Warnings in Effect The National Hurricane Center posted warnings on July 25 for areas of the Texas coast as Hanna approaches for landfall. A Storm Surge Warning is in effect from Port Mansfield to Sargent, Texas. A Hurricane Warning is in effect from Port Mansfield to Mesquite Bay, Texas. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect from Barra el Mezquita, Mexico to Port Mansfield, Texas and for Mesquite Bay to High Island, Texas....
Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) The comet is now an evening object, rising increasingly higher above the northwestern horizon. It is easily seen with binoculars (those living in brightly-lit cities may have to use them to see it). Don’t miss your chance to see it. The comet will not return to Earth’s skies for about 6,800 years. No need to get up early to see Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) anymore. It is now an evening comet for those who live in the Northern Hemisphere, easily visible in darkening skies with binoculars and possibly visible to the unaided eye to observers with dark skies....
The two major types of neuron in the brain’s cerebral cortex are connected by intricate cortical circuits that process information. Excitatory neurons, which comprise 80 percent of all neurons in this region, increase activity in target cells. The other 20 percent of neurons are inhibitory, producing the opposite effect. Inhibitory neurons (interneurons) have long been recognized as critical to understanding distinct kinds of information processing. Specific subtypes of interneurons can regulate response gain (the extent of reaction to stimuli) in excitatory neurons or shape response selectivity in target cells....
The combination of a new sequencing technique and machine learning can speed up the diagnosis of diseases in newborns and reduce false-positive results, Yale researchers and their collaborators report. Blood is routinely drawn from a pinprick of an infant’s heel shortly after birth and analyzed for a host of preventable diseases, including more than 40 rare but potentially disabling and serious metabolic disorders. The blood tests are highly sensitive and present a drawback — in many cases they indicate a disorder when none is present....
A team working under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST has invented a multifunctional electronic platform that can mechanically transform its shape, flexibility, and stretchability. This platform, which was reported in Science Advances, allows users to seamlessly and precisely tune its stiffness and shape. “This new class of electronics will not only offer robust, convenient interfaces for use in both tabletop or handheld setups, but also allow seamless integration with the skin when applied onto our bodies,” said Professor Jeong....
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers’ curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly. Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what’s going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved. “That’s the biggest thing we had to overcome,” said Sean Ressler, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), who just published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, investigating the magnetic properties of the accretion disk surrounding Sagittarius A*....
Gaia survey provides location and motion of 1.3 million binary pairs within 3,000 light years of Earth. The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth — 1.3 million of them. The one-of-a-kind atlas, created by Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysics Ph.D. student from the University of California, Berkeley, should be a boon for those who study binary stars — which make up at least half of all sunlike stars — and white dwarfs, exoplanets and stellar evolution, in general....
A team from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory and its HRL Laboratories partners used advances in 3-D printing to create new helmet padding that consists of highly-tuned open-cell lattice structures. “Careful control of the lattice design imparts novel compression characteristics to the padding that reduce peak head acceleration during blunt impact events compared to existing state-of-the-art foam padding,” said Dr. Thomas Plaisted, the lab’s project lead....
PCSK9 inhibitors are the second most common type of medication used to manage cholesterol levels, following statins. These drugs are highly effective at reducing excess cholesterol in the blood, but unlike statins, which can be taken orally, PCSK9 inhibitors must be injected. This can be a barrier to their use for some people. A small-molecule drug that can be taken orally has been developed by researchers at University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine....
“It is well established that exercise is good for heart health, and our study now indicates that morning activity seems to be most beneficial,” said study author Ms. Gali Albalak of Leiden University Medical Centre, the Netherlands. “The findings were particularly pronounced in women, and applied to both early birds and night owls.” The study used data from the UK Biobank to investigate the relationship between physical activity and the risk of heart disease and stroke in 86,657 adults....
