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Scientists like LaShanda Korley, Distinguished Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware, want to recreate these chemistries and build similar structures in synthetic materials. By doing so, they can develop new, improved materials for use in sensors, healthcare applications, and much more. Chemistries like these are ubiquitous in nature. The iron-protein interaction in human blood, for example, can be a determinant of disease....

The research will be published today, February 15, 2023, in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing cancer research and improving patient outcomes through education, collaboration, and advocacy.. Patrick Forde, MBBCh, the senior author of the study, is an associate professor of oncology and director of the Thoracic Oncology Clinical Research Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins....

Although it looks like the pattern of a shell on the beach, this intriguing spiral is in fact astronomical in nature. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured this remarkable image of a binary star system, where two stars — LL Pegasi and its companion — are locked in a stellar waltz, orbiting around their common center of gravity. The old star LL Pegasi is continuously losing gaseous material as it evolves into a planetary nebula, and the distinct spiral shape is the imprint made by the stars orbiting in this gas....

Discovered by Vladimir Lukhtanov, entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Alexander Dantchenko, entomologist and chemist at the Moscow State University, the startling discovery was named South-Russian blue (Polyommatus australorossicus). It was found flying over the northern slopes of the Caucasus mountains in southern Russia. The study is published in the open access journal Comparative Cytogenetics. “This publication is the long-awaited completion of a twenty-year history,” says Vladimir Lukhtanov....

A newly released image of Saturn’s moons Janus and Mimas from the Cassini Spacecraft. Saturn’s moons Janus and Mimas coast in their silent orbits beyond the rings in this view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The ansa, or outer edge of the rings, is visible at left. Janus hangs above center, while Mimas shines at right. Owing to its irregular shape, Janus’ terminator – that line which separates day from night – is jagged, while Mimas’ smooth terminator belies its round shape and larger size....

One of the major hurdles to combating the COVID-19 pandemic and fully reopening communities across the country is the availability of mass rapid testing. Knowing who is infected would provide valuable insights about the potential spread and threat of the virus for policymakers and citizens alike. Yet, people must often wait several days for their results, or even longer when there is a backlog in processing lab tests. And, the situation is worsened by the fact that most infected people have mild or no symptoms, yet still carry and spread the virus....

Invited commentary raises questions about pediatric transmission. New research suggests that children can shed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, even if they never develop symptoms or for long after symptoms have cleared. But many questions remain about the significance of the pediatric population as vectors for this sometimes deadly disease, according to an invited commentary by Children’s National Hospital doctors that accompanies this new study published online today (August 28, 2020) in JAMA Pediatrics....

Pluto has five known moons. In order of distance from Pluto they are: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. While Pluto’s largest moon Charon has grabbed most of the lunar spotlight, two of Pluto’s smaller and lesser-known satellites are starting to come into focus via new images from the New Horizons spacecraft. Nix and Hydra – the second and third moons to be discovered – are approximately the same size, but their similarity ends there....

Oxygenic photosynthesis, carried out by plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, produces energy and oxygen for life on Earth and is arguably the most important biological process. Cyanobacteria are among the earliest phototrophs that can perform oxygenic photosynthesis and make significant contributions to the Earth’s atmosphere and primary production. Light-dependent photosynthetic reactions are performed by a set of photosynthetic complexes and molecules accommodated in the specialized cell membranes, called thylakoid membranes. While some studies have reported the structures of photosynthetic complexes and how they perform photosynthesis, researchers still had little understanding about how native thylakoid membranes are built and further developed to become a functional entity in cyanobacterial cells....

While conventional silicon cells have an absolute theoretical maximum efficiency of about 29.1 percent conversion of solar energy, the new approach, developed over the last several years by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, could bust through that limit, potentially adding several percentage points to that maximum output. The results are described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by graduate student Markus Einzinger, professor of chemistry Moungi Bawendi, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Marc Baldo, and eight others at MIT and at Princeton University....

