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This new image from the European Southern Observatory shows two dramatic star formation regions (NGC 3603 and NGC 3576) in the southern Milky Way. This image, captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. The first is of these, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located 20,000 light-years away, in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy....

In a paper appearing this week in the journal Science, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and Rice University describe an experiment that turned 20 kilometers (12 miles) of undersea fiber-optic cable into the equivalent of 10,000 seismic stations along the ocean floor. During their four-day experiment in Monterey Bay, they recorded a 3.5 magnitude quake and seismic scattering from underwater fault zones....

“Primordial black holes remain hypothetical objects for the moment, but they are envisaged in some models of the primordial universe” underlines Raccanelli of CERN. “Initially proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1971, they have come back to the fore in recent years as possible candidates for explaining dark matter. It is believed that this accounts for approximately 80% of all matter present in the Universe, so to explain even just a small part of it would be a major achievement....

In response to the crisis, in late 2019, local governments launched lockdowns and behavior restrictions that reduced short-term economic and social activity. Despite the negative aspects of the pandemic, reduced human activity provided a unique opportunity for atmospheric scientists to study the impact of an unprecedented intervention on air quality. COVID-19 lockdowns have reduced carbon dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxides, all byproducts of fuel combustion used in transportation and manufacturing....

“We can show that the macrophages from people with mild COVID-19 exhibit an altered inflammatory and metabolic expression for three to five months post-infection,” says Craig Wheelock, docent at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet, and one of the study’s authors. “Even though the majority of these people did not have any persistent symptoms, their immune system was more sensitive than that of their healthy counterparts.” Long-term symptoms are relatively common after severe COVID-19 infection but may also affect some individuals with previous mild disease....

A team of materials scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) – scientists who normally spend their time researching things like high-performance materials for thermoelectrics or battery cathodes – have built a text-mining tool in record time to help the global scientific community synthesize the mountain of scientific literature on COVID-19 being generated every day. The tool, live at covidscholar.org, uses natural language processing techniques to not only quickly scan and search tens of thousands of research papers, but also help draw insights and connections that may otherwise not be apparent....

A new study reports that P. acnes phages, a family of viruses that live on human skin and naturally prey on the bacteria that cause pimples, could offer a promising new tool against acne. Watch out, acne. Doctors soon may have a new weapon against zits: a harmless virus living on our skin that naturally seeks out and kills the bacteria that cause pimples. The new findings by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Pittsburgh are published in the September 25 online edition of the American Society for Microbiology’s journal mBio....

Inspired by those theories, MIT researchers in collaboration with Microsoft have developed a “risk-aware” mathematical model that could improve the performance of cloud-computing networks across the globe. Notably, cloud infrastructure is extremely expensive and consumes a lot of the world’s energy. Their model takes into account failure probabilities of links between data centers worldwide — akin to predicting the volatility of stocks. Then, it runs an optimization engine to allocate traffic through optimal paths to minimize loss, while maximizing the overall usage of the network....

A virus that is widely circulating in a population and causing many infections has more opportunities to replicate and thus to mutate. Most mutations are inconsequential glitches that do not affect how the virus works in a significant way. Others may even be detrimental to the virus. But a small fraction of the errors will prove advantageous to the virus, for example making it more infectious. As a virus mutates through the replication process, the resulting mutated version of the virus is called a variant....

UQ volcanologist Dr. Teresa Ubide said it was previously understood that cooled lava from so-called ‘hot spot’ volcanoes was ‘pristine’ magma from the melting mantle, tens of kilometers under the Earth’s surface. “This isn’t quite the case – we’ve been misled, geologically deceived,” Dr. Ubide said. “For decades, we have considered hot spot volcanoes to be messengers from the earth’s mantle, offering us a glimpse into what’s happening deep under our feet....

These spheres were reportedly discovered at sites in Santorini, Crete, Cyprus, and other Greek Islands. There have been several theories about their potential uses, including sling stones, throwing balls, counting/record-keeping systems, or as counters/pawns. The same team from the University of Bristol previously conducted research that indicated there was size variation among certain clusters and collections of spheres. The researchers then intended to investigate any possible patterns within these sphere concentrations to help shed light on their potential use....

CSHL Professor Adrian Krainer and his lab, along with Omar Abdel-Wahab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, detailed how mutations of the genes IDH2 and SRSF2 are unexpected partners-in-crime for causing AML. The presence of the IDH2 mutation, in particular, exacerbates the defects induced by the SRSF2 mutation, preventing cells in the bone marrow from growing into the red and white blood cells required for an AML patient to fight the disease....

Growing Evidence Points to Unique Infectious Profile A comprehensive review into what we know about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called “long-COVID,” struggling with significant health issues months after infection. There is growing evidence that the virus infects both the upper and lower respiratory tracts – unlike “low pathogenic” human coronavirus sub-species, which typically settle in the upper respiratory tract and cause cold-like symptoms, or “high pathogenic” viruses such as those that cause SARS and ARDS, which typically settle in the lower respiratory tract....

A new study reveals the mechanism behind cytokine storm during coronavirus infection. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians have noted that certain patients are at especially high risk of developing severe illness or dying from coronavirus infection. Type 2 diabetes—a condition affecting more than 10 percent of the U.S. population—is one of the main risk factors for severe COVID-19 illness. New research from U-M uncovers why this might be and offers hope for a potential therapy....

Developing and testing a new vaccine typically takes at least 12 to 18 months. However, just over 10 months after the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was published, two pharmaceutical companies applied for FDA emergency use authorization of vaccines that appear to be highly effective against the virus. Both vaccines are made from messenger RNA, the molecule that cells naturally use to carry DNA’s instructions to cells’ protein-building machinery....

Orion, the famous hunter, is visible in evening skies throughout the world from about December through April. The constellation appears tranquil and still to the naked eye, but lying in its sword, at what appears to be a slightly fuzzy star, is a turbulent cauldron of stellar birth. The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year. The nebula (also cataloged as Messier 42) is located in the sword of Orion, hanging from his famous belt of three stars....

A 190-million-year-old dinosaur bonebed near the city of Lufeng, in Yunnan, China has revealed for the first time how dinosaur embryos grew and developed in their eggs. The great age of the embryos is unusual because almost all known dinosaur embryos are from the Cretaceous Period. The Cretaceous ended some 125 million years after the bones at the Lufeng site were buried and fossilized. Led by University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologist Robert Reisz, an international team of scientists from Canada, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Australia and Germany excavated and analyzed over 200 bones from individuals at different stages of embryonic development....

The adaptability to higher latitudes of these mosquitoes, known to have transmitted dengue and Zika in Florida, “may be a harbinger of things to come,” said Yale’s Jeffrey Powell, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the study appearing December 18 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. No known cases of locally transmitted dengue, Zika, or chikungunya have been reported in Washington, but the mosquito species “has already shown it can transmit disease in modern urban settings,” Powell said....

How successfully a person can fend off the flu depends not only on the virus’ notorious ability to change with the season, but also on the strain first encountered during childhood, according to new research published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens on December 19, 2019. The findings offer an explanation for why some patients fare much worse than others when infected with the same strain of the flu virus....

Increased awareness of the health consequences of eating too much sugar has fueled a dramatic uptick in the consumption of zero-calorie artificial sweeteners in recent decades. However, new research finds sugar replacements can also cause health changes that are linked with diabetes and obesity, suggesting that switching from regular to diet soda may be a case of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire.’ Artificial sweeteners are one of the most common food additives worldwide, frequently consumed in diet and zero-calorie sodas and other products....