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Here they evolved long, slender bodies and reduced limbs to negotiate the narrow nooks and crevices beneath the surface. Without light, their vision faded, but to take its place, an especially acute sense of smell evolved. It was during this period that these proto-snakes evolved one of their most iconic traits – a long, flicking, forked tongue. These reptiles eventually returned to the surface, but it wasn’t until the extinction of dinosaurs many millions of years later that they diversified into myriad types of modern snakes....

Our social lives have been profoundly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, people began working from home, keeping their distance, and donning medical masks to cover half of their faces. Small children, adolescents, teenagers, and adults were all impacted by this. However, there hasn’t been much research done into how changes brought on by the pandemic affect young children. Gaze following is fundamental for social development Scientists at the University of Zurich (UZH) have now studied whether infants born during the pandemic exhibit different social behavior than same-aged infants before the pandemic....

Astronomers expect that stars like the Sun will blow off much of their atmospheres into space near the ends of their lives. But new observations of a huge star cluster made using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have shown — against all expectations — that a majority of the stars studied simply did not get to this stage in their lives at all. The international team found that the amount of sodium in the stars was a very strong predictor of how they ended their lives....

“These findings open the door for the development of a cheaper, more environmentally friendly bioperovskite solar cell technology,” said Shashank Priya, associate vice president for research and professor of materials science at Penn State. “In the future, we may essentially replace some expensive chemicals inside solar cells with relatively cheaper natural materials.” Perovskite solar cells, named for their unique crystal structures that excel at absorbing visible light, are an area of intense research because they offer a more efficient and less expensive alternative to traditional silicon-based solar technology....

A University of Utah-led study explored the potential of using dust to shield sunlight. They analyzed different properties of dust particles, quantities of dust, and the orbits that would be best suited for shading Earth. The authors found that launching dust from Earth to a way station at the “Lagrange Point” between Earth and the sun (L1) would be most effective but would require astronomical cost and effort. An alternative is to use moondust....

Such tethers might be used to perform fuel-free orbital maneuvers, or deorbit satellites at the end of their working lifetime to prevent buildup of orbital debris. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain has proposed an improved tether design incorporating thin film solar cells to harvest added power for the tether plasma circuit, intended for end-of-life deorbiting. The idea was proposed through ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) Open Discovery ideas Channel, seeking novel ideas for new space research activities....

Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. In this case, the speedster star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae, or HD 2905 to astronomers. It is a massive, hot supergiant moving at around 2.5 million mph relative to its neighbors (1,100 kilometers per second)....

The discovery could provide a way of detecting the neurodegenerative disorder in its earliest stages, before symptoms start to manifest. And it points to the possibility of halting the disease’s progression. The defect appears to be exclusive to individuals with Parkinson’s disease. “We’ve identified a molecular marker that could allow doctors to diagnose Parkinson’s accurately, early, and in a clinically practical way,” said Xinnan Wang, MD, Ph.D., associate professor of neurosurgery....

In order to understand why so many younger people are being diagnosed with cancer, scientists conducted comprehensive analyses of existing data in the literature and online, including information on early life exposures that may have contributed to this trend. These findings were recently published in the journal Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. “From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time (e....

New research from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), and the Puget Sound Blood Center (PSBC) has revealed how stresses of flow in the small blood vessels of the heart and brain could cause a common protein to change shape and form dangerous blood clots. The scientists were surprised to find that the proteins could remain in the dangerous, clot-initiating shape for up to five hours before returning to their normal, healthy shape....

When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations. And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology....

A new study from MIT reveals that glycans — branched sugar molecules found in mucus — are responsible for most of this microbe-taming. There are hundreds of different glycans in mucus, and the MIT team discovered that these molecules can prevent bacteria from communicating with each other and forming infectious biofilms, effectively rendering them harmless. “What we have in mucus is a therapeutic gold mine,” says Katharina Ribbeck, the Mark Hyman, Jr....

Weather forecasting models were predicting with increasing confidence that a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event would take place on January 5, 2021, and indeed, experts confirmed that it is underway. The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere from around 10-50km above the earth’s surface. SSW events are some of the most extreme of atmospheric phenomena and can see polar stratospheric temperature increase by up to 50°C over the course of a few days....

Somewhere in the cosmos an ordinary galaxy spins, seemingly at slumber. Then all of a sudden, WHAM! A flash of light explodes from the galaxy’s center. A star orbiting too close to the event horizon of the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole is torn apart by the force of gravity, heating up its gas and sending out a beacon to the far reaches of the universe. In a universe with tens of billions of galaxies, how would we see it?...

Skoltech researchers in collaboration with scientists from the Institute for Problems of Chemical Physics of RAS and the Ural Federal University have shown that high-capacity high-power batteries can be made from organic materials without using lithium or other rare elements. In addition, they demonstrated the impressive stability of cathode materials and record high energy density in fast charge/discharge potassium-based batteries. The results of their studies were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, and Chemical Communications....

What happens when a dying star flies too close to a supermassive black hole? Several things happen, according to University of Maryland (UMD) astronomer Igor Andreoni: first, the star is violently ripped apart by the black hole’s gravitational tidal forces—similar to how the Moon pulls tides on Earth but with greater strength. Next, pieces of the star are captured into a swiftly spinning disk orbiting the black hole. Finally, the black hole consumes what remains of the doomed star in the disk....

Psychopaths generally do not feel fear and fail to consider the emotions of others, or reflect upon their behavior — traits that make them notoriously difficult to treat. However, a new study to be published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science suggests it may be possible to teach psychopaths to consider emotion and other pieces of information when they make decisions. The results could form the basis of treatment for this group of dangerous prisoners — 7 of 10 of whom go on to commit new crimes after being released....

Launched into a solar orbit on August 25, 2003, Spitzer trails behind Earth and has been gradually drifting farther away from our planet. Spitzer was the final of NASA’s four Great Observatories to reach space. Initially scheduled for a minimum 2.5-year primary mission, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has lasted far beyond its expected lifetime. #15: The first exoplanet weather map Spitzer detects infrared light, which is often emitted by warm objects such as heat radiation....

The spread of COVID-19 in Brazil overwhelmed the health systems in all the country’s regions, particularly in areas where they were already fragile, according to a collaborative effort involving the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by the “la Caixa” Foundation, the University of Sao Paulo, the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the D’Or Institute of Research and Education and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. The findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, reveal that a large percentage of COVID-19 patients that were hospitalized in Brazil required intensive care and respiratory support, and many did not survive....

Purdue University chemists have discovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water — something that has baffled scientists for decades. “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said Graham Cooks. He is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water....