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The study ― “Trends and Rapidity of Dose Tapering Among Patients Prescribed Long-term Opioid Therapy, 2008-2017” ― published on November 15, 2019, in JAMA Network Open. The results also will be presented at the November 16-19 North American Primary Care Research Group meeting in Toronto. “Tapering plans should be based on the needs and histories of each patient and adjusted as needed to avoid adverse outcomes,” said study author Alicia Agnoli, assistant professor of family and community medicine....

Facing several-million-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe — named after Eugene Parker, the University of Chicago physicist who first predicted the solar wind’s existence — will directly sample solar particles and magnetic fields in an attempt to resolve some of the most important questions facing the field of solar science today. Among those questions: What is the origin of the solar wind and how is it accelerated to speeds of up to 1....

Fluorescein, an organic dye sensitive to light and acidity/basicity was adsorbed on the surface of the titania as a probe molecule. The group used a time-resolved surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy with a femtosecond pulsed laser. By using femtosecond pulsed laser SPR spectroscopy, the group was able to indirectly observe the proton transfer process from the dye to the titania surface and proved the formation of basic hydroxyl groups. Observation through the UV irradiation time showed that the surface became more basic with OH groups on the surface of the titania which accepts the protons from the fluorescein monoanion....

In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents. The persistence of such knots could be the reason why ball lightning, a ball of plasma, lives for a surprisingly long time in comparison to a lightning strike....

Physicists are continuously advancing the control they can exert over matter. A German-Spanish team working with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg has now become the first to image the motion of the two electrons in a helium atom and even to control this electronic partner dance. The scientists are succeeding in this task with the aid of different laser pulses which they timed very accurately with respect to each other....

Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy from the Sun. Flares and solar eruptions can pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. They can also affect things on Earth including radio communications, navigation signals, and electric power grids. This flare is classified as an X1 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. More information on how flares are classified can be found here....

Supernovae, the explosive deaths of massive stars, are among the most momentous events in the cosmos because they disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were produced inside their progenitor stars, including the elements essential for making planets and life. One class of supernovae (type Ia) provide yet another benefit: they are considered to be standard distance candles, and are used by astronomers to estimate the distances to remote galaxies whose supernovae appear faint because they are far away; thus they can calibrate the cosmic distance scale....

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have explored a better way of delivering medications that does not require injections but could be as easy as swallowing a pill. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People don’t like to have injections for the rest of their lives,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Christine Beeton, professor of integrative physiology at Baylor. “In the current work, we explored the possibility of using the probiotic bacteria Lactobacillus reuteri as a novel oral drug delivery platform to treat rheumatoid arthritis in an animal model....

The study, recently published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, analyzed the complex relationship between reward and effort in achieving goals, and identified two critical stages in the decision-making process. The researchers found that when people first decide what to do they are motivated by rewards. However, once they begin to put plans into action, their focus turns to the difficulty of the effort they need to put in. They suggest the key to achievable aims is to consider the effort needed when deciding what to do, and then remembering to focus on the rewards once the time comes to put the effort in....

Global eradication of COVID-19 probably feasible, and more so than for polio, say public health experts. Main challenges lie in securing high vaccine uptake and response to emergence of variants. The global eradication of COVID-19 is probably feasible, and more so than it is for polio, although considerably less so than it was for smallpox, suggests a comparative score of technical, sociopolitical, and economic factors for all three infections, published in the online journal BMJ Global Health....

A new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics outlines how the team upgraded two radio telescopes in Argentina that lay dormant for 15 years in order to study pulsars. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense magnetic fields that emit notably in radio wavelengths. The pulses they emit carry information about the structure of neutron stars. Since getting the radio telescopes operational once again, the team has observed phenomena including a millisecond pulsar (J0437-4515), a magnetar (XTE J1810-197), and a glitch in the period of the Vela pulsar (J0835-4510)....

What happened Scientists have shown that by changing the surrounding crystal’s structure to be less symmetric, they may prolong the lifetime of a molecular qubit. The qubit is protected from noise by the asymmetry, allowing it to preserve information five times longer than if it were housed in a symmetrical structure. The study team obtained a coherence time (the time the qubit maintains information) of 10 microseconds, or 10 millionths of a second, compared to a molecular qubit’s coherence time of 2 microseconds in a symmetrical crystal host....

Quantum computing is increasingly becoming the focus of scientists in fields such as physics and chemistry, and industrialists in the pharmaceutical, airplane, and automobile industries. Globally, research labs at companies like Google and IBM are spending extensive resources on improving quantum computers, and with good reason. Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to process significantly greater amounts of information much faster than classical computers. It is expected that when error-corrected and fault-tolerant quantum computation is achieved, scientific and technological advancement will occur at an unprecedented scale....

Xinyu Dai, professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, OU College of Arts and Sciences, with OU postdoctoral researcher Eduardo Guerras, made the discovery with data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a telescope in space that is controlled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. “We are very excited about this discovery. This is the first time anyone has discovered planets outside our galaxy,” said Dai....

The unprecedented development of COVID-19 vaccines less than a year after discovery of this virus was enabled by more than $17 billion of research on vaccine technologies funded by the NIH prior to the pandemic, according to new research from Bentley University’s Center for Integration of Science and Industry. The article, titled “NIH funding for vaccine readiness before the COVID-19 pandemic,” demonstrates the critical role this broad foundation of government-funded research plays in ensuring vaccine readiness....

The Earth’s atmosphere differs from the atmospheres of most other rocky planets and moons in our solar system in that it is rich in nitrogen gas, or N2; the Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen gas. Titan, the largest of Saturn’s more than 60 moons, is the other body in our solar system with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere that resembles ours. Compared with other key elements of life — such as oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon — molecular nitrogen is very stable....

The research is the strongest evidence for the likelihood that vaccines against the virus, SARS-CoV-2, will work for long periods. Previously, many studies have shown that the first wave of antibodies to coronavirus wane after the first few months, raising concerns that people may lose immunity quickly. This new work allays these concerns. The study is the result of a multi-center collaboration led by Associate Professor Menno van Zelm, from the Monash University Department of Immunology and Pathology, with the Alfred Research Alliance between Monash University, The Alfred hospital and the Burnet Institute, and published today in the prestigious journal, Science Immunology....

Australia has at least seven Leptospermum species that produce honey with exceptionally high levels of antibacterial activity. Australian honey is abuzz with high-value antibacterial activity, meaning it could play a pivotal role in the clinical prevention and management of infections. Australia has at least seven Leptospermum species that produce honey with exceptionally high levels of antibacterial activity, providing the scientific basis to facilitate the entry of Australian honey producers into premium medicinal markets....

Like a spring connecting two swings, light can act as photon glue that binds together the quantum mechanical properties of two vastly different materials. The effect could harness the most useful characteristics from each material for hybrid solar cells and high efficiency lighting, among other applications. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Queens College, City University of New York, used light to create links between organic and inorganic semiconductors in an optical cavity—a mirror-lined nanoscale filament about 1/1,000th the width of a hair....

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid. “For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient,” said Yi Cui, a Stanford associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a SLAC/Stanford joint institute....