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A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia about 74,000 years ago likely caused severe climate disruption in many areas of the globe, but early human populations were sheltered from the worst effects, according to a Rutgers-led study. The findings appear in the journal PNAS. The eruption of the Toba volcano was the largest volcanic eruption in the past two million years, but its impacts on climate and human evolution have been unclear....

How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it. Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered – and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years. The first concerns the fundamentals of our existence....

Population size seen as key driver of a strong urban economy. Cities transition to innovative economies when population reaches 1.2 millionThe largest cities will survive after COVID-19Remote work may slow down innovationCould be a way out for areas losing manufacturing jobs A new study from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University revealed a unique historical pattern that cities follow in order to become strong and innovative economies. Population size seems to be the key driver propelling urban economies to new heights, according to Hyejin Youn, assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and the corresponding author on the study....

The robot, which measures only a few micrometers across, (a human hair is 30-100 micrometers in diameter) is reminiscent of a paper bird made with origami – the Japanese art of paper folding. But, unlike a paper structure, the robot moves as if by magic without a visible force. It flaps its wings or bends its neck and retracts its head. These actions are all made possible by magnetism. Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have assembled the micromachine from materials that contain small nanomagnets....

Meanwhile, astronomers have observed the effects of black holes and recently even detected gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes. Black holes usually are formed in the explosive death of massive stars, a process that can take many hundreds of millions of years as a star coalesces from ambient gas, evolves, and finally dies. Some black holes are inferred to exist in the early universe, but there is probably not enough time in the early universe for the normal formation process to occur....

Members of the ILC team will hand over the finalized design of the ILC to an independent committee of researchers. The blueprint calls for a 31-kilometer-long track of superconducting cavities that will be able to accelerate particles to energies of up to 500 gigaelectronvolts before colliding them. These collisions will be able to provide a glimpse of heavier particles, which would then quickly decay inside one of two detectors. The approach is similar to the LHC located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland....

JunoCam images aren’t just for art and science – sometimes they are processed to bring a chuckle. This image, processed by citizen scientist Jason Major, is titled “Jovey McJupiterface.” By rotating the image 180 degrees and orienting it from south up, two white oval storms turn into eyeballs, and the “face” of Jupiter is revealed. The original image was acquired by JunoCam on NASA’s Juno Spacecraft on May 19, 2017 at 11:20 a....

Strong response detected regardless of duration between infection and vaccination; multi-ethnic groups exhibit similar response. Although clinical trial data are encouraging, real-world evidence with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine remains scarce. In particular, response to the vaccine among those previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 is still not completely understood. Researchers from Bar-Ilan University and Ziv Medical Center now report preliminary evidence that people previously infected with the virus responded very strongly to one dose of the Pfizer vaccine, regardless of when they were infected and whether or not they had detectable antibodies against COVID-19 prior to receiving the vaccine....

Now, researchers at MIT and in China have for the first time applied this approach to the creation of nanodevices to manipulate light, potentially opening up new possibilities for research and, ultimately, the creation of new light-based communications, detection, or computational devices. The findings are described today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas X Fang and five others. Using methods based on standard microchip manufacturing technology, Fang and his team used a focused ion beam to make a precise pattern of slits in a metal foil just a few tens of nanometers thick....

Sleeping just five hours a night over a workweek and having unlimited access to food caused participants in a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder to gain nearly two pounds of weight. The study, performed in collaboration with the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, suggests that sufficient sleep could help battle the obesity epidemic. “I don’t think extra sleep by itself is going to lead to weight loss,” said Kenneth Wright, director of CU-Boulder’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory, which led the study....

NASA’s satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars. NASA has a fleet of Earth-observing instruments, many of which contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system....

Researchers, working on behalf of the Centre for Ecological Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, stated the probability of elimination was ‘extremely high’ due to permanent changes to the snake’s habitat. The study, which was published in Oryx, The International Journal of Conservation, found that up to 90 percent of the Endangered snake’s mountaintop habitat will become uninhabitable by the end of the 2080s. The small, venomous snake — Latin name, Vipera graeca — is already among the most at-risk reptiles in Europe....

As I walked her up the flight of stairs to my clinic room, Victoria* barely engaged with my small talk. I glanced back at her. Above her mask, she looked strained, miserable, and I saw that her reticence was because she was ready to burst into tears. I thought one more question might have tipped her over the edge, so we continued in silence until we reached the sanctuary of the outpatient room....

“Lunar IceCube will help pave the way for human missions through significantly less expensive robotic missions and by addressing water dynamics on the Moon,” said Mark Lupisella, exploration research, and development manager. “This is not only important for science, but it could also be important for reducing the cost of human missions over the long term.” The BIRCHES instrument will not only help map the distribution and dynamics of water on the Moon’s surface, but also in the exosphere — a very thin atmosphere-like volume surrounding the Moon....

Enter, the millets. Close to 97% of millets grown worldwide are produced in developing countries. Millets are a diverse group of cereal crops. Importantly, they generally have high nutritional content. “However, millets have been largely overlooked by modern genetics research,” says Matthew Johnson, a researcher at the University of Georgia. In a new study, Johnson, along with colleagues in India, have generated some of the first genetic resources for three different varieties of millets....

Looming over the image is Mount Sharp, the mound Curiosity has been climbing since September 2014. In the center of the image is the rover’s next big, scientific target: an area scientists have studied from orbit and have determined contains clay minerals. The formation of clay minerals requires water. Scientists have already determined that the lower layers of Mount Sharp formed within lakes that once spanned Gale Crater’s floor. The area ahead could offer additional insight into the presence of water, how long it may have persisted, and whether the ancient environment may have been suitable for life....

In a new paper published in Physical Review Letters published on November 1, 2019, the researchers suggest that such large mergers could happen just outside supermassive black holes at the center of active galactic nuclei. Gas, stars, dust, and black holes become caught in a region surrounding supermassive black holes known as the accretion disk. The researchers suggest that as black holes circle around in the accretion disk, they eventually collide and merge to form a bigger black hole, which continues to devour smaller black holes, becoming increasingly large in what O’Shaughnessy calls “Pac-Man-like” behavior....

Glaciologists have been closely monitoring the many cracks and chasms that have formed in the 150 m thick Brunt Ice Shelf over the past years. In late-2019, a new crack was spotted in the portion of the ice shelf north of the McDonald Ice Rumples, heading towards another large crack near the Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue. This latest rift was closely monitored by satellite imagery, as it was seen quickly cutting across the ice shelf....

Over the last three years, satellite missions such as Copernicus Sentinel-1 have been used to track the berg as it has drifted in the Southern Ocean. For the first two years, it remained close to its parent ice sheet, impeded by sea ice. But now, as the map shows, the main chunk of the A-68 berg, known as A-68A, is heading rapidly for South Georgia. It is now about 350 km from the island....

In Brief Problem: Development and trials of new coronavirus treatments may take anywhere from four to seven years. But millions of patients need treatment here and now. Doctors are looking for effective medications (or combinations of medicines), blindfolded. Meanwhile, chemists can predict which existing medications are potentially the most effective. Solution: Russian researchers have created a special method of molecular modeling called ‘on-top docking.’ They used it to explore the whole surface of a protein that is vitally important for SARS-CoV-2 and compared it to a number of known medications....