Researchers from the George Washington University found that aspirin may have lung-protective effects and reduce the need for mechanical ventilation, ICU admission and in-hospital mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Life Sciences Institute have found that amlexanox, an off-patent drug currently prescribed for the treatment of asthma and other uses, also reverses obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver in mice. The findings from the lab of Alan Saltiel, the Mary Sue Coleman director of the Life Sciences Institute, are published online in the journal Nature Medicine. “One of the reasons that diets are so ineffective in producing weight loss for some people is that their bodies adjust to the reduced calories by also reducing their metabolism, so that they are ‘defending’ their body weight,” Saltiel said....
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, recently past the halfway mark of his one-year mission to the International Space Station, photographed the Nile River during a nighttime flyover on September 22, 2015. Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) wrote, “Day 179. The #Nile at night is a beautiful sight for these sore eyes. Good night from @space_station! #YearInSpace.”
The conundrum is that the disk shouldn’t be there, based on current astronomical theories. However, the unexpected presence of a disk so close to a black hole offers a unique opportunity to test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. General relativity describes gravity as the curvature of space and special relativity describes the relationship between time and space. “We’ve never seen the effects of both general and special relativity in visible light with this much clarity,” said Marco Chiaberge of the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the team that conducted the Hubble study....
A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda Hota (UM-DAE Center for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has discovered a Blue Supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Virgo. Over fifty-five million years ago, it emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging cyclone winds blowing at four-million kilometers per hour....
A newly discovered exoplanet could be worth searching for signs of life. Analyses by a team led by astronomer Diana Kossakowski of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy describe a planet that orbits its home star, the red dwarf Wolf 1069, in the habitable zone. This zone includes distances around the star for which liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. In addition, the planet named Wolf 1069 b has an Earth-like mass....
The galaxy they studied, named J1649+2635, nearly 800 million light-years from Earth, is a spiral galaxy, like our own Milky Way, but with prominent “jets” of subatomic particles propelled outward from its core at nearly the speed of light. The problem is that spiral galaxies are not supposed to have such large jets. “The conventional wisdom is that such jets come only from elliptical galaxies that formed through the merger of spirals....
An international team led by astronomers in Brazil has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to identify and study the oldest solar twin known to date. Located 250 light-years from Earth, the star HIP 102152 is more like the Sun than any other solar twin — except that it is nearly four billion years older. This older, but almost identical, twin gives us an unprecedented chance to see how the Sun will look when it ages....
These organisms, called slime mold, feed on dead plant material, and they have an uncanny ability to seek out food sources. Although brainless, the organism’s “genius” at creating efficient networks to reach their food goal has caught the attention of scientists. Researchers have recreated the slime mold’s behavior in computer algorithms to help solve large-scale engineering problems such as finding the most efficient traffic routes in large cities, solving mazes, and pinpointing crowd evacuation routes....
Was Pluto’s frozen heart formed in an ancient impact basin and was it once closer to the north pole? And does the icy heart conceal a subsurface ocean? Scientists are offering several new scenarios to explain the formation of Pluto’s frozen heart-shaped feature, first spotted by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. Researchers have focused on the heart’s western lobe, informally named Sputnik Planitia, a deep basin containing three kinds of ices—frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide—and appearing opposite Charon, Pluto’s large, tidally locked moon....
Researchers at Yale and the Flatiron Institute have discovered that compact, multiple-planet systems are more likely to form around stars that have lower amounts of heavy elements than our own Sun. This runs counter to a good deal of current research, which has focused on stars with higher metallicity. The research team looked at 700 stars and their surrounding planets for the study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters....
This scenario emerged from an analysis by planetary scientists at UC Santa Cruz whose investigation was prompted in part by NASA’s plans to launch a probe to Psyche, the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system. Francis Nimmo, professor of Earth and planetary sciences, said he was interested in the composition of metallic asteroids indicated by analyses of iron meteorites, so he had graduate student Jacob Abrahams work on some simple models of how the asteroids cooled and solidified....
A young planet located 150 light-years away has given UNSW Sydney astrophysicists a rare chance to study a planetary system in the making. The findings, recently published in The Astronomical Journal, suggest that the planet DS Tuc Ab — which orbits a star in a binary system — formed without being heavily impacted by the gravitational pull of the second star. “We expected the pull from the second star to tilt the rotating disk of gas and dust that once surrounded the main star — a process that would skew the orbit of the planet,” says Dr....
The onset of neurodegenerative diseases and dementia is believed to be promoted by negative emotions, anxiety, and depression. However, the impact of these emotions on the brain and the possibility of limiting their harmful effects are still a matter of investigation. To shed light on this subject, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) studied the brain activation patterns of both young and older adults when they were exposed to the psychological distress of others....
In the paper “Axiogenesis,” scheduled to be published in Physical Review Letters on March 17, 2020, researchers Keisuke Harigaya, Member in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Raymond T. Co of the University of Michigan, have presented a compelling case in which the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion, first theorized in 1977, provides several important answers to these questions. “We revealed that the rotation of the QCD axion can account for the excess of matter found in the universe,” stated Harigaya....
A Curtin University-led research team used a supercomputer to simulate how a supercontinent forms. They discovered that because the Earth has been cooling for billions of years, the thickness and strength of the plates under the oceans reduce with time, making it difficult for the next supercontinent to assemble by closing the “young” oceans, such as the Atlantic or Indian oceans. The study was published recently in National Science Review....
An international public-private research consortium has identified and validated a cellular role of a primary Parkinson’s disease drug target, the LRRK2 kinase. This important finding, to be published in the online, open-access eLife journal, illuminates a novel route for therapeutic development and intervention testing for Parkinson’s, the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. A team of investigators from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, the University of Dundee, The Michael J....
The team focused on samples from North America, because they knew that one particular genetic family of Arabidopsis was very widespread, presenting an opportunity to observe newly-acquired mutations. The comparison of 100 complete genomes revealed 5000 new mutations, some of which could have given the plant an adaptive advantage as it colonized its new environment. The plant moved inland alongside human settlers, gradually diverging from the European ancestor from which it originated....
New analysis reveals link between birthdays and COVID-19 spread during the height of the pandemic. In counties with already high COVID-19 infection rates, birthday bashes may have fueled infection spread during the peak months of the pandemic, according to a new analysis led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation. The report, published today (June 21, 2021) in JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that in counties with high rates of COVID-19, households with recent birthdays were 30 percent more likely to have a COVID-19 diagnosis, compared with households with no birthdays....
Neutron stars and black holes are the super-dense remains of dead stars. On Wednesday, August 14, 2019, gravitational-wave discovery machines in the United States and Italy detected ripples in space and time from a cataclysmic event that happened about 8,550 million trillion kilometers away from Earth. Professor Susan Scott, from the ANU Research School of Physics, said the achievement completed the team’s trifecta of observations on their original wishlist, which included the merger of two black holes and the collision of two neutron stars....
