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Most of us who have played with this stuff know it as “oobleck,” named after a sticky green goo in Dr. Seuss’ “Bartholomew and the Oobleck.” Scientists, on the other hand, refer to cornstarch and water as a “non-Newtonian fluid” — a material that appears thicker or thinner depending on how it is physically manipulated. Now MIT engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts oobleck’s weird behavior. Using their model, the researchers accurately simulated how oobleck turns from a liquid to a solid and back again, under various conditions....

But now, we’re one step closer. Navin Varadarajan, University of Houston M.D. Anderson Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and his colleagues, are reporting in iScience the development of an intranasal subunit vaccine that provides durable local immunity against inhaled pathogens. “Mucosal vaccination can stimulate both systemic and mucosal immunity and has the advantage of being a non-invasive procedure suitable for immunization of large populations,” said Varadarajan. “However, mucosal vaccination has been hampered by the lack of efficient delivery of the antigen and the need for appropriate adjuvants that can stimulate a robust immune response without toxicity....

An exploratory randomized, controlled study on the safety and efficacy of either lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r) or Arbidol — antivirals that are used in some countries against HIV-1 and to treat influenza, respectively — as treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, suggests that neither drug improves the clinical outcome of patients hospitalized with mild-to-moderate cases of the disease over supportive care. The findings appeared on April 17, 2020, in Med, a new medical journal published by Cell Press....

Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars....

In a close collaborative effort, Spanish and Austrian physicists have experimentally encoded one quantum bit (qubit) in entangled states distributed over several particles and for the first time carried out simple computations on it. The 7-qubit quantum register could be used as the main building block for a quantum computer that corrects any type of error. The researchers’ results have now been published in Science. Even computers are error-prone. The slightest disturbances may alter saved information and falsify the results of calculations....

Now physicists at MIT and Harvard University have found the wonder material can exhibit even more curious electronic properties. In two papers published today in Nature, the team reports it can tune graphene to behave at two electrical extremes: as an insulator, in which electrons are completely blocked from flowing; and as a superconductor, in which electrical current can stream through without resistance. Researchers in the past, including this team, have been able to synthesize graphene superconductors by placing the material in contact with other superconducting metals — an arrangement that allows graphene to inherit some superconducting behaviors....

Their research, conducted using genetically modified mice and human subjects, supports the idea that changes in diet, such as increasing fiber intake, could potentially slow the progression of MS. The team is now working to evaluate the impact of dietary interventions on MS patients. “Unhealthy dietary habits such as low fiber and high-fat consumption may have contributed to the steep rise of MS in the US,” said Kouichi Ito, an associate professor of neurology and senior author of the study published in Frontiers in Immunology....

Research, from Com-COV study comparing mixed dosing schedules of Pfizer / Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, shows increase in the frequency of mild-moderate symptoms in those receiving either mixed dosing scheduleAdverse reactions were short-lived, with no other safety concernsImpact of mixed schedules on immunogenicity unknown as yet, with data to follow from this study Researchers running the University of Oxford-led Com-COV study — launched earlier this year to investigate alternating doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine — have today reported preliminary data revealing more frequent mild to moderate reactions in mixed schedules compared to standard schedules....

Researchers at the UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have put the squeeze — literally — on malignant mammary cells to guide them back into a normal growth pattern. The findings, presented Monday, December 17 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, show for the first time that mechanical forces alone can revert and stop the out-of-control growth of cancer cells....

The vaccine uses a harmless virus to deliver a MERS coronavirus protein into cells to generate an immune response, and may hold promise for developing vaccines against other coronaviruses, including the one that causes COVID-19. The team led by Paul McCray, MD, at the UI Carver College of Medicine, and Biao He, Ph.D., at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, tested a MERS vaccine candidate in mice engineered to be susceptible to the MERS coronavirus....

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found several examples of galaxies containing quasars, which act as gravitational lenses, amplifying and distorting images of galaxies aligned behind them. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, far outshining the total starlight of their host galaxies. Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes. To find these rare cases of galaxy-quasar combinations acting as lenses, a team of astronomers led by Frederic Courbin at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) selected 23,000 quasar spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)....

