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Eye position has a modest but measurable impact on speech intelligibility within a cocktail party setting. Several acoustic studies have shown that the position of your eyes determines where your visual spatial attention is directed, which automatically influences your auditory spatial attention. Researchers are currently exploring its impact on speech intelligibility. During the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually December 7-10, Virginia Best, of Boston University, will describe her work to determine whether there is a measurable effect of eye position within cocktail party listening situations....

“We were very surprised by the result,” says first author Wen Yang, a nanoengineering researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “Because, intuitively, we would think thick hair is stronger. Natural materials have undergone thousands of years of evolution, so to us, these materials are very well developed. We hope to learn from nature and develop synthetic products with comparable properties.” Previous studies have found that human hair has strength comparable to that of steel when adjusted for density....

Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid, which technically isn’t a squid at all, is a cephalopod that lives 3,000 feet deep in warm waters. In the deep pelagic zone, there is little oxygen and V. infernalis reaches a size of just 30 cm in adulthood. V. infernalis feeds on corpses, feces and its own mucus and has characteristics of both octopi and squids. The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B....

Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots” can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut. “These are novel living machines,” says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research....

Sometime between 3,000 and 10,000 years ago, humans domesticated the red junglefowl in tropical Asia. Despite this, wild and domestic birds can still interbreed. This interbreeding between wild and domestic red junglefowl is a cause for concern in terms of conservation, as wild populations that gain more DNA from chickens may experience a loss of genetic diversity, making them more vulnerable to changes in their environment. In the new study, researchers contrasted whole genomes from 51 chickens and 63 junglefowl from across the wild bird’s natural range, to find signs of interbreeding....

Heat stress from extreme heat and humidity will annually affect areas now home to 1.2 billion people by 2100, assuming current greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Rutgers study. That’s more than four times the number of people affected today, and more than 12 times the number who would have been affected without industrial-era global warming. The research was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters on March 5, 2020....

Taking advantage of excellent atmospheric conditions, the Greenland Telescope is designed to detect radio waves from stars, star-forming regions, galaxies, and the vicinity of black holes. One of its primary goals is to take the first image of a supermassive black hole by joining the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global array of radio dishes that are linked together. The Greenland Telescope has recently achieved three important milestones, beginning with “first light” last December....

Does your cat lay around all day, only getting up to eat and visit the litter box? Chances are, he’s overweight. Maybe you’ve switched to the “diet” cat food or tried feeding him less, but you might have noticed it’s not easy to get that weight off. A new study from the University of Illinois explains what it takes to get kitty to slim down. “The intent with this diet was a healthy weight loss: getting rid of fat while maintaining lean mass....

Damage includes inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis), scarring or death of heart tissue (infarction), restricted blood supply to the heart (ischaemia) and combinations of all three. The study of 148 patients from six acute hospitals in London is the largest study to date to investigate convalescing COVID-19 patients who had raised troponin levels indicating a possible problem with the heart. Troponin is released into the blood when the heart muscle is injured....

Researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have discovered how high glucose levels — whether caused by diabetes or other factors — keep heart cells from maturing normally. Their findings help explain why babies born to women with diabetes are more likely to develop congenital heart disease. The study, which was led by Atsushi “Austin” Nakano, a UCLA associate professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology and member of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center, was published today in the journal eLife....

“The reason we can’t get rid of these [viruses] is because we can’t figure out a way to get their DNA out of the nucleus, out of the cell,” explained UVA researcher Dean H. Kedes, MD, Ph.D. “They depend on this ‘tether’ to remain anchored to the DNA within our cells, and to remain attached even as the cells divide. This tether is a key factor to disrupt in devising a cure....

Imagine trying to see a firefly next to a distant spotlight, where the beams from the spotlight all but drown out the faint glow from the firefly. Add fog, and both lights are dimmed. Is the glow from the firefly still visible at all? That is the question the Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems, or HOSTS, Survey was tasked with answering, albeit on a cosmic scale. Using the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, or LBTI, in Arizona, the HOSTS Survey determines the brightness and density of warm dust floating in nearby stars’ habitable zones, where liquid water could exist on the surface of a planet....

A clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet reveals an assortment of stars across a wide color range, from young, blue stars to aging, red stars. This portrait of Stephan’s Quintet, also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Stephan’s Quintet, as the name implies, is a group of five galaxies. The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer....

NGC 2655’s core is extremely luminous, resulting in its additional classification as a Seyfert galaxy: a type of active galaxy with strong and characteristic emission lines. This luminosity is thought to be produced as matter is dragged onto the accretion disc of a supermassive black hole sitting at the center of NGC 2655. The structure of NGC 2655’s outer disc, on the other hand, appears calmer, but it is oddly shaped....

This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), a highly efficient wide-field camera covering the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. While this lovely image contains hundreds of distant stars and galaxies, one vital thing is missing — the object Hubble was actually studying at the time! This is not because the target has disappeared. The ACS actually uses two detectors: the first captures the object being studied — in this case an open star cluster known as NGC 299 — while the other detector images the patch of space just ‘beneath’ it....

The human brain’s outer layer, known as the cerebral cortex, is characterized by its unique gyri and sulci, or ridges and furrows. This layer is responsible for managing cognitive and executive functions, encompassing everything from conscious thought and speech to emotional regulation. The cerebral cortex is made up of over 10 billion cells and more than 100 trillion connections, forming a gray matter layer that is only 5 millimeters thick — equivalent to a little less than three stacked quarters....

However, if the pebble was not from Earth, what was its origin and could the minerals in it provide clues on where it came from? Micro-mineral analyses of the pebble by the original research team at the University of Johannesburg have now provided unsettling answers that spiral away from conventional views of the material our solar system was formed from. Mineral structure The internal structure of the Hypatia pebble is somewhat like a fruitcake that has fallen off a shelf into some flour and cracked on impact, says Prof Jan Kramers, lead researcher of the study published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta on December 28, 2017....

To develop devices controlled by the brain and methods for cognitive disorder treatment and post-stroke rehabilitation, neurobiologists need to understand how the brain encodes information. A key aspect of this is studying the brain activity of people perceiving visual information, for example, while watching a video. The existing solutions for extracting observed images from brain signals either use functional MRI or analyze the signals picked up via implants directly from neurons....

Before the research, it was known that untrained individuals’ respiratory volumes rise during exercise from 5 to 15 liters per minute at rest to over 100 liters per minute. In fact, well-trained athletes can reach 200 l/min levels. It was also recognized that a lot of individuals had contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus while working out indoors. However, it was unclear how exercise intensity was related to the number of aerosols that a person actually inhaled per minute and the concentration of aerosol particles in exhaled air, and thus the potential danger of transmitting infectious diseases like SARS-CoV-2....

Researchers, however, have been limited by the inability to regulate the nanostructural and material properties of these materials. For instance, there’s interest in developing BCPs with very small nanodomain sizes to make them more versatile. But various approaches to doing so can interfere with other valuable properties, such as thermomechanical behaviors and processability. As a result, achieving useful materials with domain sizes below 10 nanometers is extremely difficult. To get around this problem, Mingjiang Zhong is studying a subset of these materials known as Janus graft block copolymers (GBCPs) in collaboration with the teams of Jeremiah Johnson at MIT and Yale’s Chinedum Osuji, associate professor of chemical & environmental engineering....