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Previous research had suggested that it took hundreds of millions of years for the magma ocean to solidify, but new research from Florida State University published in Nature Communications has reduced these uncertainties to less than just a couple of million years. “This magma ocean has been an important part of Earth’s history, and this study helps us answer some fundamental questions about the planet,” said Mainak Mookherjee, an associate professor of geology in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science....

Using the 4.1-meter SOAR Telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered the first example of a binary system where a star in the process of becoming a white dwarf is orbiting a neutron star that has just finished turning into a rapidly spinning pulsar. The pair, originally detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is a “missing link” in the evolution of such binary systems. A bright, mysterious source of gamma rays has been found to be a rapidly spinning neutron star — dubbed a millisecond pulsar — that is orbiting a star in the process of evolving into an extremely-low-mass white dwarf....

Solar-thermal technology is a promising environmentally friendly energy harvesting method with a potential role to play in solving the fossil fuel energy crisis. The technology transforms sunlight into thermal energy, but it’s challenging to suppress energy dissipation while maintaining high absorption. Existing solar energy harvesters that rely on micro- or nanoengineering don’t have sufficient scalability and flexibility, and will require a novel strategy for high-performance solar light capture while simultaneously simplifying fabrication and reducing costs....

The researchers – including Peter Hatemi, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University – looked at the effects of both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism on whether people were more or less likely to wear a mask in public or get vaccinated against COVID-19. Hatemi explained that grandiose narcissism is characterized by the pursuit of social status and a desire for others to see them as important and worthy of admiration....

New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity. “Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there....

Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup, the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face. Data from NASA’s Dawn mission show that a form of weathering that occurs on the moon and other airless bodies we’ve visited in the inner solar system does not alter Vesta’s outermost layer in the same way. Carbon-rich asteroids have also been splattering dark material on Vesta’s surface over a long span of the body’s history....

NASA has authorized a mission extension for its Juno spacecraft exploring Jupiter. The agency’s most distant planetary orbiter will now continue its investigation of the solar system’s largest planet through September 2025, or until the spacecraft’s end of life. This expansion tasks Juno with becoming an explorer of the full Jovian system – Jupiter and its rings and moons – with multiple rendezvous planned for three of Jupiter’s most intriguing Galilean moons: Ganymede, Europa, and Io....

In a new paper published in Nature today, scientists from NASA’s Juno mission describe the ways in which lightning on Jupiter is actually analogous to Earth’s lightning. Although, in some ways, the two types of lightning are polar opposites. “No matter what planet you’re on, lightning bolts act like radio transmitters — sending out radio waves when they flash across a sky,” said Shannon Brown of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a Juno scientist and lead author of the paper....

The so-called natural killer (NK) cells are cells of the innate immune system that recognize and eliminate infected cells or cancer cells. During a virus infection, NK cells also keep the body’s own immune cells such as the T cells at bay in order to avoid excessive killing of intact body cells. In addition, NK cells release messenger molecules that support the immune defense. NK cells are therefore particularly important for immunity – if they are defective, recurrent infections with several viruses and cancer can develop....

Hydrogen sulfide gas has the distinct odor of rotting eggs. It frequently emanates from sewers, stockyards, and landfills, but it is especially problematic for refineries, petrochemical plants, and other industries. Thousands of tons of the noxious gas are produced annually as a byproduct of processes that remove sulfur from petroleum, natural gas, coal, and other products in these places. Naomi Halas, a Rice engineer, physicist, and chemist, and colleagues describe a process that uses gold nanoparticles to convert hydrogen sulfide into sulfur and high-demand hydrogen gas in a single step in a study that was recently published in the journal ACS Energy Letters....

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, in partnership with the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) University Hospital Dusseldorf, have made a significant discovery in the fight against MYC amplified Medulloblastoma. They have found a drug combination that holds promise for providing a more favorable outcome for children diagnosed with this often deadly form of brain cancer. “An oncogene called MYC is amplified in these tumors making them very susceptible to recurrence....

Theoretical research to evaluate the microbial habitability of Europa using data collected from analogous environments on Earth has been conducted by a group of Brazilian researchers linked to the University of São Paulo (USP) that jointly signed an article published in Scientific Reports. “We studied the possible effects of a biologically usable energy source on Europa based on information obtained from an analogous environment on Earth,” said Douglas Galante, a researcher at Brazil’s National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) and the Astrobiology Research Center (NAP-Astrobio) of the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics & Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP)....

Although in-school transmission of COVID-19 among K-12 students is low when safeguards are in place, the risk of acquiring COVID-19 during school bus transportation is unclear. A study published in the Journal of School Health reports on the bus transport experience of an independent school in Virginia. For the study, the school monitored 1,154 students with asymptomatic PCR testing every 2 weeks initially and later every week from August 28, 2020-March 19, 2021, during highest community transmission....

COVID-19 patients who receive oxygen therapy or experience fever show reduced gray matter volume in the frontal-temporal network of the brain, according to a new study led by researchers at Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The study found lower gray matter volume in this brain region was associated with a higher level of disability among COVID-19 patients, even six months after hospital discharge. Gray matter is vital for processing information in the brain and gray matter abnormality may affect how well neurons function and communicate....

That gene, KRAS, is mutated in approximately 20 percent of all human cancers and has a major presence in pancreatic, colorectal and lung cancers, can continue to mutate and evolve even after successful chemotherapy, radiation, or drug treatment. The study, published in Oncogene, follows up on new targeted therapies that show promise in inhibiting the KRAS G12C variant. Researchers collaborated with Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California to perform sequencing of KRAS-positive lung tumors to determine the prevalence of other oncogenic mutations that could lead to treatment resistance....

Lead researcher Professor Peter Fineran explains that the rise in multi-drug resistant bacteria is leading to the development of alternative therapeutics, including viruses that specifically kill bacteria, called bacteriophages, often referred to as “phages.” However, bacteria can become resistant to phages. Phages are the most abundant biological entities on the planet and are important for global ecosystems, but they can also be used to kill bacterial pathogens. To defend themselves from the phage invasion, bacteria have developed CRISPR-Cas defense systems — immune systems within the bacteria....

The Earth is located about 26,000 light-years, or about 150,000 trillion miles, from the center of the Galaxy. While humans cannot physically travel there, scientists have been able to study this region by using data from powerful telescopes that can detect light in a variety of forms, including X-ray and infrared light. This visualization builds on infrared data with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope of 30 massive stellar giants called Wolf-Rayet stars that orbit within about 1....

The study, led by researchers in the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), found that face masks substantially increase the humidity in the air that the mask-wearer breathes in. This higher level of humidity in inhaled air, the researchers suggest, could help explain why wearing masks has been linked to lower disease severity in people infected with SARS-CoV-2, because hydration of the respiratory tract is known to benefit the immune system....

The study, published in Scientific Reports, looked at identical twins and found that the more physically active siblings had lower indicators of metabolic disease, as measured by body mass index and waist size. This was accompanied by differences in their epigenomes, the molecular processes that surround DNA and can impact gene expression without changing the actual DNA sequence. The more active twins also had epigenetic marks associated with a reduced risk of metabolic syndrome, a condition that can lead to heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes....

A recent study from the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought researchers closer to understanding the strong nuclear force, one of the most enigmatic of the fundamental forces. Their work builds on foundational theories of atomic structures that originated with Argonne physicist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Goeppert Mayer in the early 1960s. She helped develop a mathematical model for the structure of nuclei....