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Citizen scientists have furnished unique perspectives of the recent close flyby of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. By processing raw images from JunoCam, the spacecraft’s public-engagement camera, members of the general public have created deep-space portraits of the Jovian moon that are not only spectacular, but also worthy of further scientific investigation. “Starting with our flyby of Earth back in 2013, Juno citizen scientists have been invaluable in processing the numerous images we get with Juno,” said Scott Bolton....

The limits of classical measurements of mechanical motion have been pushed beyond expectations in recent years, e.g. in the first direct observation- of gravitational waves, which were manifested as tiny displacements of mirrors in kilometer-scale optical interferometers. On the microscopic scale, atomic- and magnetic-resonance force microscopes can now reveal the atomic structure of materials and even sense the spins of single atoms. But the sensitivity that we can achieve using purely conventional means is limited....

The research, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, showed that an increased duration of screen time by an hour is linked to a 9% increase in the possibility of self-reporting suicidal tendencies two years later. Furthermore, the study indicated that each additional hour spent watching videos, playing video games, texting, and video chatting resulted in a higher risk of suicidal behavior. “Screen usage could lead to social isolation, cyberbullying, and sleep disruption, which could worsen mental health,” said senior author, Jason Nagata, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco....

Vaccine prevents pneumonia, elicits high levels of protective antibodies in mice. An experimental vaccine is effective at preventing pneumonia in mice infected with the COVID-19 virus, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The vaccine, which is made from a mild virus genetically modified to carry a key gene from the COVID-19 virus, is described in the journal Cell Host and Microbe. “Unlike many of the other vaccines under development, this vaccine is made from a virus that is capable of spreading in a limited fashion inside the human body, which means it is likely to generate a strong immune response,” said co-senior author Michael S....

New Horizons has obtained impressive new images of Pluto and its large moon Charon that highlight their compositional diversity. These are not actual color images of Pluto and Charon—they are shown here in exaggerated colors that make it easy to note the differences in surface material and features on each planetary body. The images were obtained using three of the color filters of the “Ralph” instrument on July 13 at 3:38 am EDT....

A new study from MIT and Harvard Medical School sheds light on the cellular mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon. In a study of mice, the researchers found that in some cases of infection, an immune molecule called IL-17a is released and suppresses a small region of the brain’s cortex that has previously been linked to social behavioral deficits in mice. “People have seen this phenomenon before [in people with autism], but it’s the kind of story that is hard to believe, which I think stems from the fact that we did not know the mechanism,” says Gloria Choi, the Samuel A....

Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) in Japan show that melatonin and its metabolites promote the formation of long-term memories in mice and protect against cognitive decline. Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) showed that melatonin’s metabolite AMK can enhance the formation of long-term memories in mice. Memory of objects were tested after treatment with melatonin or two of its metabolites. Older mice that normally performed poorly on the memory task showed improvements as dosage increased....

At approximately 9:15 a.m. EDT on Tuesday morning, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission were secured inside the VAB after completing the four-mile journey from Launch Pad 39B. A short time later, at approximately 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, a fire alarm was triggered in the VAB. The notification came when an arc flash event occurred at a connector on an electrical panel in High Bay 3....

During a five-hour surgery last October at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Kathy Sanford became the first Alzheimer’s patient in the United States to have a pacemaker implanted in her brain. She is the first of up to 10 patients who will be enrolled in an FDA-approved study at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center to determine if using a brain pacemaker can improve cognitive and behavioral functioning in patients with Alzheimer’s disease....

To understand the properties of materials, it is often vital to observe their structure at an atomic resolution. Visualizing atoms using a transmission electron microscope (TEM) is possible; however, so far, no one has succeeded in producing proper images of both heavy atoms and the lightest one of all (hydrogen) together. This is exactly what University of Groningen Professor of Nanostructured Materials Bart Kooi and his colleagues have done. They used a new TEM with capabilities that made it possible to produce images of both titanium and hydrogen atoms at the titanium/titanium hydride interface....

In a breakthrough effort for computational biology, the world’s first complete computer model of an organism has been completed, Stanford researchers reported in the journal Cell. A team led by Stanford bioengineering Professor Markus Covert used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium – the world’s smallest free-living bacterium. By encompassing the entirety of an organism in silicon, the paper fulfills a longstanding goal for the field....

People who received a flu shot last flu season were significantly less likely to test positive for a COVID-19 infection when the pandemic hit, according to a new study. And those who did test positive for COVID-19 had fewer complications if they received their flu shot. These new findings mean senior author Marion Hofmann Bowman, M.D., is continuing to recommend the flu shot to her patients even as the flu season may be winding down....

If Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself “ring” in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverberates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole’s mass and spin. Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have studied the ringing of an infant black hole, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black hole’s mass and spin — more evidence that Einstein was right all along....

These small but intense eruptions are born when magnetic field lines in the Sun’s atmosphere tangle up and stretch until they break like a rubber band. The energy they release accelerates particles to near lightspeed and according to some scientists, heats the solar atmosphere to its searing million-degree Fahrenheit temperature. All of this happens in colors of light so extreme that the human eye can’t see them. Nanoflares aren’t visible — at least not to the naked eye....

Earthquakes are unusual in this part of France, but on November 11, 2019, at noon (local time) part of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region was rocked by a quake leading to people having to be evacuated and buildings damaged. Scientists are turning to satellite-based radar observations to help understand the nature of the seismic fault and map its location. By combining imagery acquired before and after a quake, changes on the ground that occurred between the two acquisition dates lead to rainbow-colored interference patterns in the combined image, known as an ‘interferogram’, which allows scientists to quantify ground movement....

In this video, ESA Research Fellows Rachana Bhatawdekar and Sandor Kruk share their experience and explain how to observe and image the comet in the sky. Next, ESA Research Fellow Charlotte Götz tells us more about comets and their tails, and how ESA’s future Comet Interceptor mission, to be launched in 2028, is going to wait for such a ‘great’ comet that has not been discovered yet. The spacecraft will sit in a parking orbit around the Lagrange point L2, 1....

This process of solidification, or crystallization, of the material inside white dwarfs was predicted 50 years ago but it wasn’t until the arrival of Gaia that astronomers were able to observe enough of these objects with such a precision to see the pattern revealing this process. “Previously, we had distances for only a few hundreds of white dwarfs and many of them were in clusters, where they all have the same age,” says Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick, UK, lead author of the paper describing the results, published today in Nature....

In 2013, ESA launched its Gaia spacecraft to measure the location of a billion stars in our Milky Way and tens of millions of galaxies. Each position on the sky enters Gaia’s view once every month, for a total of about seventy times during the mission. This allows the spacecraft to spot transient events, such as supermassive black holes ripping stars apart or stars exploding as a supernova. Gaia will notice a change in brightness when it returns to the same patch of sky a month later....

Dedicated circuits evaluate uncertainty in the brain, preventing it from using unreliable information to make decisions. As we interact with the world, we are constantly presented with information that is unreliable or incomplete — from jumbled voices in a crowded room to solicitous strangers with unknown motivations. Fortunately, our brains are well equipped to evaluate the quality of the evidence we use to make decisions, usually allowing us to act deliberately, without jumping to conclusions....

What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers from McGill University discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles’ gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect. “The American crocodile tolerates huge variations in temperature and rainfall. But about 20,000 years ago – when much of the world’s water was frozen, forming the vast ice sheets of the last glacial maximum – sea levels dropped by more than 100 meters....