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The fruits of his curiosity, now published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, offer a reliable way to quantify whether an individual has neutralizing antibodies that could prevent the novel coronavirus from infecting cells using a method that is more broadly applicable than those currently available. “If you think you’ve had COVID-19 and go to the doctor, they can test your blood and tell you whether or not you have antibodies to COVID-19, but that doesn’t tell you whether your antibodies are any good at functionally blocking the virus from binding to cells,” Smith said....

he COVID-19 pandemic underscores more than any time in recent history how important it is to protect public health. Yet, as countries race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, another everyday killer continues to threaten billions of people worldwide: air pollution. New data from the Air Quality Life Index, which converts particulate air pollution into its impact on life expectancy, reveals that particulate pollution was the greatest risk to human health before COVID-19....

Most galaxies host a supermassive black hole, millions or billions of times as heavy as the Sun, in their centers. Some of these black holes swallow material quite actively. But astronomers have believed that rather than falling directly into the black hole, matter instead builds up around the active black hole forming a donut structure. Takuma Izumi, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), led a team of astronomers that used ALMA to observe the supermassive black hole in the Circinus Galaxy located 14 million light-years away from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Circinus....

A new extensive review by Arizona State University emeritus professor Andrew Smith, published in the October issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, finds that the American pika is far more resilient in the face of warm temperatures than previously believed. While emphasizing that climate change is a serious threat to the survival of many species on Earth, Smith believes that the American pika currently is adapting remarkably well. Smith has studied the American pika for more than 50 years and presents evidence from a thorough literature review showing that American pika populations are healthy across the full range of the species, which extends from British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, to northern New Mexico in the U....

An comet circles around the sun in this movie from ESA/NASA’s SOHO. The comet is somewhat unusual as it’s not form any known family of comets. This is the 2,875th comet discovered by SOHO. Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO/Hill An unusual comet skimmed past the sun on February 18-21, 2015, as captured by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. This comet was interesting for two reasons....

A simple two-carbon compound may have been a crucial player in the evolution of metabolism before the advent of cells. This is according to a new study by Nick Lane and colleagues of University College London, UK that was published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology on October 4th. The discovery may provide key insight into the earliest stages of prebiotic biochemistry. In addition, the finding suggests how ATP (adenosine triphosphate) came to be the universal energy carrier of all cellular life today....

The FDA is warning that there is a possibility of healthcare-related infections caused by the antiseptics, which are supposed to prevent infections, used to disinfect skin before healthcare procedures. In the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Christina Y. Chang and Lesley-Anne Furlong of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research explain that pre-operative antiseptics had never been examined for infection risks. They were grandfathered into FDA approval because they had been on the market long enough before the FDA began assessing such products....

More: NASA’s Swift Reveals a Star’s Plunge into a Black Hole

The Standard Model of particle physics explains that most particles are made of combinations of just six types of basic entities called quarks. However, there are still many unsolved mysteries, one of which is Λ(1405), an exotic but fleeting Lambda resonance. It was previously believed to be a specific combination of three quarks – up, down, and strange – and gaining insight into its composition could assist in uncovering information about the extremely dense matter in neutron stars....

“This collaborative work is an exciting step forward in our collective efforts to gain a greater understanding of our own galaxy and the supermassive black hole at the center of it. It also demonstrates the importance of access to the largest telescopes using advanced cameras/techniques,” Packham said. Black holes are objects with gravitational fields so strong that even light cannot escape their grasp. The center of almost every galaxy appears to host a black hole, including the Milky Way, where we live....

When a group of astronomers discovered unusually massive galaxies in the early universe a few years ago, the sheer size of these galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars, posed a puzzle. The galaxies are so distant, we see them as they were a mere 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was about 10% its present age. How were they able to form so many stars, in such a comparatively short time?...

Their findings conclude that a faint white dwarf located just 90 light-years from Earth, as well as the remains of its orbiting planetary system, are over ten billion years old. Led by the University of Warwick, the study was published on November 5 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Most stars, including those like our Sun, will eventually turn into white dwarfs. A white dwarf is a star that has used up all of its fuel, lost its outer layers, and is now undergoing a process of contracting and cooling....

From a great distance, our galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together. But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions. In the galaxy’s far outer disk, the hydrogen atoms making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like warped appearance....

In August astronomers announced that the nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone. At first glance, Proxima Centauri seems nothing like our Sun. It’s a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the Sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots. Starspots (like sunspots) are dark blotches on a star’s surface where the temperature is a little cooler than the surrounding area....

The results, which also mark the highest-pressure diffraction data ever recorded, were published today in the journal Science Advances. Because super-Earths have no direct analogs in our solar system, scientists hope to learn more about their structures and compositions, which will lead to insights into the types of planetary architectures that may exist in our galaxy. But there are two key obstacles. First, scientists don’t have direct measurements of our own planetary core from which to extrapolate....

Even though the Universe is constantly changing, most processes are too slow to be observed within a human lifespan. But now an international team of astronomers have observed an exception to this rule. “SAO 244567 is one of the rare examples of a star that allows us to witness stellar evolution in real time”, explains Nicole Reindl from the University of Leicester, UK, lead author of the study. “Over only twenty years the star has doubled its temperature and it was possible to watch the star ionizing its previously ejected envelope, which is now known as the Stingray Nebula....

It’s been three years since the landmark detection of a neutron star merger from gravitational waves. And since that day, an international team of researchers led by University of Maryland astronomer Eleonora Troja has been continuously monitoring the subsequent radiation emissions to provide the most complete picture of such an event. Their analysis provides possible explanations for X-rays that continued to radiate from the collision long after models predicted they would stop....

These days, the term ‘nebula’ refers to an interstellar cloud of dust and gas. Nebulae are frequently formed from the remnants of dying stars: from planetary nebulae or the dispersed debris from supernova explosions. They are also often regions of intense star formation, as the rich reservoirs of dust and gas provide the necessary raw material from which new stars are born. Nebulae are usually mind-bogglingly big, spanning several light years in size....

Photosynthetic bacteria adapt to environment by using quantum mechanics to steer energy. Photosynthetic organisms harvest light from the sun to produce the energy they need to survive. A new paper published by University of Chicago researchers reveals their secret: exploiting quantum mechanics. “Before this study, the scientific community saw quantum signatures generated in biological systems and asked the question, were these results just a consequence of biology being built from molecules, or did they have a purpose?...

Common approaches to analyzing DNA from a community of microbes, called a microbiome, can yield erroneous results, in large part due to the incomplete databases used to identify microbial DNA sequences. A team led by Aiese Cigliano of Sequentia Biotech SL, and Clemente Fernandez Arias and Federica Bertocchini of the Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas Margarita Salas, report these findings in a research paper published on February 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE....