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In the nearly six decades since quasars were discovered, the list of these energetic galaxies powered by supermassive black holes has grown to more than 100,000 – enough examples to reveal important information about the quasar population as a whole. But attempts to conduct a celestial census of these powerful objects have been limited by a fundamental problem: Although quasars are bright, they also span billions of light years in distance from Earth....

This is the first instance of cosmic cannibalism where astronomers have observed a white dwarf star feasting on both rocky-metallic material, likely from a nearby asteroid, and icy material, presumed to be from a body similar to those found in the Kuiper belt at edge of our own solar system. “We have never seen both of these kinds of objects accreting onto a white dwarf at the same time,” said lead researcher Ted Johnson, a physics and astronomy major at UCLA who just graduated....

Using caffeine as a catalyst, the researchers have devised a way to create gummy, biocompatible gels that could be used for drug delivery and other medical applications. “Most synthetic approaches for synthesizing and cross-linking polymeric gels and other materials use catalysts or conditions that can damage sensitive substances such as biologic drugs. In contrast, here we used green chemistry and common food ingredients,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and one of the study’s senior authors....

Fortunately for wine-lovers, however, the new study also outlines an adaptation strategy. The findings indicate that reshuffling where certain grape varieties are grown could halve the potential losses of winegrowing regions under 2 degrees of warming, and reduce losses by a third if warming reaches 4 degrees. The study is published today (January 27, 2020) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have long suspected that crop diversity is key to making agriculture more resilient to climate change, and wine grapes offer a unique opportunity to test this assumption....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Ecology Letters. The mountainside cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica, gets plenty of rain for nine months of the year. During three months, between February and April, precipitation is scarcer. But during these three months, some of the region’s forests are engulfed in fog for an average 13 hours a day. The fog comes from moisture that drifts in from the Caribbean Sea and condenses under the forest’s canopy....

The findings, published recently in the journal eClinicalMedicine, emerge from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) COVID-19 BioResource. The results of the study suggest the effects are still detectable more than six months after the acute illness, and that any recovery is at best gradual. There is mounting evidence that COVID-19 can cause long-term cognitive and mental health issues, with recovered patients reporting symptoms including fatigue, “brain fog,” difficulty recalling words, sleep disturbances, anxiety, and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) months after infection....

Their bodies consist of a mass of jelly, having one layer of cells on the outside and another layer lining the inside. Ctenophores have these layers two cells deep. They have a decentralized nerve net, rather than a more centralized brain and rely on water flow through the body cavity for digestion and respiration. These organisms are quite sophisticated in how they use light and researchers studying the genome of ctenophores have discovered that the creatures have 10 proteins to generate light....

NIH-funded research shows infection can affect male fertility. COVID-19 vaccination does not affect the chances of conceiving a child, according to a study of more than 2,000 couples that was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Researchers found no differences in the chances of conception if either male or female partner had been vaccinated, compared to unvaccinated couples. However, couples had a slightly lower chance of conception if the male partner had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 within 60 days before a menstrual cycle, suggesting that COVID-19 could temporarily reduce male fertility....

Some white-tailed deer living in Staten Island, New York, are actively infected with the Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant of SARS-CoV-2, according to new research led by scientists at Penn State. The team also found neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in one of the Omicron-infected deer, suggesting that, like humans, deer can be reinfected with the COVID-19 virus. “The deer population on Staten Island is so large that the animals are considered by local wildlife officials to pose significant challenges to human health and safety, particularly from vehicle collisions and the spread of tick-borne diseases,” said Kurt Vandegrift, associate research professor of biology, Penn State, and lead author of the paper, which published on the pre-print server bioRxiv in February....

Scientists who study the origins and evolution of the plague have examined hundreds of ancient human teeth from Denmark, seeking to address longstanding questions about its arrival, persistence, and spread within Scandinavia. In the first longitudinal study of its kind, focusing on a single region for 800 years (between 1000-1800AD), researchers reconstructed Yersinia pestis genomes, the bacterium responsible for the plague, and showed that it was reintroduced into the Danish population from other parts of Europe again and again, perhaps via human movement, with devastating effects....

