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Aquilolamna milarcae had a caudal fin with a well-developed superior lobe, typical of most pelagic sharks, such as whale sharks and tiger sharks. Thus, its anatomical features thus give it a chimeric appearance that combines both sharks and rays. With its large mouth and supposed very small teeth, it must have fed on plankton, according to the international research team led by Romain Vullo of the CNRS. Scientists have identified only one category of large plankton feeders in Cretaceous seasuntil now: a group of large bony fish (pachycormidae), which is now extinct....

Risk of disruptions The risk of disruption applies to all doughnut-shaped facilities known as “tokamaks,” which are widely used in the worldwide effort to capture the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars on Earth. Tokamaks employ enormous magnetic fields to confine the state of matter known as plasma, which powers fusion reactions, and heat it to temperatures several times that of the sun. This causes the atomic nuclei, or ions, in plasma to combine and unleash vast amounts of energy....

Dr. Luigi Sedda of Lancaster University analyzed the results from the team at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (WWL). Their research has now been published in the prestigious medical journal BMJ Respiratory Open. He said: “We show that Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) in the first days of hospitalization seems to save between 10% to 20% of patients. However, it is important to underline that this was a pilot study with a small sample size, although comforting evidence is starting to emerge elsewhere....

The warning comes from Steven L. Zeichner, MD, Ph.D., the head of UVA Health’s Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, and Andrea T. Cruz, MD, MPH, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine. They have authored a commentary in the journal Pediatrics accompanying a new article that reveals a small percentage of infected children become seriously ill. Those at greatest risk include babies and preschoolers. “Many infectious diseases affect children differently than adults and understanding those differences can yield important insights,” the commentary authors write....

A solar eclipse happens when the Moon moves between the Sun and Earth, casting a shadow on Earth, fully or partially blocking the Sun’s light in some areas. During an annular eclipse, the Moon is far enough away from Earth that the Moon appears smaller than the Sun in the sky. Since the Moon does not block the entire view of the Sun, it will look like a dark disk on top of a larger, bright disk....

“All sorts of scenarios have been developed under the assumption that carbon capture actually reduces substantial amounts of carbon. However, this research finds that it reduces only a small fraction of carbon emissions, and it usually increases air pollution,” said Jacobson, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Even if you have 100 percent capture from the capture equipment, it is still worse, from a social cost perspective, than replacing a coal or gas plant with a wind farm because carbon capture never reduces air pollution and always has a capture equipment cost....

The “creepy crawly” animal group known as the Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects and crustaceans, has often been the inspiration behind many science fiction monsters, largely due to their scary-looking appendages. Some of the oldest and most primitive arthropod species belong to a group called the Radiodonta (“radiating teeth”), which were armed with large, spiny raptorial (or grasping) appendages at the front of the head and a circular mouth adorned with tooth-like serrations....

The boundary between the liquid iron core and the rocky mantle is located some 1,800 miles (2,900 km) below Earth’s surface. At this transition, the temperature drops by more than a thousand degrees from the hotter core to the cooler mantle. The new study suggests heavier iron isotopes migrate toward lower temperatures — and into the mantle — while lighter iron isotopes circulate back down into the core. (Isotopes of the same element have different numbers of neutrons, giving them slightly different masses....

Metabolic syndrome affects nearly 30 percent of the U.S. population, and increases the risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. But lifestyle interventions such as adopting a healthy diet and increasing physical exercise are difficult to maintain and, even when combined with medication, are often insufficient to fully manage the disease. Now, in a collaborative effort, researchers from the Salk Institute and the UC San Diego School of Medicine found that a 10-hour time-restricted eating intervention, when combined with traditional medications, resulted in weight loss, reduced abdominal fat, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and more stable blood sugar and insulin levels for participants....

The analysis provides new and rare insights into the ecology of infectious disease, establishing that the time between epidemics, the size of the outbreaks, and even the season when the epidemics occurred, changed over the centuries. Smallpox was one of the most devastating viral diseases ever to strike humankind, killing about three out of every 10 people who were infected. Those who survived were frequently left disabled, blind, or disfigured....

Antibodies derived from llamas have been shown to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus in lab tests, UK researchers announced today. The team involves researchers from the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Oxford University, Diamond Light Source and Public Health England. They hope the antibodies – known as nanobodies due to their small size – could eventually be developed as a treatment for patients with severe COVID-19. The peer-reviewed findings are published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology....

Because there is a growing need for agricultural or renewable production of biofuels and other commodity chemicals to move away from fossil fuels, scientists have long sought to enhance the internal organization of bacteria and improve the efficiency of the cells for making nutrients, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. The research team, led by Professor Martin Warren at Kent’s School of Biosciences, working with professors Dek Woolfson and Paul Verkade at Bristol, found they could make nano-tubes that generated a scaffold inside bacteria....

The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive structures and devices. The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound....

A University of Colorado Boulder team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to efficiently split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel. The CU-Boulder team has devised a solar-thermal system in which sunlight could be concentrated by a vast array of mirrors onto a single point atop a central tower up to several hundred feet tall....

ExoMars ESA’s ruling Council, meeting in Paris on March 16-17, assessed the situation arising from the war in Ukraine regarding ExoMars, and unanimously: acknowledged the present impossibility of carrying out the ongoing cooperation with Roscosmos on the ExoMars rover mission with a launch in 2022, and mandated the ESA Director General to take appropriate steps to suspend the cooperation activities accordingly;authorized the ESA Director General to carry out a fast-track industrial study to better define the available options for a way forward to implement the ExoMars rover mission....

The ants need their fast jaws to catch their similarly fast prey, springtails, which themselves have a spring-loaded escape mechanism. The new findings may explain why the mechanism has evolved so many times independently around the world, eventually developing into the animal kingdom’s fastest-accelerating resettable part. Evolutionary change is marked by occasional breakthroughs in the design of organisms, often involving the reorganization of parts into new functional systems. But understanding how transitions in function evolve when they require changes in multiple interacting parts remains a major challenge....

The team have published two new studies evidencing both the scientific and economic advantages of giving a course of self-administered twice daily progesterone pessaries to women from when they first present with early pregnancy bleeding up until 16 weeks of pregnancy to prevent miscarriage. Progesterone is a hormone that is naturally secreted by the ovaries and placenta in early pregnancy and is vital to the attainment and maintenance of healthy pregnancies....

Supercomputer simulations have revealed that a type of oddly dim, exploding star is probably a class of duds—one that could nonetheless throw new light on the mysterious nature of dark energy. Most of the thousands of exploding stars classified as type Ia supernovae look similar, which is why astrophysicists use them as accurate cosmic distance indicators. They have shown that the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of an unknown force now called dark energy....

The scientists also documented the diverse cell shapes of genetically identical cells grown under similar conditions in their work. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature. “The way cells are organized tells us something about their behavior and identity,” said Susanne Rafelski, Ph.D., Deputy Director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, who led the study along with Senior Scientist Matheus Viana, Ph.D. “What’s been missing from the field, as we all try to understand how cells change in health and disease, is a rigorous way to deal with this kind of organization....

An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths. Researchers used Chandra to discover a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or ULX....