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It was definitely not fiction. To the dismay of local fishermen, the voracious eaters—which typically inhabit more tropical latitudes—arrived off central California in record numbers and filled their stomachs with important commercial species like hake and rockfish. Although the specifics were hazy, scientists believed that a combination of overfishing and climate change was to blame for their appearance. Seibel, who is now a professor and an expert in marine physiology at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, recently published a paper in Nature Climate Change that sheds light on those old headlines....

A planet roughly 1.4 times the size of Jupiter is being consumed by its own star behind a shroud thanks to a magnesium veil absorbing all of certain light wavelengths, according to new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). WASP-12 b, originally spotted in 2008, is a gas giant planet orbiting extremely close to its parent star. The distance between the star and planet is so small that the planet completes an orbit of its star in just over one Earth day....

It is precisely this advance that has been made by a team of researchers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, York University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, UK. They exploded a solid surface with an ultrahigh intensity (10^19 W/sq.cm), 25 femtosecond laser pulse (pump) creating a hot, dense plasma and monitored its ultra-rapid motion by reflecting a weak second femtosecond pulse (probe). The Doppler shifts in the wavelength imposed on the reflected probe pulse by the fast-evolving plasma give away the outward (blue shift) and inward (red shift) motions of the plasma....

The study, which involved 730,187 participants from 63 countries, uncovered how sleep patterns change throughout the lifespan and how they vary across different countries. Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA, and game developers Glitchers. Designed to aid Alzheimer’s research by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities, over four million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to numerous studies across the project as a whole....

How old is your dog in human years? And what factors contribute to a long and healthy life for a dog? The Dog Aging Project is gathering a vast open-source dataset about canine health and longevity, and recruiting dogs of all ages — especially puppies and young dogs — to take part. For years, it’s been generally accepted that “dog years” are roughly human years times seven – that a 1-year-old puppy is like a 7-year-old child, and an 11-year-old elderly dog is like a 77-year-old senior citizen....

“I’m interested in the role music plays in people’s lives. Since humans started making music tens of thousands of years ago, songs across cultures have always focused on relationships — getting into one, maintaining one, or breaking up — so I wondered, do people listen to music that mirrors their experiences in relationships?” says Ravin Alaei, who graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2019. According to a study published in the journal Personal Relationships conducted by Alaei and professors Geoff Macdonald and Nicholas Rule from the Department of Psychology, people’s attachment styles correspond with the lyrics of the songs they favor....

A new University of California, Berkeley, study finds that bats’ fierce immune response to viruses could drive viruses to replicate faster, so that when they jump to mammals with average immune systems, such as humans, the viruses wreak deadly havoc. Some bats — including those known to be the original source of human infections — have been shown to host immune systems that are perpetually primed to mount defenses against viruses....

As the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 quickly spread throughout the world earlier this year, researchers from Gladstone Institutes, the University of California Berkeley, and the Innovative Genomics Institute utilized virus-like particles to determine which elements of the virus are responsible for its heightened infectivity and transmission. Additionally, they demonstrated that although antibodies produced against earlier virus variants are substantially less effective against Omicron, those who have recently had a booster shot have greater levels of efficient antibodies....

Results should help improve how species’ vulnerability is assessed. A new study says that the planet’s wildlife is increasingly under the boot of humanity. Using the most comprehensive dataset on the “human footprint,” which maps the accumulated impact of human activities on the land’s surface, researchers from WCS, University of Queensland, and other groups found intense human pressures across the range of a staggering 20,529 terrestrial vertebrate species. Of that figure, some 85 percent, or 17,517 species have half their ranges exposed to intense human pressure, with 16 percent, or 3,328 species entirely exposed....

The results offer early indications that the keto diet could, over limited time periods, improve human health by lowering diabetes risk and inflammation. They also represent an important first step toward possible clinical trials in humans. The keto diet has become increasingly popular as celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Lebron James, and Kim Kardashian, have touted it as a weight-loss regimen. In the Yale study, published in the January 20, 2020, issue of Nature Metabolism, researchers found that the positive and negative effects of the diet both relate to immune cells called gamma delta T-cells, tissue-protective cells that lower diabetes risk and inflammation....

All galaxies, according to this theory, form and are embedded within clouds of dark matter. Dark matter itself consists of slow-moving, or “cold,” particles that come together to form structures ranging from hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way galaxy to clumps no more massive than the heft of a commercial airplane. (In this context, “cold” refers to the particles’ speed.) The Hubble observation yields new insights into the nature of dark matter and how it behaves....

The study was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The individuals who were treated with apremilast, on average, showed a decrease in their daily alcohol consumption by over 50 percent, reducing their intake from five drinks per day to two. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said co-senior author Angela Ozburn, Ph.D., associate professor of behavioral neuroscience in the OHSU School of Medicine and a research biologist with the Portland VA Health Care System....

In a systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical trials, the researchers found that honey consumption was associated with lower fasting blood glucose, total and LDL (‘bad’) cholesterol, triglycerides, and a marker of fatty liver disease. Additionally, honey consumption was linked to higher levels of HDL (‘good’) cholesterol and some markers of inflammation. “These results are surprising because honey is about 80 percent sugar,” said Tauseef Khan, a senior researcher on the study and a research associate in nutritional sciences at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine....

This means the apparent positions of background stars seen close to the Sun in the sky — including during a solar eclipse — should seem slightly shifted in the absence of the Sun, because the Sun’s gravity bends light. But until the eclipse experiment, no one was able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as no one could see stars near the Sun in the daytime otherwise. The world celebrated the results of this eclipse experiment — a victory for Einstein, and the dawning of a new era of our understanding of the universe....

For many years, scientists have been trying to understand how early land plants were able to adapt to new habitats and move beyond their original moist, boggy environments. These plants were small, usually no more than a few centimeters tall, and were found near streams and ponds. However, about 400 million years ago, they developed vascular systems that allowed them to extract water more efficiently from the soil and use it for photosynthesis, a change that had a significant impact on the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems....

These findings could offer an explanation for the lack of response to novel immunotherapy and targeted treatments in a significant number of lung cancer patients, despite their effectiveness in significantly prolonging survival for many others with the same disease. “These patients with high levels of depression are at much higher risk for poor outcomes,” said Barbara Andersen, one of the lead authors of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University....

This natural-color image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 149,600 miles (240,800 kilometers) from Enceladus and 352,200 miles (566,800 kilometers) from Pandora. The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on September 15, 2017. The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington....

Carbon capture will most likely be necessary to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. To accomplish that we need the technology and materials to do the job. Recently a promising and surprising new candidate has emerged. “The results are first and foremost important in terms of climate change,” says Professor Liyuan Deng at NTNU’s Department of Chemical Engineering. Professor Deng is leading the work of the membrane research group at NTNU, and their results are gaining attention....

A team of researchers at Osaka University has investigated a new method for generating nuclear fusion power, showing that the relativistic effect of ultra-intense laser light improves upon current “fast ignition” methods in laser-fusion research to heat the fuel long enough to generate electrical power. These findings could provide a spark for laser fusion, ushering in a new era of carbonless energy production. Current nuclear power uses the fission of heavy isotopes, such as uranium, into lighter elements to produce power....