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The black-and-white navigation camera aboard the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has provided dramatic video of its record-breaking 25th flight, which took place on April 8. Covering a distance of 2,310 feet (704 meters) at a speed of 12 mph (5.5 meters per second), it was the Red Planet rotorcraft’s longest and fastest flight to date. (Ingenuity is currently preparing for its 29th flight.) “For our record-breaking flight, Ingenuity’s downward-looking navigation camera provided us with a breathtaking sense of what it would feel like gliding 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour,” said Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California....

While this time was on Wednesday for most of the Earth, for Baker Island and the Pacific Ocean in the timezone just west of the International Date Line this will was before midnight on Tuesday morning. On the other side of the International Date Line, for the Pacific Ocean and islands that fall under Phoenix Island Time, West Samoa Time, and Line Islands Time, this was after midnight on Thursday morning....

When shooting a film with guns, there are many choices to make: each prop needs to be appropriate for the character, and appropriate for the scene. There is also the choice of whether you will use replica weapons, real weapons, or a mix. But most importantly, everyone on set needs to know how to work alongside guns. A gun with no ammunition – that is, a gun with neither a bullet nor blanks – is not dangerous....

There was a time when their resemblance was uncanny: Both were warm, wet, and shrouded in thick atmospheres. But 3 or 4 billion years ago, these two worlds took different paths. We may soon know why they went their separate ways. NASA’s InSight spacecraft will arrive at the Red Planet on Monday, November 26, and will allow scientists to compare Earth to its rusty sibling like never before. InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) won’t be looking for life on Mars....

Organoids are tiny 3D structures grown from stem cells that mimic organ function. Researchers have previously succeeded in developing organoid models for various organs, including the gut, lung, uterus, and even the snake venom gland. The organoids have proven useful for diagnostic purposes, predicting therapy responses in patients, and unlocking secrets about the development of tissues and rare cell types. Host factors Researchers can add levels of complexity to the organoid cultures for specific purposes....

Hi everyone. So I am in week three of self quarantining. I’m here at home hanging out with this cute little potato, try and get some work done and going a little crazy. So I read in the news that a vaccine targeting SARS-CoV-2 was already in phase one clinical trials, which sounded really good. So I did a bit of research. I found out that on average it takes about 10 years to develop a vaccine to the point where it’s ready for the general public....

The current vaccine, widely used since 2000, targets three antigens in the bacteria of the highly contagious respiratory disease which can be fatal to infants. All babies under six months old – in particular, newborns not protected by maternal immunization – are at risk of catching the vaccine-preventable disease because they are either too young to be vaccinated or have not yet completed the three-dose primary vaccine course. Australia’s whooping cough epidemic from 2008 to 2012 saw more than 140,000 cases – with a peak of almost 40,000 in 2011 – and revealed the rise of evolving strains able to evade vaccine-generated immunity....

The world’s next generation cosmic observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is due for launch on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Webb is a joint project between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency and is a remarkable feat of engineering and technology. The telescope is fitted with the largest astronomical mirror ever flown in space, sophisticated new scientific instruments, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court....

It was wartime and food was scarce. Leaders of England’s effort to wage war and help the public survive during World War II needed to know: Were the rations in lifeboats adequate for survival at sea? And, among several experiments important for public as well as military heath, how much vitamin C did a person need to avoid the deadly disease scurvy? In one experiment at the Sorby Research Institute in Sheffield, called the “shipwreck” experiment, volunteers were fed only what the navy carried in lifeboats....

IBM’s World Community Grid hosts Scripps Research project to virtually screen chemical compounds that might help fight COVID-19. Under a collaboration between IBM and Scripps Research, anyone in the world with a PC, laptop or Mac and an internet connection will be able to help scientists seek chemical compounds that might be effective against COVID-19. To do so, volunteers’ devices will perform small, virtual experiments to identify chemical compounds, including those in existing medicines, that might be used as treatments candidates for COVID-19....

Geologists look to ancient sand ripples for clues to the environmental conditions in which they formed. For instance, the spacing between ripples is proportional to the depth of the water and the size of the waves that molded the underlying ripples. But sand ripples aren’t always perfectly parallel, carbon copies of each other, and can display various kinks and swirls. Can these more subtle, seemingly random deviations or defects tell us something about the conditions in which a sandy seabed formed?...

Patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) often receive donor transplants that effectively “reboot” their own immune defenses, which then attack and potentially cure the hard-to-treat disease. However, these patients have a high rate of relapse, and the transplanted immune cells may also harm normal tissues, causing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Now, scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that they observed a strong and selective immune response in some patients who received, shortly after the transplant, several doses of a “personalized” tumor vaccine composed of their own inactivated leukemia cells combined with an immune stimulant, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF)....

Astronomers have discovered evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are “water worlds,” planets where water makes up a large fraction of the volume. Located in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, these worlds are unlike any planets found in our solar system. A detailed study of a planetary system known as Kepler-138 will be published today (December 15) in the journal Nature Astronomy....

Intentional suspected suicide attempts increased by 80.3% for isolated gabapentin exposures over a five-year period and 43% for baclofen over a four-year period. A major new analysis of the non-opioid medications, gabapentin, and baclofen, shows “worrying” increases in related suicide attempts and hospital admissions in US adults since 2013 — coinciding with a decrease in opioid prescriptions. With the risks of opioid medications widely publicized, there has been a dramatic decline in prescriptions in the United States since they peaked in 2010-2012....

Brown University researchers are part of a consortium tracking the impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer. The first study to evaluate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of vaccinated (but not boosted) patients with cancer who had breakthrough COVID-19 infections indicates they remained at high risk for hospitalization and death. The study, published in Annals of Oncology, showed that vaccinated patients who experienced breakthrough COVID-19 infections had a hospitalization rate of 65%, an ICU or mechanical ventilation rate of 19% and a 13% death rate....

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. These printed “droplet networks” could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues – such as those that use stem cells....

To see whether there was a connection between long-term air pollution exposure and COVID-19 severity, researchers evaluated data on all 151,105 patients aged 20 and over with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in 2020 in Ontario, Canada who were not in a long-term care facility. They created a simulation of historical exposure to three prevalent air pollutants before the pandemic: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ground-level ozone (O3). The authors controlled for characteristics such as date of diagnosis, gender and age, being part of an outbreak, essential worker status, neighborhood socioeconomic status, health care access (including past influenza vaccine history, previous outpatient visits), and other factors....

“I was excited because I had never seen such clear evidence of a rotating disk, spiral structure, and centralized mass structure in a distant galaxy in any previous literature,” says Takafumi Tsukui, a graduate student at SOKENDAI and the lead author of the research paper published in the journal Science. “The quality of the ALMA data was so good that I was able to see so much detail that I thought it was a nearby galaxy....

An anti-viral gene that impacts the risk of both Alzheimer’s disease and severe COVID-19 has been identified by a UCL-led research team. The researchers estimate that one genetic variant of the OAS1 gene increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by about 3-6% in the population as a whole, while related variants on the same gene increase the likelihood of severe COVID-19 outcomes. The findings, published in Brain, could open the door for new targets for drug development or tracking disease progression in either disease, and suggest that treatments developed could be used for both conditions....

The scientists published their findings in the journal PLoS ONE. This behavior of Toxotes jaculatrix was first described in the 18th century. The fish lives in mangrove forests and estuaries where there are many insects above water. This impressive strategy allows the archer fish to fetch food that would usually be out of its reach. The water jet can target and dislodge a single insect so that it falls into the water for the fish to consume....