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“We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” said Ryan Pfeifle of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, the first author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal describing these results. “This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes.” The system is known as SDSS J084905....

The research, which was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the building blocks of our immune system evolved much earlier than previously believed. This new information may help us better understand transplant rejection and, potentially help develop new immunotherapies. “For decades, researchers have wondered whether self-recognition in a marine creature called Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus was akin to the processes that control whether a piece of skin can be successfully grafted from one person to another,” said senior author Matthew Nictora, Ph....

Toxic and invisible oil spread well beyond the known satellite footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel school of Marine and Atmospheric Science. These new findings have important implications for environmental health during future oil spills. The UM Rosenstiel School-led research team combine oil-transport modeling techniques with remote sensing data and in-water sampling to provide a comprehensive look at the oil spill....

New analysis shows significant reduction in the number of deceased donor transplants performed in France and the United States. France and the United States, two countries hit hard by the novel coronavirus, have experienced a tremendous reduction in the number of organ donations and solid organ (kidney, liver, heart, and lung) transplant procedures since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study. By early April, transplant centers in both countries were conducting far fewer deceased donor transplants compared to just one month earlier, with the number of procedures dropping by 91 percent in France and 50 percent in the United States....

Patients with nasopharyngeal cancer are often treated with drugs that activate their immune system against the tumor. Scientists feared that vaccination against COVID-19 could reduce the success of cancer treatment or cause severe side effects—until now. A recent study now gives the all-clear in this regard. According to the study, the cancer drugs actually worked better after vaccination with the Chinese vaccine SinoVac than in unvaccinated patients. The results of the study, which was conducted by the Universities of Bonn and Shanxi in the People’s Republic of China, are published as a “Letter to the editor” in the journal Annals of Oncology, but are already available online....

The nitrate ingested over the course of a person’s adult lifetime through the consumption of tap water and bottled water could be a risk factor for prostate cancer, particularly in the case of aggressive tumors and in younger men. This is the conclusion of a study conducted in Spain and led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation. The findings were published on March 8 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives....

What’s the difference between asteroids, comets and meteors? These space rocks each have their own unique attributes. But differences aside, these fascinating objects are all worthy of study. Just ask NASA JPL scientist Ryan Park and he’ll agree. Well, they’re all planetary objects orbiting the Sun. An asteroid is a small, rocky object and when seen in a telescope, it appears as a point of light. Most asteroids are found in a ring between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter called the asteroid belt....

Saturn’s largest moon Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it is also the only planetary body other than Earth that currently has rivers, lakes, and seas. Unlike Earth, however, the liquid on Titan’s surface is composed of hydrocarbons including methane and ethane, not water. Its atmosphere is filled with thick haze that obscures visible light reflecting off the surface. We had waited for years to use Webb’s infrared vision to study Titan’s atmosphere, including its fascinating weather patterns and gaseous composition, and also see through the haze to study albedo features (bright and dark patches) on the surface....

Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have identified drugs that can keep developing tadpoles of the Xenopus laevis frog alive even in the presence of lethal bacteria and have discovered genetic and biological mechanisms that enhance disease tolerance, the ability of cells and tissues to resist damage in the presence of invading pathogens. Since many of the same processes exist in mammals as well, it is possible that pathogen tolerance-building techniques could one day be used to treat infections in humans and other animals....

Based on the new study published in Scientific Reports by researchers of the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, adult, intensively socialized wolves form individualized social bonds with their human handlers. One of the key features of the dog’s success is that they show attachment towards their owners. However, the origin of the ability to form these interspecific bonds is still unclear. To uncover this specific bond we need to investigate the attachment-related behaviours, but to understand its origins it is not enough to take a closer look on the dog’s behavior....

To distinguish between value and saliency in the brain Yale’s Ifat Levy, associate professor of comparative medicine and neuroscience, former Yale neuroscience graduate student Zhihao Zhang, and colleagues conducted a functional MRI experiment. Subjects were presented with cues that predicted various rewards and punishments (monetary gains and losses, electric shocks, and pleasant images) at varying intensities. The researchers were able to point to separate brain regions that encode value and saliency....

Yale School of Medicine researchers have discovered a protein that is the missing link in the complicated chain of events that lead to Alzheimer’s disease, they report in the September 4 issue of the journal Neuron. Researchers also found that blocking the protein with an existing drug can restore memory in mice with brain damage that mimics the disease. “What is very exciting is that of all the links in this molecular chain, this is the protein that may be most easily targeted by drugs,” said Stephen Strittmatter, the Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and senior author of the study....

Researchers studying what appears to be a beefed-up version of our solar system have discovered that it is encased in a halo of fine dust. The findings are based on infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA is a partner. The dusty star system, called HD 95086, is located 295 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina. It is thought to include two belts of dust, which lie within the newfound outer dust halo....

“It’s always been a mystery why fangs have evolved so many times in snakes, but rarely in other reptiles. Our study answers this, showing how easy it is for normal snake teeth to turn into hypodermic needles,” says lead author Dr. Alessandro Palci, from Flinders University. Of almost 4,000 species of snakes alive today, about 600 of them are considered ‘medically significant’ to humans, meaning that if you get bitten you are very likely to require a visit to the nearest hospital for treatment....

Exposure to air pollution increases violent crime rates, study finds. Breathing dirty air can make you sick. But according to new research, it can also make you more aggressive. That’s the conclusion from a set of studies recently authored by Colorado State University researchers in economics, atmospheric science, and statistics. Together, the team found strong links between short-term exposure to air pollution and aggressive behavior, in the form of aggravated assaults and other violent crimes across the continental United States....

In a paper published on May 26, 2021, by Nature, scientists reveal experimental evidence to support this long-standing prediction, showing that helium rain is possible over a range of pressure and temperature conditions that mirror those expected to occur inside these planets. “We discovered that helium rain is real, and can occur both in Jupiter and Saturn,” said Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and co-author on the publication....

100 pregnant women participated in a 4D ultrasound research run by Durham University’s Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, UK, to examine how the unborn children reacted to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers. Researchers observed the babies’ responses to carrot or kale flavors shortly after the mothers had consumed such flavors. Fetuses exposed to carrot flavors had more “laughter-face” reactions, but those exposed to kale had more “crying-face” responses....

The study, published in Scientific Reports, found that small marine animals with multiple propulsers—including larval crabs, polychaete worms, and some types of jellyfish—don’t push themselves forward when they move their appendages, but instead create negative pressure behind them that pulls them through the water. When the front appendage moves, it creates a pocket of low pressure behind it that may reduce the energy required by the next limb to move....

Attacks on cell phones aren’t new, and researchers have previously shown that ultrasonic waves can be used to deliver a single command through the air. However, new research from Washington University in St. Louis expands the scope of vulnerability that ultrasonic waves pose to cellphone security. These waves, the researchers found, can propagate through many solid surfaces to activate voice recognition systems and — with the addition of some cheap hardware — the person initiating the attack can also hear the phone’s response....

A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Ting Li and Alexander Ji discovered a stellar stream composed of the remnants of an ancient globular cluster that was torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity 2 billion years ago, when Earth’s most-complex lifeforms were single-celled organisms. This surprising finding, published in Nature, upends conventional wisdom about how these celestial objects form. Imagine a sphere made up of a million stars bound by gravity and orbiting a galactic core....