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Some patients with COVID-19 have a more severe case of the disease than others. Previous research has found certain variants in specific human genes that are linked with a person experiencing more severe COVID-19. Some of these variations may also be associated with other medical conditions that may already be well understood; discovering these shared variants could increase understanding of COVID-19 and reveal potential new paths for treatment. To identify shared variants, Verma and colleagues used an unprecedented dataset of genotypic information linked to electronic health record data (EHR) for more than 650,000 U....

On July 24, 1992, the joint JAXA/NASA Geotail mission launched into space aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. It was the vanguard for a set of coordinated missions known as the International Solar Terrestrial Physics or ISTP project that studied the magnetic environs of Earth. Along with the Wind and Polar missions launched later, Geotail flew up into space to provide information about the way the magnetic envelope surrounding Earth, called the magnetosphere, responds to incoming material and energy from the sun....

Jessica Cantlon at Carnegie Mellon University led a research team that comprehensively examined the brain development of young boys and girls. Their research shows no gender difference in brain function or math ability. The results of this research are available online in the November 8 issue of the journal Science of Learning. “Science doesn’t align with folk beliefs,” said Cantlon, the Ronald J. and Mary Ann Zdrojkowski Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and senior author on the paper....

Unlike the brain and spinal cord, the peripheral nervous system has an astonishing capacity for regeneration following injury. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine in Göttingen have discovered that, following nerve damage, peripheral glial cells produce the growth factor neuregulin1, which makes an important contribution to the regeneration of damaged nerves. From their cell bodies to their terminals in muscle or skin, neuronal extensions or axons in the peripheral nervous system are surrounded along their entire length by glial cells....

David Reznick, a professor of biology at UC Riverside, explained that in the wild, guppies can migrate over waterfalls and rapids to places where most predators can’t follow them. Once they arrive in safer terrain, Reznick’s previous research shows they evolve rapidly, becoming genetically distinct from their ancestors. “We already knew that they evolved quickly, but what we didn’t yet understand was why,” Reznick said. In a new paper published in American Naturalist, Reznick and his co-authors explain the reason the tiny fish evolve so quickly in safer waters....

Passion, grit, the right mindset, and support from others are what’s needed to rank among the best in a given field. That’s the only way you’ll be able to keep yourself motivated and endure all the practice that’s required. Nothing in life is free. So how does Magnus Carlsen stay so superior at his game? How can Zlatan perform magic with an orange and Ada Hegerberg become the world’s best footballer?...

A retrospective study was conducted to examine the correlation between 20 different elemental levels, thyroid hormone levels, and vitamin D levels in umbilical cord blood collected at birth and a child’s developmental milestones. The levels were compared with the results of well child examinations that were conducted from birth to age 5. The findings, recently published in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, an open access, peer-reviewed medical journal focused on clinical and basic medicine and pharmacology, showed that vitamin D levels were associated with a delay in fine motor development and thyroid hormone levels were associated with cognitive development....

Over the past few months, a number of drugs have been under investigation to treat COVID-19 without well-established safety or data to support these claims. However, some of these unproven therapies may have underlying genetic reasons for not being effective and resulting in fatal adverse effects as found with hydroxychloroquine. University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy faculty Pamala Jacobson and Melanie Nicol, and Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellow Takuto Takahashi recently published a peer-reviewed study in Nature Genomic Medicine about how individualization with pharmacogenomics — the study of how genes affect a person’s response to drugs — may improve the efficiency and safety of these drugs....

“While most attention has been focused on the climate and air quality benefits of switching from coal, this new study shows that the transition to natural gas – and even more so, to renewable energy sources – has resulted in saving billions of gallons of water,” said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. These savings in both water consumption and water withdrawal have come despite the intensification of water use associated with fracking and shale gas production, the new study shows....

