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Investigators at Cedars-Sinai have created a unique and detailed molecular profile of endometriosis to help improve therapeutic options for the millions of women suffering from the disease. The study is published today (January 9, 2023) in the journal Nature Genetics. “Endometriosis has been an understudied disease in part because of limited cellular data that has hindered the development of effective treatments. In this study we applied a new technology called single-cell genomics, which allowed us to profile the many different cell types contributing to the disease,” said Kate Lawrenson, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cedars-Sinai, and co-senior and corresponding author of the study....

The study found that low to moderate levels of stress can actually enhance working memory, which is the cognitive function that allows people to temporarily hold and manipulate information in their mind to complete everyday tasks such as remembering a phone number or recalling directions. There is, however, a caveat, the researchers said. The findings are specific to low to moderate stress. Once your stress levels go above moderate levels and become constant, that stress becomes toxic....

Electrochemical reactions that are accelerated using catalysts lie at the heart of many processes for making and using fuels, chemicals, and materials — including storing electricity from renewable energy sources in chemical bonds, an important capability for decarbonizing transportation fuels. Now, research at MIT could open the door to ways of making certain catalysts more active, and thus enhancing the efficiency of such processes. A new production process yielded catalysts that increased the efficiency of the chemical reactions by fivefold, potentially enabling useful new processes in biochemistry, organic chemistry, environmental chemistry, and electrochemistry....

This is three times what was previously known. Only 400,000 people globally were estimated to have the disorder which is caused by a defect in the F8 or F9 gene which encodes instructions for making the factor proteins that help blood clot. For those with hemophilia, lack of treatment leads to chronic and disabling joint disease, while bleeding into organs and brain hemorrhages can lead to disability and death. Hemophilia, which is found almost only in men, is currently treated with infusions of factor concentrates to prevent or stop debilitating bleeds, but treatment is expensive and scarce in many countries....

New research studies early stages of coronavirus outbreak to re-evaluate rate of initial spread in U.S. Many epidemiologists believe that the initial COVID-19 infection rate was undercounted due to testing issues, asymptomatic and alternatively symptomatic individuals, and a failure to identify early cases. Now, a new study from Penn State estimates that the number of early COVID-19 cases in the U.S. may have been more than 80 times greater and doubled nearly twice as fast as originally believed....

But a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how the weirdness of quantum mechanics can turn even this basic tenet of classical physics on its head. The study, published on December 11, 2019, in the journal Nature, shows that heat energy can leap across a few hundred nanometers of a vacuum, thanks to a quantum mechanical phenomenon called the Casimir interaction. Though this interaction is only significant on very short length scales, it could have profound implications for the design of computer chips and other nanoscale electronic components where heat dissipation is key....

As an idealistic California Institute of Technology (Caltech) graduate student during the midst of the Great Depression, Malina agreed to lead a motley crew of amateur rocket enthusiasts and fellow Caltech students attempting to launch rockets in hopes of one day reaching space. That led to building rockets for the U.S. Army during World War II. Malina helped to win a world war, only to later see his country turn against him, and declare him an international fugitive....

This flyby was a gravity science orientation pass. During orbits that highlight gravity experiments, Juno is in an Earth-pointed orientation that allows both the X-band and Ka-Band transmitter to downlink data in real-time to one of the antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California. All of Juno’s science instruments and the spacecraft’s JunoCam were in operation during the flyby, collecting data that is now being returned to Earth....

NASA’s Juno mission has provided its first science results on the amount of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy, the Juno results estimate that at the equator, water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere — almost three times that of the Sun. These are also the first findings on the gas giant’s abundance of water since the agency’s 1995 Galileo mission suggested Jupiter might be extremely dry compared to the Sun (the comparison is based not on liquid water but on the presence of its components, oxygen, and hydrogen, present in the Sun)....

Quantum computers promise to make it easier to perform certain classes of calculations such as many-body problems, which are extremely difficult and time-consuming for conventional computers. Essentially, they involve measuring a quantum value which is never in a single state like a conventional transistor, but instead exists as a “superimposed state” — in the same way that Schrodinger’s famous cat cannot be said to be alive or dead until it is observed....

The way electrons move within and between molecules, transferring energy as they go, plays an important role in many chemical and biological processes, such as the conversion of sunlight to energy in photosynthesis and solar cells. But the fastest steps in this energy transfer have eluded detection. In a paper published this month in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, researchers have demonstrated that they can manipulate and study these ultrafast energy transfers with SLAC’s X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source....

Western Norway University of Applied Sciences Associate Professor Roger E. Henriksen and his team conducted the study. It investigated the relationship between loneliness and the probability of developing T2D as well as the role of insomnia and depression. A rising amount of evidence indicates a connection between psychological stress and someone’s likelihood of getting T2D. Loneliness causes a persistent and, in certain cases, long-term state of distress, which may trigger the body’s physiological stress response....

This process, however, can often take two hours or more, as traditional systems meticulously align each of potentially a million pixels in the combined scans. In a pair of upcoming conference papers, MIT researchers describe a machine-learning algorithm that can register brain scans and other 3-D images more than 1,000 times more quickly using novel learning techniques. The algorithm works by “learning” while registering thousands of pairs of images. In doing so, it acquires information about how to align images and estimates some optimal alignment parameters....

The development of stimuli-responsive polymers has brought about a wealth of material-related opportunities for next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots. For some time now, engineers have known how to use these materials to make small robots that can walk, swim and jump. So far, no one has been able to make them fly.Researchers of the Light Robots group at Tampere University are now researching how to make smart material fly....

A study published in Nature shows that a segment of DNA that causes their carriers to have an up to three times higher risk of developing severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals. The study was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. COVID-19 affects some people much more severely than others. Some reasons for this – such as old age – are already known, but other as yet unknown factors also play a role....

Using the telescope on the ChemCam instrument to make detailed observations of the steep terrain of Mount Sharp at a distance, a French-US team headed by William Rapin, CNRS researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (CNRS/Université Toulouse III/CNES)[1], has discovered that the Martian climate recorded there alternated between dry and wetter periods, before drying up completely about 3 billion years ago. Spacecraft in orbit around Mars had already provided clues about the mineral composition of the slopes of Mount Sharp....

It is often difficult to differentiate between inlet and outlet channels, but water always flows downhill. In this particular case, we can infer that water is flowing outward because we have the necessary terrain-height information. When studying these images in detail, scientists can gain a better understanding of the strength of the flooding water that carved the channels, and better understand the history of water activity in this region of Mars....

The presence of these compounds suggests that a pulse of UV-B played an essential role in the end-Permian mass extinction event. The study was published in Science Advances on January 6. The end-Permian mass extinction event (250 million years ago) is the most severe of the big five mass extinction events, with the loss of ~80% of marine and terrestrial species. This catastrophic loss of biodiversity resulted from a palaeoclimate emergency triggered by continental-scale volcanism that covers much of modern-day Siberia....

The CME erupted from the side of the Sun opposite Earth. While resarchers are still gathering data to determine the source of the eruption, it is currently believed that the CME came from former active region AR3234. This active region was on the Earth-facing side of the Sun from late February through early March, when it unleashed fifteen moderately intense M-class flares and one powerful X-class flare. Solar flares are classified based on their X-ray energy output, measured in watts per square meter (W/m²) at the Earth’s orbit....

“We’ve determined that most of the gas ever present in the Mars atmosphere has been lost to space,” said Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), University of Colorado in Boulder. The team made this determination from the latest results, which reveal that about 65 percent of the argon that was ever in the atmosphere has been lost to space. Jakosky is lead author of a paper published in Science....