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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was launched in August 2018. Its first results are published today in a series of four papers in Nature, with Imperial College London scientists among those interpreting some of the key data to reveal how the solar wind is accelerated away from the surface of the Sun. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released by the Sun that fills our Solar System. It is responsible for the North and Southern lights, but can also cause disruption during violent episodes like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, knocking out power grids and satellites....

“We just learned that in the north polar cap, methane ice is diluted in a thick, transparent slab of nitrogen ice resulting in strong absorption of infrared light,” said New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. In one of the visually dark equatorial patches, the methane ice has shallower infrared absorptions indicative of a very different texture. “The spectrum appears as if the ice is less diluted in nitrogen,” Grundy speculated “or that it has a different texture in that area....

Pluto’s day is 6.4 Earth days long. The images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera as the distance between New Horizons and Pluto decreased from 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) on July 7 to 400,000 miles (about 645,000 kilometers) on July 13. The more distant images contribute to the view at the 3 o’clock position, with the top of the heart-shaped, informally named Tombaugh Regio slipping out of view, giving way to the side of Pluto that was facing away from New Horizons during closest approach on July 14....

“The ACTIV-5/BET study aims to streamline the pathway to finding urgently needed COVID-19 treatments by repurposing either licensed or late-stage-development medicines and testing them in a way that identifies the most promising agents for larger clinical studies in the most expedient way possible,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. The Phase 2 adaptive, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial will compare different investigational therapies to a common control arm to determine which experimental treatments have relatively large effects....

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Karolinska Institute, has shown that many of the symptoms in fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) are caused by antibodies that increase the activity of pain-sensing nerves throughout the body. The results show that fibromyalgia is a disease of the immune system, rather than the currently held view that it originates in the brain....

Severe cases of COVID-19 often include GI symptomsChronic diseases associated with severe COVID-19 are also associated with altered gut microbiotaA growing body of evidence suggests poor gut health adversely affects prognosisIf studies do empirically demonstrate a connection between the gut microbiota and COVID-19 severity, then interventions like probiotics or fecal transplants may help patients People infected with COVID-19 experience a wide range of symptoms and severities, the most commonly reported including high fevers and respiratory problems....

The study, published in JAMA Cardiology and largely funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), highlights the significance of creating tailored heart failure prevention strategies for rural residents, particularly Black men. As one of the first studies to examine the relationship between living in rural America and first-time cases of heart failure, the results emphasize the need for increased attention to this issue....

The gold nanoparticle-based probe measures viral RNA in live influenza A cells, according to a study in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C. It is the first time in virology that experts have used imaging tools with gold nanoparticles to monitor mutations in influenza, with unparalleled sensitivity. “Our probe will provide important insight on the cellular features that lead a cell to produce abnormally high numbers of viral offspring and on possible conditions that favor stopping viral replication,” said senior author Laura Fabris, an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick....

Now, researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) led by ICREA Research Professor Samuel Sanchez have overcome both challenges and achieved a breakthrough in the field of biobots by using bioengineering tools. Sanchez and his colleagues at IBEC have applied 3D bioprinting and engineering design for the development of biobots at the cm. range that can swim and coast like fishes, with unprecedented velocities. The key: to use the spontaneous contraction of muscle cells-based materials with a very special compliant skeleton....

However, there is no evidence that this novel virus has been transmitted to humans, or that it could in the future, unless it mutates. UEA researchers collected fecal samples from more than 50 lesser horseshoe bats in Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wales and sent them for viral analysis at Public Health England. Genome sequencing found a novel coronavirus in one of the bat samples, which the team have named ‘RhGB01’. It is the first time that a sarbecovirus (SARS-related coronavirus) has been found in a lesser horseshoe bat and the first to be discovered in the UK....

People with type 1 diabetes should be screened regularly for obesity and chronic kidney disease, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Almost half of the adults in the United States have obesity, a chronic progressive disease characterized by an individual having an excess of body fat. Obesity is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, and people with obesity are at an increased risk for many serious diseases and health conditions such as diabetes, heart and liver disease....

“I think many spiders can actually hear, but everybody takes it for granted that spiders have a sticky web to catch prey, so they’re only good at detecting close vibrations,” says senior author Ron Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. “Vibration detection works for sensing shaking of the web or ground, but detecting those airborne disturbances at a distance is the province of hearing, which is what we do and what spiders do too, but they do it with specialized receptors, not eardrums....

Now Professor Graham Coop and postdoctoral researcher Michael “Doc” Edge at the University of California, Davis, Department of Evolution and Ecology warn that these “direct to consumer” services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they said, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer’s disease....

Understanding where SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic — came from and how it spreads is important for its control and treatment. Most experts agree that bats are a natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, but an intermediate host was needed for it to jump from bats to humans. A recent study that analyzed the new virus’ genome suggested snakes as this host, despite the fact that coronaviruses are only known to infect mammals and birds....

Researchers have used pet dogs, with real injuries, to test a treatment that involved transplanting cells from the lining of the nose and injecting them into the spine in an attempt to bridge the damage in their spinal column. The scientists published their findings in the journal Brain. This was the first randomized controlled trial using this technique, so neither the vet nor the owner knew if they were receiving the real treatment....

People who took statins to lower cholesterol were approximately 50% less likely to die if hospitalized for COVID-19, a study by physicians at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian has found. “Our study is one of the larger studies confirming this hypothesis and the data lay the groundwork for future randomized clinical trials that are needed to confirm the benefit of statins in COVID-19,” says Aakriti Gupta, MD, a cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center and one of the co-lead authors of the study....

DTCs generalize the notion of phase of matter to the non-equilibrium realm. They break the discrete time-translational symmetry of a periodic drive by responding at a subharmonic of that frequency. Among the declinations of time-crystalline phenomena that have been investigated recent years, discrete time-symmetry breaking in prethermal DTCs lasts for a finite but very long time (exponential in drive frequency). Discovered in a quantum-mechanical setting, analyzing prethermal DTCs has so far remained challenging to due to the notorious complexity of quantum many-body systems....

The study of 412,596 middle-aged UK Biobank participants examined the relative association of body mass index (BMI) and self-reported walking pace with the risk of contracting severe COVID-19 and COVID-19 mortality. The analysis found slow walkers of a normal weight to be almost 2.5 times more likely to develop severe COVID-19 and 3.75 times more likely to die from the virus than normal weight fast walkers.[1] Professor Yates, Lead Researcher for the study and a Professor of Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Health at the University of Leicester said: “We know already that obesity and frailty are key risk factors for COVID-19 outcomes....

Astronomers have discovered the very first confirmed planetary system that resembles the expected fate of our solar system, when the Sun reaches the end of its life in about five billion years. The researchers detected the system using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi; it consists of a Jupiter-like planet with a Jupiter-like orbit revolving around a white dwarf star located near the center of our Milky Way galaxy....