The debris field of very fine dust was likely created from collisions among developing infant planets near the star, evidenced by a bright ring of dusty debris seen 7 billion miles from the star. The pressure of starlight from the star, which is 23 times more luminous than the Sun, then expelled the dust far into space. But the dynamics don’t stop there. The puffy outer dust structure is like a donut-shaped inner tube that got hit by a truck....

Being a typical elliptical galaxy, Messier 60 on its own may not be very exciting to look at, but together with its adjacent spiral friend, the pair becomes a rather interesting feature in the night sky. Messier 60 is very bright — the third brightest in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, a collection of more than 1300 galaxies. It is noticeably larger than its neighbor, and has a far higher mass of stars....

Hubble’s resulting time-lapse movie of the aftermath of the collision reveals surprising and remarkable changes as dust and chunks of debris were flung into space from the wounded asteroid. Smashing head-on into the asteroid at 21,000 kilometers per hour (13,000 mph), the DART impactor blasted over 900,000 kilograms (2,000,000 pounds) of dust off of the asteroid. The Hubble movie provides invaluable new clues into how the debris was dispersed into a complex pattern in the days following the impact....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observed for the first time the source of a gravitational wave, created by the merger of two neutron stars. This merger created a kilonova — an object predicted by theory decades ago — that ejects heavy elements such as gold and platinum into space. This event also provides the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of neutron stars. This discovery is the first glimpse of multi-messenger astronomy, bringing together both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation....

Discovered in November 1834 by British astronomer John Herschel, NGC 1898 has been scrutinized numerous times by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Today we know that globular clusters are some of the oldest known objects in the universe and that they are relics of the first epochs of galaxy formation. While we already have a pretty good picture on the globular clusters of the Milky Way — still with many unanswered questions — our studies on globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies just started....

Palomar 2 is part of a group of 15 globulars known as the Palomar clusters. These clusters, as the name suggests, were discovered in survey plates from the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the 1950s, a project that involved some of the most well-known astronomers of the day, including Edwin Hubble. They were discovered quite late because they are so faint — each is either extremely remote, very heavily hidden behind blankets of dust, or has a very small number of remaining stars....

The presence of walruses in Iceland in the past and its apparent disappearance as early as in the Settlement and Commonwealth periods (870–1262 AD) has long puzzled the scientific world. In a study recently published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution scientists from Denmark, Iceland and Holland have addressed the question by analyzing ancient and contemporary DNA along with carbon-14 dating of walrus remains, supplemented with detailed studies of finding localities of the remains, place names and references to walrus hunting in the Icelandic Mediaeval literature, including the Icelandic Sagas....

Large parts of the genome consist of monotonous regions where short sections of the genome repeat hundreds or thousands of times. But expansions of these “DNA repeats” in the wrong places can have dramatic consequences, like in patients with Fragile X syndrome, one of the most commonly identifiable hereditary causes of cognitive disability in humans. However, these repetitive regions are still regarded as an unknown territory that cannot be examined appropriately, even with modern methods....

The Wyss Institute and SEAS announced Tuesday that Novartis will have access to commercially develop their therapeutic, biomaterial-based cancer vaccine technology that promotes cancer immunity. Under a licensing agreement spearheaded by Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD), Novartis will have worldwide rights, in target-limited applications, to develop and translate this treatment approach. The first-generation therapy consists of a porous scaffold made from a widely used biodegradable medical polymer infused with inactivated antigens from the patient’s own tumor cells, as well as immunostimulatory molecules that attract dendritic cells of the immune system to the immuno-material site and activate them to stimulate a host response....

In nine studies conducted by the researchers, people rated the competence of faces wearing different upper-body clothing. Clothing perceived as “richer” by an observer — whether it was a T-shirt, sweater, or other top — led to higher competence ratings of the person pictured than similar clothes judged as “poorer,” the researchers found. Given that competence is often associated with social status, the findings suggest that low-income individuals may face hurdles in relation to how others perceive their abilities — simply from looking at their clothing....

According to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth’s 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880. Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much. The 2015 temperatures continue a long-term warming trend, according to analyses by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York (GISTEMP)....