Posts

As fast as technology progresses, hackers find new means to exploit it. It’s a problem that requires strategies on several fronts and rethinking approaches to software, hardware, and the law. At SEAS, a number of faculty members are exploring the question of how we make computing more secure and reliable. A Hacker-Proof Operating System Ideally, a computer’s operating system would have at its core a small, trustworthy kernel that can manage all the hardware resources and also provide isolation and protection for different software components....

The portrait analyzed in the study is one of the masterpieces of the renowned painter’s mature period and a rare example of a children’s dress-up portrait in Russian art. However, rough restoration interventions of a century ago, thick layers of old yellowed varnish, and damage to the paint layer of unknown origin distorted the aesthetic perception of the image. The conservator, Tatiana Seregina, faced the difficult task of bringing the portrait as close to its original state as possible today, without affecting the painter’s work....

How much you enjoy the new Star Wars movie will depend a lot on your expectations going in, a new study suggests. Researchers surveyed 441 people before and after they saw the last episode in the popular franchise, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, released in 2017. They wanted to see how audiences’ expectations affected their actual enjoyment of the movie. The findings suggest that it is probably best not to go into Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker thinking you’re really going to love it or really going to hate it, said James Alex Bonus, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University....

To disinfect a surface, you can illuminate it with a blast of ultraviolet (UV) light, which is at a bluer wavelength than the human eye can see. But to specifically inactivate SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which wavelengths are best? And how much radiation is sufficient? Two main obstacles must be overcome for scientists to answer those questions. First, they need to completely separate the virus from extraneous substances in the environment....

Personal protective equipment, like face masks and gowns, is generally made of polymers. But not much attention is typically given to the selection of polymers used beyond their physical properties. To help with the identification of materials that will bind to a virus and speed its inactivation for use in PPE, researchers from the University of Nottingham, EMD Millipore, and the Philipps University of Marburg developed a high-throughput approach for analyzing the interactions between materials and viruslike particles....

Nelson was the lead author of a laboratory study of the photopolarimetric properties of bright particles that explain unusual negative polarization behavior at low phase angles observed for decades in association with atmosphereless bodies including asteroids 44 Nysa, 64 Angelina and the Galilean satellites Io, Europa and Ganymede. These observations are explained by extremely fine-grained particles with void space greater than about 95 percent. Grain sizes would be on the order of the wavelength of light of the observations (a fraction of a micron)....

It’s well known in conventional biology that during the process of mammalian cell division, or mitosis, a mother cell divides equally into two daughter cells. But when it comes to cancer, say University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers, mother cells may be far more prolific. Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science developed a platform to mechanically confine cells, simulating the in vivo three-dimensional environments in which they divide, and found that, upon confinement, cancer cells often split into three or more daughter cells....

Understanding Dangerous Droplet Dynamics New fluid dynamics research reveals why social distancing alone doesn’t necessarily prevent infection indoors and how to detect COVID-19 super-spreaders. Researchers who study the physics of fluids are learning why certain situations increase the risk that droplets will transmit diseases like COVID-19. At the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, the scientists offered new evidence showing why it’s dangerous to meet indoors — especially if it’s cold and humid, and even if you’re more than six feet away from other people....

An international team led by the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has found that the total number of globular clusters around Dragonfly 44 and, therefore, the dark matter content, is much less than earlier findings had suggested, which shows that this galaxy is neither unique nor anomalous. The result was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)....

Exposure to enzymes causes peculiar response in liquid droplets formed by DNA; new study explains mechanisms behind it. “A watched pot never boils,” as the saying goes, but that was not the case for UC Santa Barbara researchers watching a “pot” of liquids formed from DNA. In fact, the opposite happened. With research partners at the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU), in Munich, Germany, the team’s findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

At the Vienna University of Technology, an explanation has now been found: A subtle interaction of single atomic defects in the material and mechanical strain is responsible for this quantum light effect. Computer simulations show how the electrons are driven to specific places in the material, where they are captured by a defect, lose energy and emit a photon. The solution to the quantum light puzzle has now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters....

Phobos, which is about 7 miles (11.5 kilometers) across, was imaged on March 26, 2019 (the 2,359th sol, or Martian day, of Curiosity’s mission); Deimos, which is about 1.5 miles (2.3 kilometers) across, was photographed on March 17, 2019 (Sol 2350). Phobos doesn’t completely cover the Sun, so it would be considered an annular eclipse. Because Deimos is so small compared to the disk of the Sun, scientists would say it’s transiting the Sun....

Exciting new research conducted at the Bernal Institute at the University of Limerick (UL) and published in the journal Biomaterials Research, has made significant strides in the area of spinal cord tissue repair. New hybrid biomaterials developed at UL in the form of nanoparticles and building on existing practice in the tissue engineering field, were successfully synthesized to promote repair and regeneration following spinal cord injury, according to the researchers....

New views from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show blooming stars in our Milky Way galaxy’s more barren territories, far from its crowded core. The images are part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (Glimpse 360) project, which is mapping the celestial topography of our galaxy. The map and a full, 360-degree view of the Milky Way plane will be available later this year. Anyone with a computer may view the Glimpse images and help catalog features....

Single stars are often overlooked in favor of their larger cosmic cousins — but when they join forces, they create truly breathtaking scenes to rival even the most glowing of nebulae or swirling of galaxies. Around 1100 open clusters have so far been discovered within the Milky Way, although many more are thought to exist. Trumpler 14 is one of these, located some 8000 light-years away towards the center of the well-known Carina Nebula....

The experimental vaccine, ID93+GLA-SE, was developed by Christopher B. Fox, Ph.D., and scientists at the Access to Advanced Health Institute (formerly the Infectious Disease Research Institute) in Seattle. It is a recombinant subunit vaccine made from four proteins of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria combined with GLA-SE, an immune-stimulating adjuvant. The freeze-dried formulation does not require refrigeration and is mixed with sterile water just prior to injection. Thermostable vaccines are desirable in settings where maintaining cold or frozen vaccines for long periods can be costly and difficult....

According to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, beginners who took one-hour piano lessons per week for 11 weeks showed significant improvement in recognizing audio-visual changes in the environment and reported lower levels of depression, stress, and anxiety. In the randomized control study, 31 adults were assigned to either music training, music listening, or a control group. Individuals with no prior musical experiences or training were instructed to complete weekly one-hour sessions....

When a solar flare filled with charged particles erupts from the sun, its magnetic fields sometime break a widely accepted rule of physics. The flux-freezing theorem dictates that the magnetic lines of force should flow away in lock-step with the particles, whole and unbroken. Instead, the lines sometimes break apart and quickly reconnect in a way that has mystified astrophysicists. But in a paper published in the May 23 issue of the journal Nature, an interdisciplinary research team led by a Johns Hopkins mathematical physicist says it has found a key to the mystery....

A century and a half ago, French physician Pierre Paul Broca found that patients with damage to part of the brain’s frontal lobe were unable to speak more than a few words. Later dubbed Broca’s area, this region is believed to be critical for speech production and some aspects of language comprehension. However, in recent years neuroscientists have observed activity in Broca’s area when people perform cognitive tasks that have nothing to do with language, such as solving math problems or holding information in working memory....

Water inside the Moon’s mantle came from primitive meteorites, new research finds, the same source thought to have supplied most of the water on Earth. The findings raise new questions about the process that formed the Moon. The Moon is thought to have formed from a disc of debris left when a giant object hit the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, very early in Earth’s history. Scientists have long assumed that the heat from an impact of that size would cause hydrogen and other volatile elements to boil off into space, meaning the Moon must have started off completely dry....