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Analysis of spring New York City outbreak finds asymptomatic cases make up at least 80% of COVID-19 cases. A new study out of the University of Chicago has found that during the initial wave of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, only between one in five and one in seven cases of the virus was symptomatic. The research team found that non-symptomatic cases substantially contribute to community transmission, making up at least 50% of the driving force of SARS-CoV-2 infection....

A new study from the University of Copenhagen revealed that eating a diet rich in antioxidants may actually counteract many of the health benefits of exercise, including reduced blood pressure and cholesterol in older men. In older men, a natural antioxidant compound found in red grapes and other plants – called resveratrol – blocks many of the cardiovascular benefits of exercise. This is the surprising result from a research project from the University of Copenhagen published today in The Journal of Physiology....

The “Raising the Pulse” project, which has received £2 million in public funding over a three-year period, has officially launched and has recently been announced in the Nutrition Bulletin journal. Five teams of researchers within the University of Reading, along with members of the public, farmers, industry, and policymakers, are now working together to bring about one of the biggest changes to UK food in generations. This is by increasing pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favorable growing conditions in the UK and the sustainable nutritional enhancement they provide....

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. — subject line: “Flight of the RoboBee.” “I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,” recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science. The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard....

An Electron rocket lifted off at 1:33 a.m. EST (7:33 p.m. NZDT) from the company’s launch complex on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, marking the first time CubeSats have launched for NASA on a rocket designed specifically for small payloads. “With the VCLS effort, NASA has successfully advanced the commercial launch service choices for smaller payloads, providing viable dedicated small launch options as an alternative to the rideshare approach,” said Jim Norman, director of Launch Services at NASA Headquarters in Washington....

This direct proof of a previously unconfirmed charge state in a manganese-containing battery component could inspire new avenues of exploration for battery innovations. X-ray experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were key in the discovery. The study results were published on February 28 in the journal Nature Communications. Scientists at Berkeley Lab and New York University participated in the study, which was led by researchers at Natron Energy, formerly Alveo Energy, a Palo Alto, California-based battery technology company....

In the 18 months since the first report of COVID-19 and the spread of the pandemic, there has been a large amount of research into understanding it and developing means to treat it. COVID-19 does not affect all infected individuals equally. Many individuals are asymptomatic; of those who are symptomatic, the large majority have mild symptoms, and only a small number have severe cases. The reasons for this are not fully understood and are an important area of ongoing research....

Nearly one in five adults in the United States is affected by psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. Additionally, about half of patients diagnosed with a psychiatric illness also have symptoms of another disorder. This overlap has led researchers to believe that there may be a single neurobiological explanation for various psychiatric illnesses. A team of researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, studied four existing neurological and psychiatric datasets and pinpointed a network of brain areas underlying psychiatric illnesses....

Astronomy is undergoing a transformation as vast amounts of astronomical data from millions of celestial objects become readily accessible. This is due to large-scale surveys and meticulous observations utilizing top-notch astronomical observatories, combined with a policy of open data availability. Needless to say that these data have great potential for many discoveries and a new understanding of the universe. However, it is not practical to explore the data from all these objects manually, and automated machine learning techniques are essential to extract information from these data....

“The discovery gives you a different way to control the flow of heat,” said lead author Michael Manley of the paper published in Nature Communications. “It provides a shortcut through the material–a way to send the energy of pure atomic motion at a speed that’s higher than you can with phonons [atomic vibrations]. This shortcut may open possibilities in heat management of nanoscale materials. Imagine the possibility of a thermal circuit breaker, for example....

The striatum is responsible for processing and integrating new sensory information from the environment and coordinating the sequence of motor responses. In individuals with mental and neurological disorders, there is often a significant decline in the ability to adapt to changes in the environment and correctly estimate the timing and completion of voluntary actions. The study, which was recently published in the journal Molecular Neurobiology, uncovered the first evidence of the important role cilia play in timing-dependent dysfunction....

Why is ice so slippery? The answer lies in a film of water that is generated by friction, one that is far thinner than expected and much more viscous than usual water through its resemblance to the “snow cones” of crushed ice we drink during the summer. This phenomenon was recently demonstrated by researchers from the CNRS and ENS-PSL, with support from the École polytechnique, in a study that appeared in Physical Review X on November 4, 2019....

The winning images and an additional 16 highly commended images, taken by international ecologists and students, celebrate the diversity of ecology; capturing flora and fauna from across the planet. Subjects range from a showdown between a roadrunner and rattlesnake, flamingos feasting at sunset and a close-up of a friendly humphead wrasse. On her winning image, Alwin, a PhD candidate at the University of Eastern Finland, said: “I gave this image the title The art of flight because of how impressive this bird’s wings appear in the picture, you can almost see the bird flying in front of you despite it being a still image....

Sexting is extremely common among adults — but maybe not for the reasons you think. New research from the Sexuality, Sexual Health & Sexual Behavior Lab in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences shows that two-thirds of people who sext do so for non-sexual reasons. In an analysis of the reasons people engage in sexting with their relationship partner, assistant professor Joseph M. Currin and doctoral student Kassidy Cox confirmed three main motivations found in previous research:...

No evidence of infection found in the bacterial community around shark wounds. A survey of the shark skin microbiome provides the first step toward understanding the remarkable resilience of shark wounds to infection. In the wild, blacktip reef sharks are often seen bearing wounds, but they rarely exhibit obvious signs of infection around the wounds. As a first step toward understanding this phenomenon, an international team led by researchers at KAUST’s Red Sea Research Center investigated the microbial community living on the skin of sharks....

A research group at the Sars Center in Bergen has shed new light on the evolutionary origin of the head. In a study published in the journal PLoS Biology they show that in a simple, brainless sea anemone, the same genes that control head development in higher animals regulate the development of the front end of the swimming larvae. In many animals, the brain is located in a specific structure, the head, together with sensory organs and often together with the mouth....

Patients from more socially vulnerable areas were sicker when they got to hospitals, but did just as well by the time they left – suggesting the importance of early and equal access to care. COVID-19 has sent nearly 900,000 Americans to the hospital in the past two years. A new study shows that the ZIP codes they came from had a lot to do with how sick they were when they got to the hospital, and how much care they needed once they were there....

New research, just published, details how University of Cincinnati researchers have developed and tested a solar-powered nano filter that is able to remove harmful carcinogens and antibiotics from water sources – lakes and rivers – at a significantly higher rate than the currently used filtering technology made of activated carbon. In the journal Nano Letters, Vikram Kapoor, environmental engineering doctoral student, and David Wendell, assistant professor of environmental engineering, report on their development and testing of the new filter made of two bacterial proteins that was able to absorb 64 percent of antibiotics in surface waters vs....

Elementary particles have a property called “spin” that can be thought of as rotation around their axes. In work reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT physicists have imposed a stringent set of traffic rules on atomic particles in a gas: Those spinning clockwise can move in only one direction, while those spinning counterclockwise can move only in the other direction. Physical materials with this distinctive property could be used in “spintronic” circuit devices that rely on spin rather than electrical current for transferring information....

Clues from Canadian rocks formed billions of years ago reveal a previously unknown loss of life even greater than that of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when Earth lost nearly three-quarters of its plant and animal species. Rather than prowling animals, this die-off involved minuscule microorganisms that shaped the Earth’s atmosphere and ultimately paved the way for those larger animals to thrive. “This shows that even when biology on Earth is comprised entirely of microbes, you can still have what could be considered an enormous die-off event that otherwise is not recorded in the fossil record,” said Malcolm Hodgskiss, co-lead author of a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....