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So you want to build a Mars base. Where to start? Like any human settlement, it would be best located near accessible water. Not only will water be crucial for life-support supplies, but it will also be used for everything from agriculture to producing the rocket propellant astronauts will need to return to Earth. Schlepping all that water to Mars would be costly and risky. That’s why NASA has engaged scientists and engineers since 2015 to identify deposits of Martian water ice that could be within reach of astronauts on the planet’s surface....

This new application for the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system should allow scientists to more easily determine the function of individual genes, according to Feng Zhang, the W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering in MIT’s Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering, and a member of the Broad Institute and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. This approach also enables rapid functional screens of the entire genome, allowing scientists to identify genes involved in particular diseases....

HSE University researchers have become the first in the world to discover genetic predisposition to severe COVID-19. The results of the study were published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology. T-cell immunity is one of the key mechanisms used by the human body to fight virus infections. The staging ground for cell immunity development is the presentation of virus peptides on the surface of infected cells. This is followed by activation of T lymphocytes, which start to kill the infected cells....

To test their accuracy, models are programmed to simulate past climate to see if they agree with the geologic evidence. The model simulations can conflict with the evidence. How can we know which is correct? A review article published today (February 15) in the journal Nature addresses this conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum. Lead author Darrell Kaufman, a Regents’ professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability, and University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher Ellie Broadman, a co-author who worked on this study while earning her Ph....

We all know being surrounded by greenery is good for the mind and soul, but can it be good for the body, too? Planetary health researchers at Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine have found that may indeed be the case, at least for women. In a world first, they’ve shown a link between the amount of plant life in a person’s immediate environment and slower biological aging, based on changes to DNA methylation....

Asteroid explorer Hayabusa2, launched in 2014, set out for Ryugu, a carbon-rich C-type asteroid. In 2018, it arrived in the area of Ryugu, conducting a number of remote observations and collecting samples from two locations on the asteroid. Before the launch of Hayabusa2, a research team at Osaka University had been developing a non-destructive method of light element analysis utilizing muons to analyze Ryugu. Against such a backdrop, an initial analysis project involving international researchers began in 2021, conducted by Dr....

A study published today (January 20, 2020) in Nature Climate Change by researchers at Columbia University examines the greenhouse warming effects of ozone-depleting substances and finds that they caused about a third of all global warming from 1955 to 2005, and half of Arctic warming and sea ice loss during that period. They thus acted as a strong supplement to carbon dioxide, the most pervasive greenhouse gas; their effects have since started to fade, as they are no longer produced and slowly dissolve....

Stars ten times as massive as the Sun, or more, should not exist: as they grow, they tend to push away the gas they feed on, starving their own growth. Scientists have been struggling to figure out how some stars overcome this hurdle. Now, a group of researchers led by two astronomers at the University of Toronto suggests that baby stars may grow to great mass if they happen to be born within a corral of older stars –with these surrounding stars favorably arranged to confine and thus feed gas to the younger ones in their midst....

A new accelerator chip called “Hiddenite” that can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in the calculation of sparse “hidden neural networks” with lower computational burdens has now been developed by Tokyo Tech researchers. By employing the proposed on-chip model construction, which is the combination of weight generation and “supermask” expansion, the Hiddenite chip drastically reduces external memory access for enhanced computational efficiency. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are a complex piece of machine learning architecture for AI (artificial learning) that require numerous parameters to learn to predict outputs....

A clinical trial was conducted with 240 patients who were given 200,000 IU of vitamin D3 on admission to hospital. The supplementation did not reduce length of stay or affect the proportion requiring intensive care. Can a high dose of vitamin D administered on admission to the hospital improve the condition of patients with moderate or severe COVID-19? The answer is no, according to a Brazilian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)....

According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who recently shared their findings at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song. “Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science....

Along with the use of face masks, social distancing in public remains one of the most practiced front-line defenses against the spread of COVID-19. However, flows of pedestrians, including those practicing the 6-foot rule for distancing, are dynamic and characterized by nuances not always carefully considered in the context of everyday, public spaces. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University examine the dynamics of COVID-19 social distancing practices through the lens of particle-based flow simulations....

Evolution proceeds in this way, with new life forms appearing and some disappearing over millennia — or, in the case of microbial pathogens (viruses, bacteria and parasites) over days or weeks. Evolutionary change results from two opposing forces: Positive selection reproduces beneficial genetic variations that enable the virus to survive, while negative selection pressure hinders the virus’s survival and ability to reproduce. Evolution can be studied at the molecular level....

If you’re at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it sounds like winning the Super Bowl: cheers, laughter, and lots of hollering. But in the minutes before that, NASA’s InSight team will be monitoring the Mars lander’s radio signals using a variety of spacecraft — and even radio telescopes here on Earth — to suss out what’s happening 91 million miles (146 million km) away. Because these signals are captured by several spacecraft, they’re relayed to Earth in different ways and at different times....

Deploying an Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a corporate business can be a costly endeavour. The payback period may be slightly longer. But longer term, the benefits of implementing these technologies would by far exceed the initial investment, says Prof Tankiso Moloi. He is Professor of Accountancy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Profit centre owners ask themselves how sustainable they are, and how competitive they will be in three to five years....

Collectively, the dim dispersed glow from these wayward stars forms a background called intracluster light that is evidence they are lurking around. Although the first clues came in 1951, Hubble can easily detect this light even though it’s 1/10,000th the glow of the night sky as seen from the ground-based telescopes. Billions of years ago galaxies would have been smaller than seen today, and they probably shed stars pretty easily because of a weaker gravitational pull....

The shape of this galaxy admittedly appears to be somewhat bizarre, so confusion would be forgiven. This is due to a cosmic phenomenon called gravitational lensing. In this image, the gravitational influence of a massive galaxy cluster (called SDSS J1110+6459) is causing its surrounding spacetime to bend and warp, affecting the passage of any nearby light. This cluster to the lower left of the blue streak; a few more signs of lensing (streaks, blobs, curved lines, distorted shapes) can be seen dotted around this area....

Globular clusters are spherical collections of densely packed stars, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12 to 13 billion years. This is very old considering that the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Messier 22 is one of about 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way and at just 10,000 light-years away it is also one of the closest to Earth. It was discovered in 1665 by Abraham Ihle, making it one of the first globulars ever to be discovered....

This newly released Hubble image reveals the iridescent interior of one of the most active galaxies in our local neighborhood — NGC 1569, a small galaxy located about eleven million light-years away in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). This galaxy is currently a hotbed of vigorous star formation. NGC 1569 is a starburst galaxy, meaning that — as the name suggests — it is bursting at the seams with stars, and is currently producing them at a rate far higher than that observed in most other galaxies....

For the first time, scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have witnessed a massive object with the makeup of a comet being ripped apart and scattered in the atmosphere of a white dwarf, the burned-out remains of a compact star. The object has a chemical composition similar to Halley’s Comet, but it is 100,000 times more massive and has a much higher amount of water. It is also rich in the elements essential for life, including nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and sulfur....