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Edwin Hubble’s observations over 90 years ago showing the expansion of the Universe remain a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. But when you get into the details of calculating how fast the Universe was expanding at different times in its history, scientists have difficulty getting theoretical models to match observations. To solve this problem, a team led by Maria Dainotti (Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI in Japan and an affiliated scientist at the Space Science Institute in the U....

Cracked phone screens could become a thing of the past thanks to breakthrough research conducted at The University of Queensland. The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr. Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang, and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television, and computer screens. The findings will enable the manufacture of glass screens that are not only unbreakable but also deliver crystal clear image quality....

Modern medicine makes extensive use of drugs that bacteria naturally produce. One of the most noteworthy natural products is penicillin, an antibiotic developed from certain molds that is regarded as one of the most significant developments in medicine and human health. Scientists now have access to hundreds of thousands of microbial genomes and the natural compounds they make as DNA sequencing has gotten more inexpensive and quick. However, according to Doug Mitchell (MMG), the John and Margaret Witt Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, this is insignificant when compared to the number of compounds that these organisms are capable of producing by using the genetic pathways they possess....

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the chemists have discovered that uranium can perform reactions that used to be the preserve of transition metals such as rhodium and palladium. And because uranium sits between different types of reactivity of lanthanides and transition metals it might be able to combine the best of both to give new ways of producing materials and chemicals. This discovery is also profiled in a new video which is part of a series produced by the School of Chemistry....

More research is needed on the environmental impact of sunscreen on the world’s coral reefs, scientists at the University of York say. The concerns over the number of cases of cancer as a result of overexposure to UV solar radiation, has led to extensive production and use of skin protection products. The chemical compounds used in these products, however, can enter the environment at the points of manufacture as well as through use by the consumer....

Fungal products We constantly need new therapeutic compounds in the clinic for various reasons, including our increasing age, with corresponding illnesses, and resistance to existing drugs. Fungi are excellent, but the underexplored source of these kinds of compounds, such as lovastatin, a compound produced by the fungus Aspergillus terreus that is used as a cholesterol-lowering drug. Jelmer Hoeksma, one of the researchers at the Hubrecht Institute, explains: “Every year new compounds produced by fungi are identified, but so far we have only investigated a very small subset of all existing fungi....

“Awareness of the presence of drug-drug interactions of Paxlovid with common cardiovascular drugs is key. System-level interventions by integrating drug-drug interactions into electronic medical records could help avoid related adverse events,” said Sarju Ganatra, MD, director of the cardio-oncology program at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts, and the senior author of the review. “The prescription of Paxlovid could be incorporated into an order set, which allows physicians, whether it be primary care physicians or cardiology providers, to consciously rule out any contraindications to the co-administration of Paxlovid....

“Looking for the first stars and black holes has long been a goal of astronomy. They will tell us about the actual properties of the very early universe, things we’ve only modeled on our computers until now,” said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, Tempe. Windhorst is lead author of the paper that appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “We want to answer questions about the early universe such as, were binary stars common or were most stars single?...

The wetlands of Adair Bay (also known as Bahia Adair) mark the transition between the Great Altar Desert in northwestern Mexico and the Gulf of California. A single highway, paralleled by a railroad, cuts across dry salt flats and sand on the northern reaches of the estuary. This photograph, taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS), also highlights the sediment-rich waterways that allow the mixing of freshwater and saltwater vital to the function of the estuary....

A new series of computational fluid dynamics simulations suggests that, for two people who must travel together in the same passenger car, the safest way to prevent possible transmission of COVID-19 in such a risky, enclosed environment is to do so with all four windows down and the passenger seated as far as possible from the driver, in the rear seat on the opposite side. Varghese Mathai and colleagues found that this modeled configuration created two distinct flows of air in the car’s cabin, separated along the midline of the car and moving — perhaps counterintuitively — from the rear towards the front of the car, due to exterior pressure differentials dictated by the car’s aerodynamics....

The White House announced the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. “America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine....

However, researchers at Yale University have now developed a technology that allows them to image the brains of two individuals during live and natural conditions. Using this technology, they have identified specific brain areas in the dorsal parietal region that are associated with the social symptoms of ASD. This study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that these neural responses to live face and eye contact may provide a biological index that can be used in the clinical classification and assessment of autism....

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. 1200+ Mile Trail of Smoke Stretches Across California in These NASA Terra Images of the WildfiresSmoke Shrouds the U.S. West After More Than 10,000 Lightning Strikes Ignite Hundreds of Wildfires Across CaliforniaNASA’s Terra Satellite Captures the Scene of Intense Wildfires in CaliforniaThick Smoke Obscures California Skies After Wildfires Exploded Across the North

The new study, recently published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, is the first to utilize a sophisticated screening method, commonly used to detect chemicals in food and wastewater, to evaluate chemical exposures in hairdressers. The findings indicate the need for further research to better comprehend the dangers faced by hairdressers, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, and to determine the most effective ways to minimize these risks....

As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, Hill has continued to study this protein, known as BefA. Additionally, Karen Guillemin’s lab at UO has continued to research BefA. Together with other colleagues, they have now gathered new understandings of BefA’s functions and the causes of its production. Those discoveries have “important, profound implications,” said Guillemin. “If we understand how BefA works, it could give us a way to stimulate beta cell production therapeutically....

New results from precision particle detectors at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) offer a fresh glimpse of the particle interactions that take place in the cores of neutron stars and give nuclear physicists a new way to search for violations of fundamental symmetries in the universe. The results, just published in Nature Physics, could only be obtained at a powerful ion collider such as RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory....

Astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology modeled a theoretical twin of Earth into other star systems called binary systems because they have two stars. They concluded that 87% of exo-Earths one might find in binary systems should have axis tilts similarly steady to Earth’s, an important ingredient for climate stability that favors the evolution of complex life. “Multiple-star systems are common, and about 50% of stars have binary companion stars....

The study, which analyzed and reconstructed a 120-million-year-old bird fossil called Yuanchuavis kompsosoura, found that this ancient bird retained many of the same features as its dinosaurian ancestors. This fossil also offered insights into the origins of cranial kinesis, a key feature in the skulls of modern birds. The study was recently published in the journal eLife. Most living birds have what is termed a kinetic skull. This means that upper beak movement is independent of the braincase....

“Right now, whatever is available as a clinical product is more like a fancy Band-Aid,” said Pankaj Karande, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), who led this research at Rensselaer. “It provides some accelerated wound healing, but eventually it just falls off; it never really integrates with the host cells.” A significant barrier to that integration has been the absence of a functioning vascular system in the skin grafts....

Each human cell has two meters of genome condensed down into 10 microns within the nucleus. Folding the genome is more than a packaging solution, it helps genes make physical contact with other genes or a regulatory element that may be located quite a distance away along the chromosome. This is crucial for cell function. The precise 3D structure of the genome is weaved together by architectural proteins. CTCF is one of the most prominent of these structural proteins....