Skeletal muscle tissue, the organ responsible for locomotion, is formed by cells that have more than one nucleus, an almost unique feature in our body. Despite the plasticity of muscle cells, their contraction can be accompanied by muscle damage. William Roman, main author of the study and researcher at iMM and UPF Barcelona, explains: “Even in physiological conditions, regeneration is vital for muscle to endure the mechanical stress of contraction, which often leads to cellular damage....

Sulfur dioxide emissions are typically produced by power plants, other industrial facilities, trains, ships, and heavy equipment, and can be harmful to human health and the environment. The team developed porous, cagelike, stable copper-containing molecules known as metal-organic frameworks or MOFs that are designed to separate sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas from other gases. The team exposed the MOF material, dubbed MFM-170, to simulated exhaust gases and found that it efficiently separated out SO2 from the gas mixture at elevated temperatures even in the presence of water....

One of the exciting possibilities of metamaterials – engineered materials that exhibit properties not found in the natural world – is the potential to control light in ways never before possible. The novel optical properties of such materials could lead to a “perfect lens” that allows direct observation of an individual protein in a light microscope or, conversely, invisibility cloaks that completely hide objects from sight. Although metamaterials have revolutionized optics in the past decade, their performance so far has been inhibited by their inability to function over broad bandwidths of light....

A new map including rover paths of the Schrödinger basin, a geologically important area of the moon, could guide future exploration missions. The map was created by a team of interns at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, including Ellen Czaplinski, a U of A graduate student researcher at the Arkansas Center for Planetary Sciences and first author of a paper that was recently published in The Planetary Science Journal. The researchers identified significant geologic features of the Schrödinger basin, located near the lunar south pole....

Monitored in the radio since its discovery and more recently in the infrared and the X-ray, Sgr A* appears to be accreting material at a very low rate, only a few hundredths of an Earth mass per year. Its X-ray emission is persistent, probably resulting from the rapid motions of electrons in the hot accretion flow associated with the black hole. Once a day there are also flares of emission that are highly variable; they appear more often in the infrared than in X-rays....

The bacterium Salmonella Typhi causes typhoid fever in humans, but leaves other mammals unaffected. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University Schools of Medicine now offer one explanation — CMAH, an enzyme that humans lack. Without this enzyme, a toxin deployed by the bacteria is much better able to bind and enter human cells, making us sick. The study is published in the December 4 issue of Cell....

Study participants who regularly drank at harmful levels shown to consume six drinks per session, compared to two alcoholic beverages for those less regular binge drinkers. Harmful drinking among adults increases the longer they spend at home in lockdown, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. The research, based on a survey of nearly 2,000 over-18s in the US, is the first to highlight the relationship nationally between hazardous drinking and life stresses triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated “lockdowns....

The study is published in the journal Nature. Researchers derived their results by tracking ice sheet movement through Landsat satellite images taken from 1985 to 2014 across a roughly 3,088-square-mile (8000-square-kilometer) region in southwest Greenland. They found that, between 2007 and 2014, ice movement slowed in 84 percent of the study area, during a period of high surface melt, compared to the years between 1985 and 1994. The average slowdown was 12 percent, or 32....

According to a study published in Nature, an international team of researchers has identified a mechanism that allows cancer cells to spread throughout the body. They found that cancer cells move faster when they are surrounded by thicker fluids, a change that occurs when lymph drainage is disrupted by a primary tumor. These findings provide a potential new target for stopping metastasis, which is responsible for 90% of cancer deaths....

Does the presence of life on Earth provide any insight into the likelihood that abiogenesis—the process by which life first emerges from inorganic substances—occurs elsewhere? That is a question that has baffled scientists for a while, as well as everyone else inclined to think about it. Astrophysicist Brandon Carter makes the widely accepted claim that the selection effect of our own existence limits our ability to observe. Nothing can be concluded about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere based on the fact that we had to end up on a planet where abiogenesis took place....