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The larvae have the ability to quickly detach and reattach to underwater rocks in torrential alpine rivers that can flow as fast as three meters per second. Their highly specialized suction organs are so strong that only forces over 600 times their body weight can detach them. Being in such fast-flowing water puts them out of harm’s way, since competitors or predators are unlikely to survive in this challenging environment....

This pretty sprinkling of bright blue stars is the cluster NGC 2547, a group of recently formed stars in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail). This image was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The Universe is an old neighborhood — roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient — some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old....

There was a conspicuous gap in the early Solar System’s protoplanetary disk, between where Mars and Jupiter are now, and where the modern-day asteroid belt sits. What exactly caused the gap is a mystery, but astronomers think it’s a sign of the processes that governed planet formation. A group of scientists have published a paper outlining the discovery of this ancient gap. The lead author is Cauê Borlina, a Planetary Science Ph....

Like the giant crystals of Naica in Mexico (see the 2007 Geology article by García-Ruiz and colleagues), the crystals of Pulpí are gypsum (calcium sulfate with two water molecules). García-Ruiz says, “To reveal their formation has been a very tough task because unlike in the case of Naica, where the hydrothermal system is still active, the large geode of Pulpí is a fossilized environment.” The team performed a study of the geology and geochemistry of the abandoned mine where the geode was found, including a detailed mapping of the underground mining works, which has been used to allow tourist visits in the mine....

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has provided physicists with a huge quantity of data to analyze since the first physics run in 2009. Now it’s time for the machine, along with CERN’s other accelerators, to get a facelift. “Long Shutdown 1” (LS1) will begin on 14 February 2013, but this doesn’t mean that life at CERN will be any less rich and exciting. Although there will be no collisions for a period of almost two years, the whole CERN site will be a hive of activity, with large-scale work underway to modernize the infrastructure and prepare the LHC for operation at higher energy....

For example, more than 50 discovered satellite galaxies orbit our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The largest of these is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, a large dwarf galaxy that resembles a faint cloud in the Southern Hemisphere night sky. Several of the small, or “dwarf,” galaxies orbiting the Milky Way were probably taken from the LMC, according to a team of astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside....

The new tool, the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array (OV-LWA), is already producing unprecedented videos of the radio sky. Astronomers hope that it will help them piece together a more complete picture of the early universe and learn about extrasolar space weather—the interaction between nearby stars and their orbiting planets. The consortium includes astronomers from Caltech, JPL, Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, Virginia Tech, and the Naval Research Laboratory....

The findings, which were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), suggest that obesity in children may have negative impacts on brain health. These findings highlight the importance of addressing and preventing obesity in children in order to promote overall brain health. “We know being obese as an adult is associated with poor brain health,” said researcher Simone Kaltenhauser, a post-graduate research fellow in radiology and biomedical imaging at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut....

Diamond is one of the toughest, naturally occurring materials found on Earth. Now, the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, can melt them using pressure, electromagnetic pulses, and enough current to light 100 million light bulbs. The interior of the Z machine is 33 meters wide, and it was designed to research nuclear fusion, not to melt diamonds. It can also explore the behavior of materials at high temperatures and pressures, as well as act as a source of intense X-rays....

In 2020, Denmark culled millions of mink to quell a source of zoonotic COVID-19 transmission, the passage of the SARS-CoV-2 virus between humans and animals. Last year, zoo animals including lions, tigers, and gorillas got sick with the virus, presumably infected by their keepers. And earlier this year, pet hamsters were implicated in precipitating a new outbreak in Hong Kong. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, coronaviruses were known to cause certain varieties of the common cold as well as diseases important in animal populations....

Roscosmos flight controllers conducted a successful test of the Soyuz MS-22 thrusters at 3:08 a.m. EST Friday, December 16, as part of the ongoing evaluation and investigation. The systems that were tested were nominal, and Roscosmos assessments of additional Soyuz systems continue. Temperatures and humidity within the Soyuz spacecraft, which remains docked to the Rassvet module, are within acceptable limits. NASA is supporting the ongoing investigation with the use of the Canadarm2 robotic arm to provide additional viewing of the Soyuz exterior on Sunday, December 18....

According to Jason Jabbari, research assistant professor and co-author of a recent study that was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice, more security lowers math test scores, lowers the percentage of kids entering college, and increases suspensions. The authors discovered that in addition to being utilized to prevent school shootings, surveillance measures may have enhanced schools’ ability to recognize and discipline pupils for less severe and more frequent offenses, which may have a detrimental effect on the learning environment....

Forecasting cannot foresee COVID-19 infection rates peaking or plateauing. During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joseph Lee McCauley, a physics professor at the University of Houston, was watching the daily data for six countries and wondered if infections were really growing exponentially. By extracting the doubling times from the data, he became convinced they were. Doubling times and exponential growth go hand in hand, so it became clear to him that modeling based on past infections is impossible, because the rate changes unforeseeably from day to day due to social distancing and lockdown efforts....

People who think based on their first instincts are more likely to believe and share COVID-19 misinformation, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU). The study compared intuitive thinkers, those who tend to make decisions on immediate instinct, with reflective thinkers, those who stop and reflect on the accuracy of information presented to them. As part of the study, 742 Australians were shown a mix of five already-debunked COVID-19 claims and five accurate statements from public health authorities....

Prime Minister David Cameron has stated that the government’s National Health Service (NHS) has earmarked £100 million for the effort, which is part of the £600 million announced for research in the coming years. The sequencing program is expected to take between 3 to 5 years. The effort joins many sequencing projects and biobanks across Europe. In March, the UK opened its first biobank of 500,000 people that includes health information and blood samples....

The study, recently published in the journal Nature, provides the first-ever seasonal temperature record of its kind from any location on the planet. “The goal of the research team was to push the boundaries of what is possible with past climate interpretations, and for us, that meant trying to understand climate at the shortest timescales, in this case seasonally, from summer to winter, year-by-year, for many thousands of years,” said Tyler Jones, lead author on the study, and assistant research professor and fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR)....

On November 8, 2019, Nature Communications published research conducted by Army-funded researchers at Northwestern University, who developed a set of design rules to guide how ribosomes, a cell structure that makes protein, can incorporate new kinds of monomers, which can be bonded with identical molecules to form polymers. “These findings are an exciting step forward to achieving sequence-defined synthetic polymers, which has been a grand challenge in the field of polymer chemistry,” said Dr....

According to recent simulations and analysis, the flagship fusion facility of the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) might serve as the model for an economically appealing next-generation fusion pilot plant. The pilot plant could be the next step in the United States toward collecting the fusion power that powers the sun and stars on Earth as a safe and clean source of power for producing energy....

Men with stable coronary artery disease who are on Viagra due to impotence seem to live longer and have a lower risk of experiencing a new heart attack, a study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports. Impotence can be an early warning sign of cardiovascular disease in healthy men and is treated either locally with alprostadil, which dilates the blood vessels so that the penis stiffens, or with so-called PDE5 inhibitors, such as Viagra or Cialis, which are taken in tablet form orally before sex, inhibiting the enzyme phosphodiesterase5 (PDE5) in the penis to increase the blood flow....

Well, actually, there have been several theories over many decades. Earlier versions of lunar formation theories included capture, where the Moon would have been a strayed planetoid. Another version was fission, where the Earth was spinning so fast that it would have ejected out of the Earth and then formed its own body. This led to our current theory, the giant impactor theory. So this collision was during the late stages of planetary formation throughout our entire solar system, when planets were still very new and very much forming....