According to the study, the average number of children desired by women born between 1995 and 1999 was 2.1 when they were aged 20 to 24 years old. This is nearly equivalent to the 2.2 children desired by women born between 1965 and 1969 in the same age range. Still, the total fertility rate in the United States was 1.71 in 2019, the lowest level since the 1970s. What’s going on?...
Findings can help ease supply constraints. N95 respirators are commonly used in hospitals worldwide to protect healthcare personnel from infectious pathogens. During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare facilities have experienced shortages of the respirators, forcing personnel to re-use them or resort to less protective masking alternatives. In keeping with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) re-used N95 respirators to ease supply constraints, employing vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP) – a common, effective environmental disinfection agent – as a decontamination method....
Military uniforms of the future may offer a new layer of critical protection to wearers thanks to research by teams at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and several other institutions who are developing a nanotube-based fabric that repels chemical and biological agents. UMass Amherst polymer scientists Kenneth Carter and James Watkins, collaborating with team leader Francesco Fornasiero of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), recently received a five-year $1.8 million grant to design ways to manufacture the new material as part of a $13 million project funded by the U....
NASA is investing in technology concepts that include meteoroid impact detection, space telescope swarms, and small orbital debris mapping technologies that may one day be used for future space exploration missions. The agency selected 25 early-stage technology proposals that have the potential to transform future human and robotic exploration missions, introduce new exploration capabilities, and significantly improve current approaches to building and operating aerospace systems. The 2018 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I concepts cover a wide range of innovations selected for their potential to revolutionize future space exploration....
Like carbon dioxide, methane traps heat in the atmosphere, but it does so more efficiently and for a shorter period of time. Scientists estimate that most methane emissions in California are driven by industrial facilities, such as oil and gas fields, large dairies, and landfills. To help reduce methane’s impact on climate, the state has made cutting human-caused emissions a priority. But in order to cut these hard-to-detect emissions, they have to be measured and the sources identified....
One of the two regolith samples will be considered for deposit on the Martian surface in the coming weeks as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. Studying regolith with powerful lab equipment back on Earth will allow scientists to better understand the processes that have shaped the surface of Mars and help engineers design future missions as well as equipment used by future Martian astronauts. Perseverance’s mission on Mars aims to study astrobiology, with a focus on finding evidence of past microbial life....
The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA’s next step in the exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions – and past microbial life — but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet’s surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration....
MIT neuroscientists have found evidence that the brain’s ability to control what it’s thinking about relies on low-frequency brain waves known as beta rhythms. In a memory task requiring information to be held in working memory for short periods of time, the MIT team found that the brain uses beta waves to consciously switch between different pieces of information. The findings support the researchers’ hypothesis that beta rhythms act as a gate that determines when information held in working memory is either read out or cleared out so we can think about something else....
The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature Communications. Dan Li, a materials engineer at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, was able to coax 1-centimeter-high graphene blocks from tiny flakes of graphene oxide using ice crystals as templates. Graphene is a two-dimensional form of carbon that was first discovered less than a decade ago. It has exceptional strength and electrical conductivity, but being able to use these properties implies that scientists need to find ways to scale graphene up from nano-sized flakes....
This is the latest finding that shows remarkable similarities between Earth and Titan, the only other world we know of in our solar system that has stable liquid on its surface. The twist at Titan is that its lakes and seas are filled with hydrocarbons rather than liquid water, and water ice overlain by a layer of solid organic material serves as the bedrock surrounding these lakes and seas. The new paper, led by Alex Hayes at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that Titan’s seas follow a constant elevation relative to Titan’s gravitational pull — just like Earth’s oceans....
The connections between moving parts in machines are crucial for their proper functioning. Whether they are rigid or flexible, such as the connection between shafts in a motor or joints in the body, the material properties ensure that mechanical forces are transmitted correctly. This is especially true in cells, where interactions between moving subcellular structures are essential for many biological processes. However, the way in which nature achieves this coupling has long baffled scientists....
The early-stage research in rats, by a group of scientists led by Imperial College London, revealed two existing medications can boost the body’s own repair machinery, by triggering the release of stem cells from the bone marrow. The scientists published their research in the journal npj Regenerative Medicine. The team says the two drugs (currently used for bone marrow transplants and bladder control) could be used for different types of bone fractures, including to the spine, hip, and leg, to aid healing after surgery or fractures....
This enhanced color view from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows the southeastern portion of Pluto’s great ice plains, where at lower right the plains border rugged, dark highlands informally named Krun Macula. (Krun is the lord of the underworld in the Mandaean religion, and a ‘macula’ is a dark feature on a planetary surface.) Pluto is believed to get its dark red color from tholins, complex molecules found across much of the surface....
Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles present new research on a curious cosmic phenomenon known as “whistlers” — very low-frequency packets of radio waves that race along magnetic field lines. This first-of-its-kind study, appearing in the Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing, provides new insights into the nature of whistlers and space plasmas — regions of energized particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic fields. These studies could one day aid in the development of practical plasma technologies with magnetic fields, including spacecraft thrusters that use charged particles as fuel....
The project — published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis — allows the full scale of the devastation to be visualized like never before. Wartime intelligence The map, which is free to use, is based on 6,500 pages of brief, daily reports compiled by wartime intelligence officers for the Ministry of Home Security and senior officials. The reports are now held by The National Archives and have been digitized by Routledge, Taylor, and Francis as part of their War, State and Society online resource....
Now, a team of researchers led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported that a new lithium-sulfur battery component allows a doubling in capacity compared to a conventional lithium-sulfur battery, even after more than 100 charge cycles at high current densities, which are key performance metrics for their adoption in electric vehicles (EVs) and in aviation. They did it by designing a new polymer binder that actively regulates key ion transport processes within a lithium-sulfur battery, and have also shown how it functions on a molecular level....
The approach, described in Nature Methods, lays the foundation for novel ways to map connections across different brain regions—an ability that can enable the design of devices to image various areas of the brain and even treat conditions that arise from malfunctions in cells inhabiting these regions, the researchers said. The work was led by Bernardo Sabatini, the Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology in the Blavantik Institute at Harvard Medical School, and Ferruccio Pisanello at IIT, and Massimo De Vittorio at IIT and University of Salento, and funded by the European Research Council and by the National Institutes of Health in the United States....
“Nucleolar malfunction can lead to disease, including cancer,” explains Alexandra Zidovska, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Physics and the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal eLife. “Thus, understanding the processes responsible for the maintenance of nucleolar shape and motion might help in the creation of new diagnostics and therapies for certain human afflictions.” Recent discoveries have shown that some cellular compartments don’t have membranes, which were previously seen as necessary to hold a cell together....
First and only study to give molecular and serological evidence that SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses circulate in bats and pangolins in Southeast AsiaHigh diversity of SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses in the region makes finding the immediate progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 with intensified and internationally coordinated surveillance highly possible While the World Health Organization (WHO) continues its mission to Wuhan investigating the origin and early transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a new study led by scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, shows that SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses (SC2r-CoVs) are circulating in animals as far away as Thailand....
Gene transcription, the complex process through which human cells read genetic information encoded in DNA, was previously believed to be activated only when particular regulatory factors traveled to certain DNA sequences. A group of Cornell scientists found that certain genes already have their transcription regulatory factors and cofactors in place, but they are in a latent state, according to a recent study published in the journal Genes & Development. These “poised” genes become highly active when the appropriate signals arrive....
