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Vaccines that employ weakened but live pathogens to trigger immune responses have inherent safety issues but Yale researchers have developed a new trick to circumvent the problem — using bacteria’s own cellular mistakes to deliver a safe vaccine. The findings, published online on March 12 in Nature Communications, suggest new ways to create novel vaccines that effectively combat disease but can be tolerated by children, the elderly, and the immune-compromised who might be harmed by live vaccines....

However, all regions of the human brain have molecular signatures very similar to those of our primate relatives, yet some regions contain distinctly human patterns of gene activity that mark the brain’s evolution and may contribute to our cognitive abilities, a new Yale-led study has found. The massive analysis of human, chimpanzee, and monkey tissue published November 23 in the journal Science shows that the human brain is not only a larger version of the ancestral primate brain but also one filled with distinct and surprising differences....

Our brains have a remarkable ability to pick out one voice from among many. Now, a team of Columbia University neuro engineers has uncovered the steps that take place in the brain to make this feat possible. Today’s discovery helps to solve a long-standing scientific question as to how the auditory cortex, the brain’s listening center, can decode and amplify one voice over others — at lightning-fast speeds. This new-found knowledge also stands to spur the development of hearing-aid technologies and brain-computer interfaces that more closely resemble the brain....

Countries across the globe are making efforts to improve the safety of nuclear waste storage in order to prevent the release of radioactive nuclides into the environment. Plutonium, has been shown to be transported by groundwaters from contaminated sites for kilometers in the form of colloids, which are formed by interaction with clay, iron oxides, or natural organic matter. A team of scientists led by HZDR studies the chemistry of actinides under environmentally relevant conditions, by synthesizing such compounds, and then studying their electronic and structural behavior both with advanced synchrotron X-ray methods experimentally as well as theoretically....

‘The oceans store an immense amount of energy and the ocean currents have a strong effect on the Earth’s climate,’ says University of Groningen Associate Professor in Numerical Mathematics, Fred Wubs. Together with his colleague Henk Dijkstra from Utrecht University, he has studied ocean currents for some 20 years. Box model Ocean scientists have found that the Atlantic Ocean currents are sensitive to the amount of fresh water at the surface....

In 2021, NASA completed its busiest year of development yet in low-Earth orbit, made history on Mars, continued to make progress on its Artemis plans for the Moon, tested new technologies for a supersonic aircraft, finalized launch preparations for the next-generation space telescope, and much more – all while safely operating during a pandemic and welcoming new leadership under the Biden-Harris Administration. “At NASA, we turn science fiction into science fact, and we do it daily....

As NASA pushes the frontiers of science and human exploration, the agency also advances technology to modernize life on Earth, including drones, self-driving cars and other innovations. NASA’s diverse missions spur the creation and improvement of thousands of new products that make life better for people around the world. Dozens of the latest examples are featured in the newest edition of NASA’s Spinoff publication, including several from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and many illustrating how NASA is working to shape the coming revolution of autonomous vehicles on the roads and in the air....

When Jocelyn Bell first observed the emissions of a pulsar in 1967, the rhythmic pulses of radio waves so confounded astronomers that they considered whether the light could be signals sent by an alien civilization. The stars act like stellar lighthouses, shooting beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. For more than a half-century, the cause of those beams has baffled scientists. Now a team of researchers suspects that they’ve finally identified the mechanism responsible....

“The field of medicine, despite its prominent influence in society, has invested little to promote healthy lifestyle choices,” says the commentary co-authored by Saray Stancic, MD, FACLM, director of medical education for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “The consequence of this is reflected in our ever-rising chronic disease statistics, most notably obesity and diabetes rates.” The authors claim that medical schools only provide a meager level of nutrition education throughout the course of four years and that this situation is not improved during postgraduate study....

The original problem, set in 1954 at the University of Cambridge, looked for Solutions of the Diophantine Equation x^3+y^3+z^3=k, with k being all the numbers from one to 100. Beyond the easily found small solutions, the problem soon became intractable as the more interesting answers – if indeed they existed – could not possibly be calculated, so vast were the numbers required. But slowly, over many years, each value of k was eventually solved for (or proved unsolvable), thanks to sophisticated techniques and modern computers – except the last two, the most difficult of all; 33 and 42....

In order to combat infectious respiratory diseases and environmental pollution, Helen Zha, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and a member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer (CBIS), worked with Edmund Palermo, associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems (cMDIS) at Rensselaer. “This was a multifaceted materials engineering challenge with a great, diverse team of collaborators,” Palermo said....

Sodium, a commonly found element on Earth, may offer the potential for scientists to create opioids or other drugs with far reduced side effects. Scientists from USC, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford University have published a study in the journal Nature, in which they showed that by chemically connecting fentanyl to the sodium pockets within nerve cell receptors, they were able to prevent the harmful side effects of the drug while still effectively reducing pain....

During the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held November 29 to December 3, Angeles Salles, from Johns Hopkins University, will discuss how bats rely on acoustic information from the echoes of their own vocalizations to hunt airborne insects. The session, “Bats use predictive strategies to track moving auditory objects,” will take place Tuesday, November 30, at 1:50 p.m. Eastern U.S. In contrast to predators that primarily use vision, bats create discrete echo snapshots, to build a representation of their environment....

“With their whole genomes deciphered at high resolution we have a much better window into the evolutionary history of these endangered species,” says Professor Mahmood Shivji. It’s a startling image that describes a milestone in conservation science for sharks. Professor Shivji, Professor Michael Stanhope and their collaborators have glanced back in history by sequencing to chromosome level the genomes (entire genetic blueprint) of great hammerhead and shortfin mako sharks. Their DNA timeline shows that their populations have declined substantially over 250,000 years....

Unlike the Milky Way, this semi-spiral collection of a few tens of billions of stars lacks our galaxy’s rich abundance of heavy elements, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. With such a dearth of heavy elements, astronomers predict that the LMC should contain a comparatively paltry amount of complex carbon-based molecules. Previous observations of the LMC seem to support that view. New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), however, have uncovered the surprisingly clear chemical “fingerprints” of the complex organic molecules methanol, dimethyl ether, and methyl formate....

Observations of a black hole powering an energetic X-ray source in a galaxy some 22 million light-years away could change our thinking about how some black holes consume matter. The findings indicate that this particular black hole, thought to be the engine behind the X-ray source’s high-energy light output, is unexpectedly lightweight, and, despite the generous amount of dust and gas being fed to it by a massive stellar companion, it swallows this material in a surprisingly orderly fashion....

The event triggered landslides over a wider area than any other recorded quake anywhere in the world. The earthquake was centered 130 km south-southwest of Washington DC, near Mineral, Virginia. The August 23, 2011 quake was the strongest to hit the eastern USA since 1897. The findings were reported by scientists of the US Geological Survey at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. The area affected by the quake was about the same as a much larger 7....

For much of ancient Roman history, Roman mints produced coins featuring portraits of current emperors. In 1713, a group of such coins was allegedly discovered in Transylvania, some of them featuring a portrait labeled with the name “Sponsian,” although there are no other historical records that a Roman emperor named Sponsian ever existed. While the Transylvanian coins follow the general style of mid-third-century Roman coins, they diverge in certain stylistic characteristics and in how they were manufactured, leading many experts to dismiss them as forgeries created to sell to collectors....

A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution published December 16, 2019, investigates why some moths are more relaxed fliers in the face of bat attacks. The research reveals that less appetizing moths are more nonchalant when attacked by bats, whereas more palatable moths tend to employ evasive maneuvers. The work demonstrates the complex risks and rewards of anti-predator strategies where mistakes invariably mean death, and may let scientists predict the evasive behaviors of rare or even extinct species....

Astris is planned to fly by mid 2024 as an optional add-on to Ariane 6’s upper stage and will interface directly with the payload. This will enable Ariane 6 to offer a range of new space transportation services by allowing complex orbital transfers. Astris will simplify missions by taking over some of the required built-in propulsion capabilities of payloads to move themselves to their final position in orbit. This will reduce the burden on satellite manufacturers to factor this into their design....