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Findings suggest infection control measures against variants will need to continue in the post-vaccination era. The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, which has become the dominant variant in countries including India and the UK, has most likely spread through its ability to evade neutralizing antibodies and its increased infectivity, say an international team of researchers. The findings were reported on September 6, 2021, in Nature. As SARS-CoV-2 replicates, errors in its genetic makeup cause it to mutate....

Chemists at the University of California, Davis, have engineered blue-green algae to grow chemical precursors for fuels and plastics — the first step in replacing fossil fuels as raw materials for the chemical industry. “Most chemical feedstocks come from petroleum and natural gas, and we need other sources,” said Shota Atsumi, assistant professor of chemistry at UC Davis and lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

In the world of network cyber security, the weak link is often not the hardware or the software, but the user. Passwords are often easily guessed or possibly written down, leaving entire networks vulnerable to attack. Mobile devices containing sensitive information are often lost or stolen, leaving a password as the single layer of defense. DARPA’s Active Authentication program is addressing this problem by adding additional ways to validate a user’s identity beyond the password based on user behavior....

Impossible Sensing, a St. Louis-based deep tech start-up specializing in optical sensors and edge analytics, partners with the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to pioneer a new way to discover cleantech resources on the seafloor. Impossible Sensing’s breakthrough technology, VIPER, brings, for the first time, robotic laboratories to the bottom of the ocean to identify and quantify the location, size, and nature of mineral deposits and biological communities....

Researchers have been able to encode a draft of an entire book into DNA. The 5.27 MB file contains 53,246 words, 11 JPG images, as well as a JavaScript program, making this the largest piece of non-biological data ever stored in DNA. The scientists published their findings on August 16 in the journal Science. In theory, two bits of data could be incorporated per nucleotide, implying that each gram of DNA could store 455 exabytes of data (1 exabyte is 1 million terabytes), which outstrips inorganic storage devices like flash memory, hard disks, and even quantum-computing methods....

Despite being a vegetable full of nutrients, potatoes are often singled out as a food to limit. In fact, some health professionals still advise restricting or avoiding eating potatoes owing to worries that they may raise cardiometabolic risk, despite the Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ recommendation to boost fruit and vegetable consumption. However, a recent study published in the Journal of Nutritional Science suggests that this advice may be unwarranted. The impact of potatoes on the risk of developing cardiometabolic disease was studied by Boston University researchers in the context of overall dietary and lifestyle habits....

Constantly being told to wash your hands? Us, too. So we’re diving into the chemistry behind why soap is so effective against viruses like the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. [PALLI] and yeah, they break up all the non-covalent interactions, and the whole virus just falls apart, like a house of cards. [SAM] Hi everyone! So we are trying to get more videos out to you, but right now our entire team is practicing social distancing and working from home....

A leading cause of death worldwide, heart attacks trigger inflammatory responses that cause a scar to form in the heart. Over time, that damage eventually leads to incurable heart failure. Administered within hours of an attack, the potential drug would prevent scarring. It would also eliminate the need for patients to take possibly debilitating heart medication for the rest of their lives. “This research is really exciting because it opens the door to use circadian medicine therapies to heal heart attacks after they occur and to prevent the subsequent development of heart failure,” said Martino, a pioneer in circadian medicine....

At the center of many large galaxies hides a supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Interestingly, the mass of the black hole is roughly proportional to the mass of the central region (bulge) of the galaxy in the nearby Universe. At first glance, this may seem obvious, but it is actually very strange. The reason is that the sizes of galaxies and black holes differ by about ten orders of magnitude....

Now, scientists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and several other institutions have taken a step in that direction, developing a method that can reposition atoms with a highly focused electron beam and control their exact location and bonding orientation. The finding could ultimately lead to new ways of making quantum computing devices or sensors, and usher in a new age of “atomic engineering,” they say. The advance is described today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering Ju Li, graduate student Cong Su, Professor Toma Susi of the University of Vienna, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Vienna, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in China, Ecuador, and Denmark....

Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles. A further test of this work successfully linked the brains of two animals thousands of miles apart—one in Durham, North Carolina, and one in Natal, Brazil. The results of these projects suggest the future potential for linking multiple brains to form what the research team is calling an “organic computer,” which could allow sharing of motor and sensory information among groups of animals....

According to recent research, those who have elevated levels of the protein prostasin—which is primarily found in the epithelial cells that line the body’s surfaces and organs—may be more likely to develop diabetes. This research was recently published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Importantly, the results also suggest that those with high blood sugar and prostasin levels seem to have a much higher chance of dying from cancer....

Something called the fast Fourier transform is running on your cell phone right now. The FFT, as it is known, is a signal-processing algorithm that you use more than you realize. It is, according to the title of one research paper, “an algorithm the whole family can use.” Alexander Stoytchev – an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University who’s also affiliated with the university’s Virtual Reality Applications Center, its Human Computer Interaction graduate program, and the department of computer science – says the FFT algorithm and its inverse (known as the IFFT) are at the heart of signal processing....

New wearable system would be made from soft, stretchable assistive devices, which provide efficient actuation and joint support to increase stamina of soldiers. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University today announced that it has received a $2.6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a smart suit that helps improve physical endurance for soldiers in the field. The novel wearable system would potentially delay the onset of fatigue, enabling soldiers to walk longer distances, and also potentially improve the body’s resistance to injuries when carrying heavy loads....

“It’s long been suspected that this was possible in theory, but we’re the first to show it in practice,” said Yuping Huang, Gallagher Associate Professor of Physics at Stevens and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering. To create photon pairs, researchers trap light in carefully sculpted nanoscale microcavities; as light circulates in the cavity, its photons resonate and split into entangled pairs. But there’s a catch: at present, such systems are extremely inefficient, requiring a torrent of incoming laser light comprising hundreds of millions of photons before a single entangled photon pair will grudgingly drip out at the other end....

By studying the chemical composition of fossilized foraminifera, tiny single-celled animals that lived in shallow tropical waters, a team of researchers generated precise estimates of tropical sea surface temperatures and seawater chemistry during the Eocene Epoch, 56-34 million years ago. Using these data, researchers fine-tuned estimates from previous foram studies that captured polar conditions to show tropical oceans warmed substantially in the Eocene, but not as much as polar oceans....

As climate change worsens water quality and threatens ecosystems, the famous dams of beavers may help lessen the damage, according to a new study by Stanford University scientists and colleagues. The research, which will be published today (November 8) in the journal Nature Communications, reveals that beaver dams can have a far greater influence than climate-driven, seasonal extremes in precipitation when it comes to water quality in mountain watersheds. The wooden barriers raise water levels upstream, diverting water into surrounding soils and secondary waterways, collectively called a riparian zone....

The study discovered that acts of kindness improved symptoms more than the other two therapy methods for treating depression or anxiety. Most importantly, the acts of kindness technique was the only intervention tested that helped people feel more connected to others, said study co-author David Cregg, who led the work as part of his Ph.D. dissertation in psychology at The Ohio State University. “Social connection is one of the ingredients of life most strongly associated with well-being....

A team of scientists from Yale, the University of Leicester, Oxford, and Imperial College London announced the discovery on November 7 in a study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. The new species is named Spiricopia aurita, from the Latin words for “breath of life,” “abundance,” and “ears,” referring to the preservation of gills and the shape of the carapace. Yale paleontologist Derek Briggs, a co-author of the study, said the exceptionally well-preserved fossil, which is less than 10 mm long, revealed not only the animal’s hard shell but also its limbs, eyes, gut, and gills....

Just about 0.02 mm thick – thinner than a human hair – the prototype solar cells were developed by Azur Space Solar Power in Germany and tf2 in the Netherlands; the cell seen here is from tf2. The project was backed through ESA’s Technology Development Element, investigating novel technologies for space. Possessing up to 32% ‘end of life’ efficiency, the solar cells were produced using a technique called ‘epitaxial lift-off,’ meaning they were peeled off the Germanium substrate layer they were initially laid down on, so the costly material can be reused....