NASA’s Perseverance rover has notched up a slew of firsts since touching down on Mars one year ago, on February 18, 2021, and the six-wheeled scientist has other important accomplishments in store as it speeds toward its new destination and a new science campaign. Weighing roughly 1 ton (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance is the heaviest rover ever to touch down on Mars, returning dramatic video of its landing. The rover collected the first rock core samples from another planet (it’s carrying six so far), served as an indispensable base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), the first prototype oxygen generator on the Red Planet....

Replacement cattle will cost ranchers more per head as the price rises from the rock-bottom lows. The drought has made many cattle operations untenable since it has pressured ranchers to sell breeding cattle, take on more debt, or seek supplemental work off the farm. In Texas, many ranchers liquidated whole ranches. The drought has killed off much of the natural forage on grazing pastures, forcing ranchers to buy hay, straw, and soybean supplements....

University of Cincinnati researchers produce fat-busting proteins in the laboratory. Researchers Mark Castleberry, a doctoral student, and professor Sean Davidson, both in the UC College of Medicine, have found a way to produce in the laboratory a human protein produced in the liver known as Apolipoprotein A5 (APOA 5). It plays an important role in metabolizing and clearing excess levels of triglycerides from the bloodstream. Their findings are available in the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s Journal of Lipid Research online....

The research team, led by the University of Birmingham and Keele University in the UK and the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy, has demonstrated that fenofibrate and its active form (fenofibric acid) can significantly reduce SARS-COV-2 infection in human cells in the laboratory. Importantly, reduction of infection was obtained using concentrations of the drug which are safe and achievable using the standard clinical dose of fenofibrate. Fenofibrate, which is approved for use by most countries in the world including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), is an oral drug currently used to treat conditions such as high levels of cholesterol and lipids (fatty substances) in the blood....

“Because of the strong performance we can achieve with low-cost, solution-processable materials, these quantum-dot-based double-pane windows and even more complex luminescent solar concentrators offer a new way to bring down the cost of solar electricity,” said lead researcher Victor Klimov. “The approach complements existing photovoltaic technology by adding high-efficiency sunlight collectors to existing solar panels or integrating them as semitransparent windows into a building’s architecture.” The key to this advance is “solar-spectrum splitting,” which allows one to process separately higher- and lower-energy solar photons....

Researchers discover that a protein in tiny tardigrades binds and forms a protective cloud against extreme survival threats such as radiation damage. Diminutive animals known as tardigrades appear to us as plump, squeezable toys, earning them irresistible nicknames such as “water bears” and “moss piglets.” But don’t let their squishy appearance fool you. These microscopic invertebrates are highly resilient. In fact, they’re considered “extremophiles,” with near super-power abilities of defense in harsh conditions....

The catalyst, which is composed of nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide, is manufactured using a self-assembly process that relies on a surprising ingredient: gelatin, the material that gives Jell-O its jiggle. “Platinum is expensive, so it would be desirable to find other alternative materials to replace it,” said senior author Liwei Lin, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “We are actually using something similar to the Jell-O that you can eat as the foundation, and mixing it with some of the abundant earth elements to create an inexpensive new material for important catalytic reactions....

Today’s life is entirely dependent on photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae that capture and convert CO2. An enzyme known as Rubisco, which absorbs more than 400 billion tons of CO2 annually, is at the heart of these processes. Rubisco is produced in astounding quantities by living things today; its mass on Earth exceeds that of all humans combined. Rubisco has to continually adapt to shifting environmental circumstances in order to play such a major role in the global carbon cycle....

For the first time, research conducted by Associate Professor Duc Dong, Ph.D. has revealed that the detrimental effects of Alagille syndrome, a genetic disorder that has no cure, can be reversed using a single drug. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have the potential to revolutionize the treatment approach for this rare condition, and could also shed light on more widespread diseases. “Alagille syndrome is widely considered an incurable disease, but we believe we’re on the way to changing that,” says Dong, who is also the associate dean of admissions for Sanford Burnham Prebys’ graduate school....