A new study by Yale researchers published on March 3, 2020, in the journal Cell Metabolism may help reconcile these conflicting findings. The study showed that people who periodically drank beverages with the low-calorie sweetener sucralose, which is found in low-cal soft drinks, candy, breakfast bars, and other products, did experience problematic metabolic and neural responses — but only when a carbohydrate in the form of a tasteless sugar was added to the drink....

A series of autopsies conducted by LSU Health New Orleans pathologists shows the damage to the hearts of COVID-19 patients is not the expected typical inflammation of the heart muscle associated with myocarditis, but rather a unique pattern of cell death in scattered individual heart muscle cells. They report the findings of a detailed study of hearts from 22 deaths confirmed due to COVID-19 in a Research Letter published in Circulation....

NASA has released a new map that could help you decide. Based on observations from several NASA missions, the map details the path of the Moon’s shadow as it crosses the contiguous U.S. during the annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023, and total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. These dark paths across the continent show where observers will need to be to see the “ring of fire” when the Moon blocks all but the outer edge of the Sun during the annular eclipse, and the ghostly-white outer atmosphere of the Sun (the corona) when the Moon completely blocks the Sun’s disk during the total eclipse....

Scientists found that medicines usually used to treat angina and high blood pressure prevented much of the long-term damage to the kidney and cardiovascular system caused by acute kidney injury (AKI). The study, which was conducted in mice, was published on December 14, in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Experts hope the findings will pave the way for improved treatment of AKI – a common condition that occurs in approximately 20 percent of emergency hospital admissions in the UK....

A total of over 1.2 million kilometers of fiber-optic cables run across the globe, transmitting phone calls, internet signals, and data. However, this summer, researchers made a groundbreaking discovery by publishing the strange sounds of blue and fin whales captured by a fiber-optic cable on the west coast of Svalbard. The researchers now have their sights set on eavesdropping on an even bigger beast – the Earth itself. Combining the world’s fiber-optic network with existing remote-sensing systems, like satellites, could create a low-cost global real-time monitoring network, said Martin Landrø, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Electronic Systems and head of the Centre for Geophysical Forecasting....

But what is the shortest time possible for electrons to stream from a tiny metal lead in an electronic circuit? By using extreme short laser flashes, a team of researchers led by Professor Eleftherios Goulielmakis, head of the group Extreme Photonics of the institute for Physics at the University of Rostock, and collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Solid State Research in Stuttgart used state-of-the-art laser pulses to eject electrons from a tungsten nanotip and to generate the shortest electron burst to date....

The leak has since been determined to be coolant, and ground teams at Mission Control in Moscow continue to assess the leak from the aft end of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. Following the ongoing analysis, NASA and Roscosmos will continue to work together to determine the next course of action. The crew members aboard the space station are safe and were not in any danger during the leak. The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft transported NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin into space after launching on September 21 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan....

Train headlights not only illuminate the tracks ahead, they also play an important role in rail transportation. Because trains are difficult to stop, the headlights must be visible from a distance far enough away to give people or vehicles on the tracks ample time to move out of the way. Traditional train headlights, which use incandescent or halogen bulbs, are bright enough to meet safety regulations but are not very energy efficient because most of the energy powering the light is converted into heat rather than visible light....

Crops produced from first-generation hybrids often display improved performance compared to their parent strains, which is referred to as “hybrid vigor”. However, this improvement does not continue when the hybrids are bred for a second generation. As a result, farmers who wish to use high-performing hybrid plant varieties must purchase new seeds each season. Rice, the staple crop for half the world’s population, is relatively costly to breed as a hybrid for a yield improvement of about 10 percent....

The first dataset from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Plan (HSC-SSP) can be seen easily with the “HSC Viewer” on your PC or tablet. The HSC Viewer is a user-friendly website to display the HSC-SSP data. When you start zooming into one of the green squares displayed on the initial screen of the HSC Viewer, an HSC image appears. If you keep zooming deeper into the Universe, thousands of tiny points of light start to gush out, even from dark, starless areas....