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Post-pandemic, many people are realizing that their immune system could do with a boost. Our immune system is our first line of defense against the viruses and bacteria we encounter every day, so it pays to make sure yours is fighting fit, and one of the key ways to maintain immune health is by supplementing with immune-boosting vitamins and nutrients. Approximately 30% of the United States population is at risk for at least one vitamin deficiency,[1] meaning that our bodies lack the essential nutrients needed to keep our immune system strong....

To commemorate three decades of scientific discoveries, this image is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the telescope has observed during its 30-year lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbor NGC 2020 which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 163 000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef” because it resembles an undersea world....

On 24 April 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the space shuttle Discovery. It has since revolutionized how astronomers and the general public see the Universe. The images it provides are spectacular from both a scientific and a purely aesthetic point of view. Each year the telescope dedicates a small portion of its precious observing time to take a special anniversary image, focused on capturing particularly beautiful and meaningful objects....

Have you ever wondered why the stars in Hubble images are surrounded by four sharp points? These are called diffraction spikes, and are created when starlight diffracts — or spreads around — the support structures inside reflecting telescopes like Hubble. The four spikes are due to the four thin vanes supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror and are only noticeable for bright objects like stars where a lot of light is concentrated on one spot....

Bright arcs are smeared around the heart of galaxy cluster Abell S1077 in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope. The arcs are stretched images of distant galaxies distorted by the cluster’s enormous gravitational field. Galaxy clusters are large groupings of galaxies, each hosting millions of stars. They are the largest existing structures in the Universe, bound by the gravitational attraction between them. The amount of matter condensed in such groupings is so high that their gravity is enough to warp even the fabric of space-time, distorting the path that light takes when it travels through the cluster....

NGC 3344 is a glorious spiral galaxy around half the size of the Milky Way, which lies 25 million light-years distant. We are fortunate enough to see NGC 3344 face-on, allowing us to study its structure in detail. The galaxy features an outer ring swirling around an inner ring with a subtle bar structure in the center. A bar is an elongated distribution of stars and gas in the center of a spiral galaxy....

Findings may relate to underuse, overuse, or even misuse, say researchers. There’s a 7-fold unexplained variation in rates of euthanasia across The Netherlands, reveals an analysis of health insurance claims data, published online in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care. It’s not clear if these differences relate to underuse, overuse, or even misuse, say the researchers. The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, introducing preliminary legislation in 1994, followed by a fully fledged law in 2002....

At the Supercomputing 2012 conference last week, IBM Research-Almaden presented its next milestone towards fulfilling DARPA’s cognitive computing program, Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE). DARPA’s SyNAPSE program was announced in 2008, and it calls for developing an electronic neuromorphic machine technology, which is basically a brain simulation that scales to biological levels using cognitive computing architecture with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. These numbers are based on the number of estimated synapses and neurons in the human brain....

Scientists from Swansea University, Culham Center for Fusion Energy, ITER in France, and the Max-Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany paired x-ray and neutron imaging to test the robustness of parts. They found that both methods yield valuable data which can be used in developing components. The sun is a shining example of fusion in action. In the extremes of pressure and temperature at the center of the sun atoms travel fast enough to fuse together, releasing vast amounts of energy....

Their work has numerous potential impacts, especially in the context of understanding and responding to autoimmune disorders and inflammation. Our immune system serves a very important function in protecting us from infection and injury. However, when immune responses become too aggressive this can lead to damaging inflammation, which occurs in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Inflammation is triggered when our bodies produce “alarm proteins” (interleukins), which ramp up our defenses against infection and injury by switching on different components of our immune system....

Scientists, however, say it remains unclear what the cause of the link is. Furthermore, the small numbers of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) cases observed appear similar to increases previously seen in other mass vaccination campaigns. The same research team, based at University College London (UCL) Queen Square Institute of Neurology, had previously shown there was no measurable link between COVID-19 infection and GBS. This subsequent study set out to investigate any relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and GBS....

A new study by a team of international experts, led by Dr. James Neenan, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits University in South Africa, has revealed that a completely extinct group of marine reptiles called sauropterygians evolved similar inner ear proportions to those of some modern-day aquatic reptiles and mammals. Sauropterygians were swimming reptiles from the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’ that included some semi-aquatic forms, nearshore swimmers, and fully-aquatic ‘underwater-flyers....

An international collaboration led by scientists from the University of Hong Kong, RIKEN (Japan), and CEA (France) have used the RI Beam Factory (RIBF) at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-base Science to show that 34 is a “magic number” for neutrons, meaning that atomic nuclei with 34 neutrons are more stable than would normally be expected. Earlier experiments had suggested, but not clearly demonstrated, that this would be the case....

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, with hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains up to 250 miles high. However, concentrations of volcanic activity are significantly displaced from where they are expected to be based on models that predict how the moon’s interior is heated, according to NASA and European Space Agency researchers. Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter’s massive gravity and the smaller but precisely timed pulls from two neighboring moons that orbit further from Jupiter – Europa and Ganymede....

This, the researchers say, combined with using cleaner aircraft engines, could reduce contrail-caused harm to the climate by up to 90 percent. Lead author Dr. Marc Stettler, of Imperial’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said: “According to our study, changing the altitude of a small number of flights could significantly reduce the climate effects of aviation contrails. This new method could very quickly reduce the overall climate impact of the aviation industry....

The ruddy color of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is likely a product of simple chemicals being broken apart by sunlight in the planet’s upper atmosphere, according to a new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini mission. The results contradict the other leading theory for the origin of the spot’s striking color — that the reddish chemicals come from beneath Jupiter’s clouds. The results were presented earlier this month by Kevin Baines, a Cassini team scientist based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science Meeting in Tucson, Arizona....

Television programs featuring healthy foods can be a key ingredient in leading children to make healthier food choices now and into adulthood. A new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, found kids who watched a child-oriented cooking show featuring healthy food were 2.7 times more likely to make a healthy food choice than those who watched a different episode of the same show featuring unhealthy food....

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered a chemical that offers a completely new and promising direction for the development of drugs to treat metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes—a major public health concern in the United States due to the current obesity epidemic. Their discovery, detailed in a paper published July 13 in an advance online issue of the journal Science, initially came as a surprise because the chemical they isolated does not directly control glucose production in the liver, but instead affects the activity of a key protein that regulates the internal mechanisms of our daily night and day activities, which scientists call our circadian rhythm or biological clock....

La Soufrière is an active stratovolcano on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A series of explosive events began in April 2021, forming a plume of volcanic ash reaching 8 km in height, and generating pyroclastic flows down the volcano’s south and southwest flanks. The image below was captured on April 8, one day before the first main eruption, while the image on top was taken on April 13, and shows the northern part of the island covered in ash....

New evidence points to the role of plate tectonics in early Earth’s release of internal heat and the swapping of geomagnetic poles. Some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago has been revealed by new research that analyzed pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet. Additionally, the study provides the earliest proof of when the planet’s magnetic north and south poles swapped places....