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Our Solar System formed out of a huge, primordial cloud of gas and dust. The vast majority of that cloud formed the Sun, while the leftover disc of rotating material around it eventually coalesced into the orbiting planets we know — and live on — today. Astronomers can observe similar processes happening around other stars in the cosmos. This splendid Picture of the Week shows a disc of rotating, leftover material surrounding the young star HD 163296....

A team led by Jean-François Lemaître, a CNRS researcher at the Biometry and Evolutionary Biology laboratory (CNRS / Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University / VetAgro Sup), compiled demographic data for 134 populations of 101 mammalian species — from bats to lions, orcas to gorillas — making their study the widest reaching and most precise to date. In 60% of the cases, female mammals live longer than males: 18.6% longer on average (versus only 7....

A single measurement result is not a proof — this has been shown again and again in science. We can only really rely on a research result when it has been measured several times, preferably by different research teams, in slightly different ways. In this way, errors can usually be detected sooner or later. However, a new study by Prof. Andrej Pustogow from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien together with other international research teams shows that this can sometimes take quite a long time....

The University of Surrey has built an artificial intelligence (AI) model that identifies chemical compounds that promote healthy aging — paving the way towards pharmaceutical innovations that extend a person’s lifespan. In a paper published by Nature Communication’s Scientific Reports, a team of chemists from Surrey built a machine learning model based on the information from the DrugAge database to predict whether a compound can extend the life of Caenorhabditis elegans — a translucent worm that shares a similar metabolism to humans....

The visual acuity of birds of prey has been studied extensively and shows the vision of some large eagles and vultures is twice as acute as that of humans. On the other hand, up to now researchers have never studied the speed of vision among birds of prey, i.e. how fast they sense visual impressions. “This is the first time. My colleague Simon Potier and I have examined the peregrine falcon, saker falcon and Harris’s hawk and measured how fast light can blink for these species to still register the blinks,” says Almut Kelber, professor at the Department of Biology, Lund University....

Publishing their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team discovered that female monkeys use alarm calls to recruit males to defend them from predators. The researchers conducted the study among 19 different groups of wild putty-nosed monkeys, a type of forest guenon, in Mbeli Bai, a study area within the forests in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Northern Republic of Congo. The results promote the idea that females’ general alarm requires males to assess the nature of the threat and that it serves to recruit males to ensure group defense....

An international team of scientists led by Newcastle University, UK, has produced the first global assessment of areas at greatest risk of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods and identified priority areas for mitigation. As the climate gets warmer, glaciers retreat and meltwater collects at the front of the glacier, forming a lake. These lakes can suddenly burst and create a fast-flowing Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) that can spread over a large distance from the original site – more than 120 km in some cases....

The detection was made at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This massive neutrino telescope, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, encompasses 1 billion tons of instrumented ice at depths of 1.5 to 2.5 kilometers (0.9 to 1.2 miles) below Antarctica’s surface near the South Pole. This unique telescope explores the farthest reaches of our universe using neutrinos. It reported the first observation of a high-energy astrophysical neutrino source in 2018....

Recently at the 2013 IFA international trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances in Berlin, major electronics manufacturers displayed new types of displays that are thin, and even curved, but expensive. IT experts in Saarbrücken have gone a step further. Their more cost-effective approach, called Flexpad, allows a simple, standard sheet of paper to be transformed into a moveable, flexible display. Already today, this could help patients better review the results of a computer tomography, for example....

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been much uncertainty about how long immunity lasts after an unvaccinated person is infected with SARS-CoV-2. Now a team of scientists led by faculty at Yale School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte have an answer: Strong protection following natural infection is short-lived. “Reinfection can reasonably happen in three months or less,” said Jeffrey Townsend, the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health and the study’s lead author....

The international team behind Galaxy Zoo, including astronomers from Oxford University, is inviting people to be involved in more discoveries as they launch a new incarnation of the site at http://galaxyzoo.org. From today, the site includes more than 250,000 new images of galaxies, most of which have never been seen by humans. By classifying them, volunteers will add to our understanding of the processes which shaped our universe. “We’d like to thank all those that have taken part in Galaxy Zoo in the past five years....

A scientific and medical team led by Newcastle University, UK, has demonstrated that the gene, HLA-DRB104:01, is found three times as often in people who are asymptomatic. This suggests that people with this gene have some level of protection from severe COVID. The study, funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, compared asymptomatic people to patients from the same community who developed severe COVID but had no underlying illnesses, and is published in the HLA journal....

Planetary scientists discovered unexpected and enormous ice avalanches on Saturn’s moon Iapetus, half of which is light-colored while the other is dark. Its mountains are 12 miles in height, which is twice the height of Mount Everest. Kelsi Singer, graduate student in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and the lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience states that this isn’t something that they were expecting to find on Iapetus....

“Trade-wind clouds influence the climate system around the globe, but the data demonstrate behavior differently than previously assumed. Consequently, an extreme rise in Earth’s temperatures is less likely than previously thought,” says Vogel, an atmospheric scientist. “Though this aspect is very important for more accurately projecting future climate scenarios, it definitely doesn’t mean we can back off on climate protection.” To date, many climate models have simulated a major reduction in trade-wind clouds, which would mean much of their cooling function would be lost and the atmosphere would consequently warm even more....

Experts met on Monday and Tuesday of this week at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland to discuss the future of such work, so-called gain-of-function experiments, which entails changing the virus’ properties to make it more transmissible and infectious in humans in order to investigate the possible natural evolution of the virus. While the meeting didn’t reconcile the differences of opinion over the risks, or address the moratorium, it appears that non-NIH funded investigations might resume in H5N1 work....

Researchers say the findings of their study, published in the journal Science, may lead to new therapies to halt the progression of the uniformly fatal disease that affects more than 30,000 Americans. One such treatment is already under development for testing in humans after the current study showed it stopped nerve cell damage in mice with ALS. The onset of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is marked by the gradual degradation and eventual death of neuronal axons, the slender projections on nerve cells that transmit signals from one cell to the next....

Instead, dust in Webb’s image is like the dawn. It is an essential ingredient for star formation. Though cloaked, these pillars are bursting with activity. Newly forming stars hide within these dark gray chambers, and others, like red rubies, have jumped into view. Over time, Webb’s mid-infrared image will allow researchers to deeply explore the gas and dust in this region, and more precisely model how stars form over millions of years....

After 3.2 billion km of travel through space, Hayabusa2’s reentry capsule parachuted down to Australia’s remote desert Woomera Prohibited Area on Saturday, December 5, 2020. Within the capsule is material gathered from the Ryugu near-Earth asteroid during two sampling operations: an initial touchdown sampling in February 2019 was followed by a second one in July that year that collected subsurface samples after blasting the face of the asteroid with an explosive impactor....

Sweden’s policy of allowing the controlled spread of COVID-19 viral infection among the population has so far failed to deliver the country’s previously stated goal of herd immunity. Commenting on recent antibody testing clinical and research findings, authors of a paper published by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, write that Sweden’s higher rates of viral infection, hospitalization and mortality compared with neighboring countries may have serious implications for Scandinavia and beyond....

The universe immediately following the big bang contained mostly hydrogen and some helium. All the other elements needed to make galaxies, planets, and life were formed in stellar interiors or related processes. It is no wonder, then, that the epoch of star formation in the early universe, and the processes at work, are key cosmological questions. Astronomers think that stars started forming in earnest only a few hundred million years after the big bang, but the great bursts of star formation needed to shape the current universe have so far been detected occurring a few billion years later, in galaxies lit up at infrared wavelengths as their dust absorbs light from massive young stars....