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Researchers from Imperial College London’s School of Public Health have produced the most comprehensive assessment to date of the association between ultra-processed foods and the risk of developing cancers. Ultra-processed foods are food items that have been heavily processed during their production, such as fizzy drinks, mass-produced packaged breads, many ready meals, and most breakfast cereals. Ultra-processed foods are often relatively cheap, convenient, and heavily marketed, often as healthy options....

An analysis of publicly available data on infections from the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19 yielded an estimate of 5.1 days for the median disease incubation period, according to a new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This median time from exposure to onset of symptoms suggests that the 14-day quarantine period used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for individuals with likely exposure to the coronavirus is reasonable....

Published in Cell Reports, the work sheds light on the mechanisms through which histones regulate how stem cells give rise to differentiated cells. Researchers in the Chromatin Structure and Function Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) have identified the histone BigH1 as a key protein in stem cell differentiation to male sex cells. Histones are basic proteins that confer order and structure to DNA and they play an important role in gene regulation....

A Rossetta Stone for stellar dynamos Now, a large international team led by Christoffer Karoff from Aarhus University has found a star that can help shed light on the physics underlying the solar dynamo. The star is located 120 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus, and on the surface, the star looks just like the Sun: it has the same mass, radius, and age – but inside, the chemical composition of the star is very different....

A new theoretical model enlightens the structure and the electrical properties of pure and doped ice. A fascinating substance with unique properties, ice has intrigued humans since time immemorial. Unlike most other materials, ice at very low temperature is not as ordered as it could be. A collaboration between the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the Institute of Physics Rosario (IFIR-UNR), with the support of the Istituto Officina dei Materiali of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IOM), made new theoretical inroads on the reasons why this happens and on the way in which some of the missing order can be recovered....

In reality, it’s a new form of matter proposed by theoretical physicists at The University of Texas at Dallas in a recent study published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Their study also describes a “recipe” for making the exotic materials in the lab. Most people are familiar with the three fundamental states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. There are actually several more, including plasma, which is found inside the sun and other stars, and Bose-Einstein condensates, which are very dense and exist only at the most extreme cold temperatures....

The team – led by UNSW Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons, Director of the Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, or CQC2T – is the only group in the world that has the ability to see the exact position of their qubits in the solid state. Simmons’ team create the atom qubits by precisely positioning and encapsulating individual phosphorus atoms within a silicon chip. Information is stored on the quantum spin of a single phosphorus electron....

The results of their study, which was recently published in the journal Nature, describe a novel approach to calculate electron speed. This study also represents the first instance where quantum geometry has been recognized as the primary contributing mechanism to superconductivity in any material. The material the researchers studied is twisted bilayer graphene. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged periodically in a honeycomb pattern. In twisted bilayer graphene, two sheets of graphene are stacked on top of one another with a slight angular twist....

While other planets in our solar system emit radio light, Jupiter is by far the most radio-bright. When charged particles in space interact with Jupiter’s magnetic field, they emit radio light through a process known as synchrotron radiation. The first radio observation of Jupiter was made by Bernard Burke and Kenneth Franklin in 1955. They weren’t expecting such a signal, so they initially thought it was the radio noise of a farm-hand driving home....

The researchers used an animal model of obesity to investigate whether PEPITEM, delivered by a slow-release pump, could prevent or reverse the effects that a high-fat diet has on the pancreas. Excitingly, the results showed that administration of PEPITEM significantly reduced the enlargement of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and also significantly reduced immune cell migration into various tissues. The research team was led by Dr. Helen MCGettrick and Dr....

From 2010 to 2019 over 9 600 rhinos were killed in poaching attacks. On this current trajectory, South Africa’s rhino will be nearing extinction in nine years. Trafficked rhino horn is also not an industry on its own. It has become a lucrative “commodity” for the biggest crime syndicates, those dealing in weapons, drugs, the illicit wildlife trade and human trafficking. So lucrative that it is worth more than gold and platinum....

Fans of the soccer team Sevilla FC will never forget the August 2007 game when 22-year-old Antonio Puerta went into cardiac arrest, collapsed on the field, and eventually passed away in the hospital. The athlete was later found to be suffering from a condition known as arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. This inherited disease affects one in every 5,000 individuals, with males being more impacted than women. “Arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy leads to arrhythmia with a loss of cardiac muscle cells, deposits of connective tissue, and fat within the cardiac muscle....

In Chinese medicine rhino horn is believed to have many benefits, including working as an aphrodisiac. In reality, the sellers are often cutting the horn with ground-up Viagra. Whatever the exact hidden blend may be, the undimmed demand for rhino horn continues to drive poaching with devastating effect for the few populations left in the wild. This study aims to provide a way to confuse and thus hopefully diminish the demand for real rhino horns by showing a way to a vastly cheaper copy that can be used to infiltrate the market....

University of Sydney scientists have discovered a protein in the lung that blocks SARS-CoV-2 infection and forms a natural protective barrier in the human body. This protein, the leucine-rich repeat-containing protein 15 (LRRC15), is an inbuilt receptor that binds the SARS-CoV-2 virus without passing on the infection. The research opens up an entirely new area of immunology research around LRRC15 and offers a promising pathway to develop new drugs to prevent viral infection from coronaviruses like COVID-19 or deal with fibrosis in the lungs....

It is the first time that an entire ancient human genome has been extracted from anything other than human bones. The new research results were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications on December 17, 2019. ‘It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone,’’ says Associate Professor Hannes Schroeder from the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, who led the research. ‘What is more, we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains,’ Hannes Schroeder adds....

Nevertheless, some sneak through — and at the forefront of figuring out just how this happens is NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS. New results show that tornado-like swirls of space plasma create a boundary tumultuous enough to let particles slip into near-Earth space. MMS, launched in 2015, uses four identical spacecraft flying in a pyramid formation to take a three-dimensional look at the magnetic environment around Earth. The mission studies how particles transfer into the magnetosphere by focusing on the causes and effects of magnetic reconnection — an explosive event where magnetic field lines cross, launching electrons and ions from the solar wind into the magnetosphere....

Only states of equal entropy and energy can be reversibly converted from one to the other. This reversibility condition led to the discovery of thermodynamic processes such as the (idealized) Carnot cycle, which poses an upper limit to how efficiently one can convert heat into work, or the other way around, by cycling a closed system through different temperatures and pressures. Our understanding of this process underpinned the rapid economic development during the Western Industrial Revolution....

Allura Red (also called FD&C Red 40 and Food Red 17), is a common ingredient in food ranging from candies and soft drinks to dairy products and breakfast cereals. Long-term consumption of Allura Red food dye can be a potential trigger of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, according to Waliul Khan from McMaster University. Using experimental animal models of IBD, researchers discovered that continual exposure to Allura Red AC harms gut health and promotes inflammation....

At the end of the red giant phase of a star, these forces become unbalanced. Without enough energy created by fusion, the core of the star collapses in on itself, while the surface layers are ejected outward. After that, all that remains of the star is what we see here: glowing outer layers surrounding a white dwarf star, the remnants of the red giant star’s core. This isn’t the end of this star’s evolution though — those outer layers are still moving and cooling....

New research led by the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time the extent to which frailty increases the risk of mortality in COVID-19 patients. The clinical observational study, involving 5,711 patients with COVID-19 at 55 hospitals across 12 countries, found that very severely frail individuals with COVID-19 are three times more likely to die than those who were not frail, even taking into account their age. It also found that those with severe frailty who survived the virus were seven times more likely to go on to need increased care at home or in care homes....