The international collaborative team of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in Japan, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar (IIT Ropar) in India, and Osaka University in Japan has discovered for the first time a topological change of viscous fingering (one of classical interfacial hydrodynamics), which is driven by “a partially miscibility,” where the two liquids do not mix completely with finite solubility. This topological change originates from a phase separation and the spontaneous motion driven by it....
Study finds that beneficial brain regions, including those involved in movement, underlie successful kicks and overthinking may be a factor in missed kicks. Are penalty shots a soccer player’s dream or nightmare? What should be an easy shot can become a mammoth task when the hopes and fears of an entire nation rest on a player’s shoulders, leading them to choke under pressure. Understanding the brain activity behind choking is the driving force behind a new study in open-access journal Frontiers in Computer Science....
Analysis shows coughing, deep breathing and shouting creates more than 100-fold greater amounts of aerosols than oxygen therapies, potentially increasing risk to frontline staff who wear only surgical masks. New research published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) challenges the guidance that special aerosol precautions are only needed when using oxygen therapies for COVID-19 patients, and raises concerns about safety of staff and patients in hospital wards, if they are not protected from infectious aerosols....
A new study from the University of Central Florida suggests that masks and a good ventilation system are more important than social distancing for reducing the airborne spread of COVID-19 in classrooms. The research, published recently in the journal Physics of Fluids, comes at a critical time when schools and universities are considering returning to more in-person classes in the fall. “The research is important as it provides guidance on how we are understanding safety in indoor environments,” says Michael Kinzel, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and study co-author....
“The newly described snail belongs to the so-called caenogastropods, a group of land snails known to be sensitive to drought, temperature extremes, and forest degradation”, says snail expert and co-founder of Taxon Expeditions, Dr. Menno Schilthuizen. All individuals were found very close to the research field station (Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre) at the foot of a steep hill-slope, next to a riverbank, while foraging at night on the green leaves of understorey plants....
This quote from Dr. Sydney Brenner, molecular geneticist and one of the founders of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), highlights the burgeoning scientific interest in cephalopods like cuttlefish, octopuses, and squid. These creatures are lauded for their complex nervous systems and intricate behavior – but scientists still know relatively little about them. Now, researchers in OIST’s Molecular Genetics Unit, in collaboration with a researcher from Australia, have identified a new species of bobtail squid inhabiting Okinawa’s waters – dubbed Euprymna Brenner in honor of the late Dr....
The study found that there was no significant difference in cognitive function later in life between babies born between 34-39 weeks and those born at 40 weeks. The researchers also acknowledge that cognitive outcomes are not predetermined at birth, but are heavily impacted by social conditions. It is estimated that around 15 million infants are born preterm, before 37 weeks of pregnancy, worldwide each year. The final weeks of pregnancy are significant for fetal brain development, and preterm and early-term birth are thought to have a negative impact on later brain function....
Two teams of researchers report that they have solved this chemical quandary and have been able to uphold this lunar origin theory. The two papers predict different sizes for Theia. One paper states that Theia was smaller than Mars, and another says that Theia was four to five times larger than Mars. Both papers were published in the journal Science (1, 2). These papers show that there is a wide variety of impact scenarios that were possible....
Farmers could soon be growing tomatoes bunched like grapes in a storage unit, on the roof of a skyscraper, or even in space. That’s if a clutch of new gene-edited crops prove as fruitful as the first batch. The primary goal of this new research is to engineer a wider variety of crops that can be grown in urban environments or other places not suitable for plant growth, said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor and HHMI Investigator Zach Lippman, who leads the lab that designed the ‘urban agriculture tomatoes....
Electrons have a negative charge, but they also behave like tiny magnets. This property of electrons, called spin, can be used to transport or store information in electronic circuits. Scientists are looking for ways to create such spin-based electronics, as this is probably more energy efficient than normal electronics. University of Groningen physicist Siddhartha Omar discovered a way to transport spins over long enough distances to make such devices feasible....
