it had greater effect on elderly adults who had smoked more and had a lower baseline neuropsychological test scores....