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Dr. Tedros was joined by WHO Regional Director Dr. Takeshi Kasai and Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme Dr. Mike Ryan, and also met State Councilor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi and Minister of Health Ma Xiaowei. The National Health Commission presented China’s strong public health capacities and resources to respond and manage respiratory disease outbreaks. The discussions focused on continued collaboration on containment measures in Wuhan, public health measures in other cities and provinces, conducting further studies on the severity and transmissibility of the virus, continuing to share data, and for China to share biological material with WHO....

Space telescopes have observed these cosmic clouds in the vicinity of supermassive black holes, those mysterious dense objects from which no light can escape, with masses equivalent to more than 100,000 Suns. There is a supermassive black hole in the center of nearly every galaxy, and it is called an “active galactic nucleus” (AGN) if it is gobbling up a lot of gas and dust from its surroundings. The brightest kind of AGN is called a “quasar....

However, the ‘inconsistent and misleading’ advice offered on some of the world’s most popular websites could actually be doing more harm than good, according to new research. A study by the University of Plymouth assessed the effectiveness of 16 password meters that people are likely to use or encounter on a regular basis. The main focus was dedicated password meter websites, but the study also sought to assess those embedded in some common online services (including Dropbox and Reddit) and those found as standard on some of our devices....

“Efforts to understand how pulsars do what they do began as soon as they were discovered in 1967, and we’re still working on it,” said Gabriele Brambilla, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Milan who led a study of the recent simulation. “Even with the computational power available today, tracking the physics of particles in the extreme environment of a pulsar is a considerable challenge....

A scientist from Tokyo Metropolitan University has shown that large gamma-ray emitting bubbles around the center of our galaxy were produced by fast-blowing outward winds and the associated “reverse shock.” Numerical simulations successfully reproduced the temperature profile observed by an X-ray telescope. Such outflows have been observed in other galaxies; this finding suggests similar winds may have been blowing in our own galaxy until quite recently. The universe is full of massive celestial objects which are yet to be explained....

“The Two-Dimensional Crystal Consortium (2DCC) is a world leader in 2D materials research and my lab often works with the 2DCC doing materials characterization for novel 2D materials,” said Slava V. Rotkin, Frontier Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics with an appointment in the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. “There is a big challenge in these studies: Frequently, optical properties of 2D materials are not uniform in space. Furthermore, they may vary at a very small spatial scale, down to a single atom....

Yet, it is possible that the saddleback shell shape also has other functions. These tortoises can fall on their back while walking on the rugged volcanic landscape of the Galapagos. If they cannot turn over quickly, their chances of dying increase. It is possible that the peculiar shape of the saddleback shell could help these tortoises roll back onto their feet. To test this hypothesis, the researchers of the study, including Dr....

A specialized 3D printing process, using human stem cells, could pave the way to purpose-built replacement organs for patients, eliminating the need for organ donation, immune suppression and the problem of transplant rejection. The process, developed at Heriot-Watt University, in partnership with Roslin Cellab, takes advantage of the fact that stem cells can now be grown in laboratory conditions from established cell lines, could also speed up and improve the process of drug testing by growing three-dimensional human tissues and structures for pharmaceuticals to be tested on....

Eighty-six percent of parents agree that teens spend too much time gaming, but many may be mistaken about the extent of their own child’s video game habits, a new national poll suggests. Parents also report very different gaming patterns for teen boys than girls, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. Twice as many parents say their teen boy plays video games every day compared to parents of teen girls....

Since dementia is irreversible and effective treatments are limited, preventing and detecting cognitive decline early on is crucial. Studies have shown that certain lifestyle factors such as physical activity, diet, and sleep can affect cognitive function. However, the impact of dietary sodium and potassium on cognitive function remains poorly understood. In a prospective study published in the KeAi journal Global Transitions, a group of researchers from China looked at the impact of dietary sodium, potassium, sodium to potassium ratio, and salt on the cognitive function of a group of elderly people in China....

To deepen understanding of the autoimmune response generally, a research team led by co-senior authors Martin Kriegel and Sandra Wolin, focused on a protein, Ro60, that has been found in lupus patients even before they developed symptoms. The protein induces the immune response and production of antibodies. In the study, the research team tested blood and tissue samples from patients with the most common form of the disease, systemic lupus....

In the grand scheme of things, though, the galaxy is actually quite ordinary. Spiral galaxies like NGC 4380 are one of the most common types of galaxies in the Universe. These colossal collections of stars, often numbering in the hundreds of billions, are shaped like a flat disc, sometimes with a rounded bulge in the center. Graceful spiral arms outlined by dark lanes of dust wind around the bulging core, which glows brightly and has the highest concentration of stars in the galaxy....

Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show that the most vigorous bursts of star birth in the cosmos took place much earlier than previously thought. The results are published in a set of papers to appear in the journal Nature on 14 March 2013, and in the Astrophysical Journal. The research is the most recent example of the discoveries coming from the new international ALMA observatory, which celebrates its inauguration today....

Results can help anticipate the scale of future health complications and improve planning for use of healthcare resources. Almost a third (32 of every 100) of older adults infected with COVID-19 in 2020 developed at least one new condition that required medical attention in the months after initial infection, 11 more than those who did not have COVID-19, finds a US study published by The BMJ on February 9, 2022....

Known as HETDEX, or the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment, the research project is based at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory and relies on volunteers who participate online in a project called Dark Energy Explorers. Participants can experience what it’s like to be an astronomer using a smartphone or computer, teasing apart the mysteries of the universe while helping professional astronomers find distant galaxies and learn more about the mysterious force known as dark energy, which is causing the universe to rapidly expand....

New Modeling Tool Has Implications for Better Understanding of Disease Remember domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and Darwin’s tree of life metaphor we learned about in high school biology? That way of describing living-things lineages is just science’s best guess about how genes have mutated and split over time to change things into what they are today. It’s not uncommon for living things to be reclassified into another genus as science gets better at identifying protein and gene changes; for example, there have been recent changes in the taxonomy of different kinds of bacteria, plants, and coral....

“Through this crowdsourced data, we can see that there was global environmental impact by land use at least 3,000 years ago,” says Gary Feinman, MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum and one of the study’s 250 authors. “And that means that the idea of seeing human impact on the environment as a newer phenomenon is too focused on the recent past.” Feinman says that to understand our current climate crisis, we need to understand the history of humans altering their environments....

Individuals who carry healthy mutant genes, commonly found in populations known for exceptional longevity such as the “blue zones,” often live to 100 years or more and remain in good health. These carriers are also less susceptible to cardiovascular complications. Scientists funded by the British Heart Foundation believe the gene helps keep their hearts youthful by guarding against diseases related to aging, such as heart failure. In this new study, researchers demonstrate that one of these healthy mutant genes, previously proved particularly frequent in centenarians, can protect cells collected from patients with heart failure requiring cardiac transplantation....

A tiny protein of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that gives rise to COVID-19, may have big implications for future treatments, according to a team of Penn State researchers. Using a novel toolkit of approaches, the scientists uncovered the first full structure of the Nucleocapsid (N) protein and discovered how antibodies from COVID-19 patients interact with that protein. They also determined that the structure appears similar across many coronaviruses, including recent COVID-19 variants — making it an ideal target for advanced treatments and vaccines....

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, UNSW quantum computing researchers describe how they created artificial atoms in a silicon ‘quantum dot,’ a tiny space in a quantum circuit where electrons are used as qubits (or quantum bits), the basic units of quantum information. Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak explains that, unlike a real atom, an artificial atom has no nucleus, but it still has shells of electrons whizzing around the center of the device, rather than around the atom’s nucleus....