Posts

Were Neanderthals carnivores? According to scientists, the debate is still ongoing. Although some investigations of the dental tartar of individuals from the Iberian Peninsula seem to indicate that Neanderthals were major consumers of plants, other studies carried out at sites outside Iberia appear to suggest that they consumed almost nothing but meat. Now, using new analytical techniques on a molar belonging to an individual of this species, researchers[1] have shown that the Neanderthals at the Gabasa site in Spain appear to have been carnivores....

New findings from a NASA-funded instrument have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now confirmed the long-held suspicion that much of this glow stems from a region of million-degree interstellar plasma known as the local hot bubble, or LHB. At the same time, the study also establishes upper limits on the amount of low-energy, or soft, X-rays produced within our planetary system by the solar wind, a gusty outflow of charged particles emanating from the sun....

Using a single lens that is about one-thousandth of an inch thick, researchers have created a camera that does not require focusing. The technology offers considerable benefits over traditional cameras such as the ones in most smartphones, which require multiple lenses to form high-quality, in-focus images. “Our flat lenses can drastically reduce the weight, complexity, and cost of cameras and other imaging systems, while increasing their functionality,” said research team leader Rajesh Menon from the University of Utah....

A team of scientists has discovered that the behavior of sperm cells is due, in part, to the individual DNA makeup of these cells, rather than only the genetics of males. These results, which provide a new understanding of the competition among sperm cells to fertilize the egg, have larger implications for the reproductive process. The study, which centers on the swimming behavior of sperm cells, is the first to establish a direct effect of mutation on sperm behavior and suggests that the development and application of screens based on sperm behavior can improve the quality of the genetics they carry....

Sand dunes are scattered across Mars and one of the larger populations exists in the Southern hemisphere, just west of the Hellas impact basin. The Hellespontus region features numerous collections of dark, dune formations that collect both within depressions such as craters, and among “extra-crater” plains areas. This image displays the middle portion of a large dune field composed primarily of crescent-shaped “barchan” dunes. Here, the steep, sunlit side of the dune, called a slip face, indicates the down-wind side of the dune and direction of its migration....

HiRISE operates in visible wavelengths, the same as human eyes, but with a telescopic lens that produces images at resolutions never before seen in planetary exploration missions. These high-resolution images enable scientists to distinguish 1-meter-size (about 3-foot-size) objects on Mars and to study the morphology (surface structure) in a much more comprehensive manner than ever before.

Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and other international research institutions have created a tropical rainforest vulnerability index. It will detect and evaluate the vulnerability of these diverse ecosystems to two main categories of threats: the warming and drying climate, and the consequences of human land use such as deforestation and fragmentation from encroaching roads, agricultural fields, and logging. “Rainforests are perhaps the most endangered habitat on Earth – the canary in the climate-change coal mine,” said Sassan Saatchi, a JPL scientist and lead author of the new study published on July 23, 2021, in the journal OneEarth....

Prior animal studies have shown that drugs designed to inhibit the RNA molecule, known as miR-33, successfully reduced the atherosclerotic plaques that cause the most common forms of heart disease. But those drug therapies also triggered changes that could promote metabolic dysfunction. To shed more light on the function of miR-33, a team led by Carlos Fernandez-Hernando, an associate professor in Yale’s Department of Comparative Medicine, studied mouse models lacking the molecule....

The result could shed light on the nature of superconductivity and could also lead to better-engineered superconducting circuits for applications like quantum computing and ultralow-power computing. The findings are described in the latest issue of Physical Review B. “We were able to use this knowledge to make larger-area devices, which were not really possible to do previously, and the yield of the devices increased significantly,” says Yachin Ivry, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, and the first author on the paper....

If these light structures are tightly focused by a lens, like a magnifying glass used as burning glass, highly intense three-dimensional light landscapes will be shaped, facilitating a significantly enhanced resolution in named applications. These kinds of light landscapes have paved the way to pioneering applications such as the Nobel prize awarded STED microscopy. However, these nano-fields themselves could not be measured yet, since components are formed by tight focusing which are invisible for typical measurement techniques....

But for a robot — say, one that’s sorting through a bin of objects and attempting to get a good grasp on one of them — this is a computationally taxing maneuver. Before even attempting the move it must calculate a litany of properties and probabilities, such as the friction and geometry of the table, the pen, and its two fingers, and how various combinations of these properties interact mechanically, based on fundamental laws of physics....

Avian influenza is a poultry disease caused by influenza A virus infection. Rapid initial response for a suspected infection and continuous surveillance are essential to mitigate the damage from highly pathogenic, transmittable pathogens such as avian influenza viruses. Generally, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method is used to detect the viral genome, but its complicated procedure requires a considerable amount of time. Another method involves detecting antibodies produced in the body in reaction to virus infection....

Despite efforts to increase physical activity and improve cardiovascular health in adults, the global rate of physical inactivity has remained unchanged for the past 20 years. The inefficient walking styles of Mr. Teabag and Mr. Putey, acted by John Cleese and Michael Palin in the 1971 Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, have been shown to be more variable than usual walking, but their energy expenditure has never been measured....

According to a recent study published in the journalLatin American Antiquity, the K’iche’ ruling elite adopted a hands-off approach towards the procurement and trade of obsidian conducted by individuals outside their central sphere of control. In these areas, access to nearby sources of obsidian, a glasslike rock used to make tools and weapons, was managed by local people through independent and diverse acquisition networks. Over time, the availability of obsidian resources and the prevalence of craftsmen to shape it resulted in a system that is in many ways suggestive of contemporary market-based economies....

“Parkinson’s disease is not usually seen as an autoimmune disease,” says LJI Research Assistant Professor Cecilia Lindestam Arlehamn, Ph.D. “But all of our work points toward T cells having a role in the disease.” “Now that we can see what these T cells are doing, we think intervening with antibody therapies could have an impact on the disease progression, especially early on, ” adds LJI Professor Alessandro Sette, Dr.Biol.Sci., who led the work with Lindestam Arlehamn....

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over one million seconds of observation, the resulting image revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the Universe ever taken at that time. The new full-color XDF image is even more sensitive than the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, thanks to the additional observations, and contains about 5,500 galaxies, even within its smaller field of view....

Periodontitis is a serious gum disorder induced by an imbalance in the bacteria and other microorganisms of the mouth (the oral microbiome). It is the sixth-most prevalent infectious disease and the most common cause of tooth loss worldwide. Monell Center Director and President Robert Margolskee, MD, PhD and cell biologist Marco Tizzano, PhD, along with colleagues from Sichuan University, found that the newly identified cells, known as solitary chemosensory cells (SCCs), are present in the gums of mice....

Sexually transmitted infections, or STIs, pose a significant public health challenge. Globally, more than one million new STI cases are diagnosed each day. In a new article in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, experts from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that the biomedical research community must refocus its commitment to STI research to surmount this growing global health crisis....

Since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, several more-infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, have emerged. The original, or wild-type, virus was followed by the alpha variant, which became widespread in the United States in early 2021, and subsequently the delta variant, which is the most prevalent strain circulating today. The variants have acquired mutations that help them infect people and spread more easily. Many of the mutations affect the spike protein, which the virus uses to get into cells....

The first stars appeared about one hundred million years after the big bang, and ever since then stars and star formation processes have lit up the cosmos. When the universe was about three billion years old, star formation activity peaked at rates about ten times above current levels. Why this happened, and whether the physical processes back then were different from those today or just more active (and why), are among the most pressing questions in astronomy....