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What happens to a material that is burned in different conditions? To investigate this question, researchers use a laser camera that photographs the material in a two-dimensional layer, known as LS CUP (single-shot laser sheet compressed ultrafast photography). By observing the sample from the side, it is possible to see what reactions and emissions occur over time and space. Researchers have used LS-CUP to study the combustion of various hydrocarbons....

These preparations are expected to last 55 days from the observatory’s arrival by ship to the day of launch. After Webb arrived at the Arianespace clean room facilities in French Guiana, contamination control technicians ensured the observatory is clean and contaminant free following its 5,800 mile journey. Then engineers ran a final set of electrical and functional tests and checked the stowed mechanical configuration to ensure delivery went smoothly. A trained crew in special hazmat suits will soon begin the two-week process of loading the spacecraft with the hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer it will need to power its rocket thrusters to maintain its orbit....

Published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the study challenges the notion that “a calorie is a calorie.” The study, led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Cara Ebbeling and Professor of Pediatrics David Ludwig, finds diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal — either low-glycemic index or very-low-carbohydrate — may be preferable to a low-fat diet for those trying to achieve lasting weight loss....

Quantum mechanics incorporates some very non-intuitive properties of matter. Quantum superposition, for example, allows an atom to be simultaneously in two different states with its spin axis pointed both up and down, or combinations in between. A computer that uses quantum mechanical manipulation of atoms or particles therefore has many more possible options than a conventional one that works with “zeros” and “ones” and has only two choices, called bits....

For more than 500 years, humans have mastered the art of refracting light by shaping glass into lenses, then bending or combining those lenses to amplify and clarify images either close-up and far-off. But in the last decade or so, a group led by scientist Federico Capasso at Harvard University has begun to transform the field of optics by engineering flat optics metasurfaces, employing an array of millions of tiny microscopically thin and transparent quartz pillars to diffract and mold the flow of light in much the same way as a glass lens, but without the aberrations that naturally limit the glass....

However, it is still a prevalent condition today, affecting over 10 million people in the United States, or approximately 5% of the adult population. Despite its long history, dating back to ancient Egypt, gout continues to be a significant health concern. Gout is the most common form of inflammatory arthritis, in which urate (a byproduct of purine-rich foods like meat and alcohol) builds up in the body and forms needle-shaped crystals in and around the joints, usually starting in the foot....

Some cancer patients’ treatments were interrupted throughout the summer and autumn of 2019. The cause was a lack of the key chemotherapeutic drugs vinblastine and vincristine, which are used to treat several forms of cancer. These medications, which are extracted from the leaves of the Catharanthus roseus plant, have no alternatives. Vinblastine, a compound made up of the plant’s active ingredients vindoline and catharanthine, inhibits the division of cancer cells....

Rice University scientists have taken an important step toward the creation of two-dimensional electronics with a process to make patterns in atom-thick layers that combine a conductor and an insulator. The materials at play – graphene and hexagonal boron nitride – have been merged into sheets and built into a variety of patterns at nanoscale dimensions. Rice introduced a technique to stitch the identically structured materials together nearly three years ago....

For most mechanical objects to be coaxed into a quantum state, they need to be cooled to exceedingly low temperatures to overcome the thermal vibrations, or phonons, that mask the signature of quantum motion. This brings the object closer to its motional ground state. However, achieving motional ground state has generally only been demonstrated in nanoscale objects and the methods used to prepare these tiny systems are not feasible at larger mass scales....

Researchers at Indiana University have shown that an artificial intelligence framework that employs sequential decision-making could reduce healthcare costs by over 50 percent while also improving patient outcomes by over 40 percent. New research from Indiana University has found that machine learning — the same computer science discipline that helped create voice recognition systems, self-driving cars, and credit card fraud detection systems — can drastically improve both the cost and quality of healthcare in the United States....

On January 23, 2020, the world saw the first coronavirus lockdown come into force in Wuhan, China in an effort to stop the spread of the illness. This lockdown set the precedent for similar measures in other cities across the country, putting a halt to daily activities including industry and traffic. Factories and other industries were shut down and people were confined to their homes. Similar measures were then put in place worldwide in the following weeks and months....

Young stars are often surrounded by dense, rotating discs of gas and dust, known as protoplanetary discs, from which planets are born. The heat from a typical young solar-type star means that the water within a protoplanetary disc is gaseous up to distances of around 3 au from the star — less than 3 times the average distance between the Earth and the Sun — or around 450 million kilometers....

Stars like our Sun eject large amounts of gas and dust into space, containing various elements and compounds. Asymptotic giant branch — AGB — phase stars, near their end of life, are particularly significant sources of such substances in our galaxy. Formation of dust around AGB stars has been considered to play an important role in triggering acceleration of stellar wind, but the detailed mechanism of this acceleration has not been well explained....

Scientists have detailed a change in the lifestyle of marine bacteria, in which they switch from coexisting with algal hosts in a symbiotic relationship to suddenly killing them. The study was recently published in the journal eLife. An understanding of this lifestyle switch could offer new perspectives on the regulation of algal bloom dynamics and its effect on the large-scale biogeochemical processes in marine environments. Single-celled algae, known as phytoplankton, form oceanic blooms which are responsible for around half of the photosynthesis that occurs on Earth, and form the basis of marine food webs....

Public largely unaware of potential safety hazards. Swallowing alcohol-based hand sanitizer can kill, warns an analysis of two such deaths identified in coroners’ reports, and published in the journal BMJ Evidence Based Medicine. But the public is largely unaware of the potential safety hazards of this form of hand hygiene, which has become commonplace in homes, hospitals, schools, workplaces, and public venues in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, argues the researcher....

What happens in the brain when we see, hear, think and remember? To be able to answer questions like this, neuroscientists need information about how the millions of neurons in the brain are connected to each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have taken a crucial step towards obtaining a complete circuit diagram of the brain of the mouse, a key model organism for the neurosciences....

The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old. Scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that two of the species they studied appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis, another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed methane and used it to build their cell walls. The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history — combined with scientists’ knowledge of the vast number of stars in the universe and the growing understanding that planets orbit so many of them — strengthens the case for life existing elsewhere in the universe because it would be extremely unlikely that life formed quickly on Earth but did not arise anywhere else....

Scientists report the existence of 15 new planets — including one ‘super-Earth’ that could harbor liquid water — orbiting small, cool stars near our solar system. These stars, known as red dwarfs, are of enormous interest for studies of planetary formation and evolution. A research team led by Teruyuki Hirano of Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences has validated 15 exoplanets orbiting red dwarf systems. One of the brightest red dwarfs, K2-155 that is around 200 light years away from Earth, has three transiting super-Earths, which are slightly bigger than our own planet....

Black holes are objects with such strong gravity that everything, including light, is sucked in and cannot escape. Because black holes do not emit light, astronomers must infer their existence from the effects their gravity produces in other objects. Black holes range in mass from about 5 times the mass of the Sun to supermassive black holes millions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers think that small black holes merge and gradually grow into large ones, but no one had ever found an intermediate-mass black hole, hundreds or thousands of times the mass of the Sun....

A major step in searching for habitable planets is finding suitable stars that could foster the emergence of complex organisms. Because our Sun has nurtured life on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, conventional wisdom would suggest that stars like it would be prime candidates. But stars like our Sun represent only about 10% of the Milky Way population. What’s more, they are comparatively short-lived. Our Sun is halfway through its estimated 10 billion-year lifetime....