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While on humanitarian work in Haiti, Binns developed intense eye pain and increasingly blurry vision. Over the next two years, Binns slowly went legally blind, with his doctors not being able to figure out the problem. He could no longer drive or read books. Doctors diagnosed him with a rare disease called corneal limbal stem cell deficiency, which was causing normal cells on Binns’ corneas to be replaced with scar tissue, leading to painful ulcers that clouded his vision....

People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility, according to a new study. This “mental rigidity” makes it harder for people to change their ways of thinking or adapt to new environments, say researchers. Importantly, mental rigidity was found in those with the most fervent beliefs and affiliations on both the left and right of the political divide....

Researchers have now overcome this barrier through a combination of clever experiments and cutting-edge simulations. In doing so, they have uncovered a previously unknown role for a universal process called the “Biermann battery effect,” which turns out to impact magnetic reconnection in unexpected ways. The Biermann battery effect, a possible seed for the magnetic fields pervading our universe, generates an electric current that produces these fields. The surprise findings, made through computer simulations, show the effect can play a significant role in the reconnection occurring when the Earth’s magnetosphere interacts with astrophysical plasmas....

Some 40% of plant species are under threat of extinction. Plants that are not directly useful to humans are particularly vulnerable. People often do not recognize how important many plants are due to a cognitive bias sometimes called “plant blindness” or “plant awareness disparity.” While humans are generally concerned with endangered animals, threats to plants are harder to recognize and address. In the United States, for example, plants receive less than 4% of federal funding for endangered species, despite comprising 57% of the endangered species list....

Recently, researchers from various fields have discovered remarkable and seemingly universal correlations between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. As cities expand, they generate more wealth, interconnectivity, and innovations per resident. However, what may be accurate for the overall city population, may not apply to individual residents. “The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policymakers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is,“ says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University....

The locals sold the fossil to scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning, China, who published a description (pdf) of the fossil species in Acta Geologica Sinica, the peer-reviewed journal of the Geological Society of China. The Chinese team gave the spider the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis. But other scientists in Beijing, upon seeing the paper, had suspicions. The spider fossil was huge and strange looking. Concerned, they contacted a U....

A recent study conducted by the University College London (UCL) suggests that a gold coin long thought to be a forgery depicting a long-lost Roman emperor by the name of Sponsian is really authentic. The coin was discovered in Transylvania, in modern-day Romania, in 1713 and is now kept in The Hunterian collection at the University of Glasgow. A few other coins of the same design were also discovered there....

Indianapolis, IN – If you had a time machine that could take you anywhere in the past, what time would you choose? Most people would probably pick the era of the dinosaurs in hopes of spotting a T. rex. But many astronomers would choose the period, four and a half billion years ago, that our solar system formed. In lieu of a working time machine, we learn about the birth of our Sun and its planets by studying young stars in our galaxy....

Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, have postulated that the existence of a long-lost stellar binary companion in the Sun’s birth cluster—the collection of stars that formed together with the Sun from the same dense cloud of molecular gas—could explain the formation of the Oort cloud as we observe it today. Popular theory associates the formation of the Oort cloud with debris left over from the formation of the solar system and its neighbors, where objects were scattered by the planets to great distances and some were exchanged amongst stars....

For more than a century, biologists have been perplexed by the varied life cycles exhibited by different animal species. While some species, including humans and most vertebrates, develop directly into a fully formed—yet smaller—version of an adult, others follow a fascinating metamorphic process that involves the emergence of intermediate forms known as larvae, which eventually transform into their adult counterparts. Still, the understanding researchers had of why larvae exist and how they originated was limited....

“This is a very, very significant finding,” says LJI Professor Michael Croft, Ph.D., senior author of the new study and member of the LJI Center for Autoimmunity and Inflammation. “This research gives us a better understanding of the potential of therapeutic targeting of LIGHT and what we might do to relieve some of the symptoms and some of the inflammatory features seen in patients who have severe asthma.” This research was published recently in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology....

A recent study led by Dr. Danna Qasim, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, suggests that the conditions within interstellar clouds may have had a substantial impact on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system. “Carbonaceous chondrites, some of the oldest objects in the universe, are meteorites that are thought to have contributed to the origins of life. They contain several different molecules and organic substances, including amines and amino acids, which are key building blocks of life that were critical to creating life on Earth....

Within such displays, electricity-conducting and light-emitting components are layered onto a transparent film. To make them flexible enough to withstand the bending required to stay on skin or other soft surfaces, researchers have so far relied on films made of plastic — a substance derived from fossil fuels, a limited resource and a source of pollution. Hai-Dong Yu, Juqing Liu, Wei Huang, and colleagues wanted to find a more sustainable and environmentally friendly material for the film....

A review of clinical trials has found that higher vitamin D intake was associated with a 15 percent decreased likelihood for developing type 2 diabetes in adults with prediabetes. The review was published on February 7, 2023, in Annals of Internal Medicine. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin available in or added to some foods, as a supplement, or produced by the body when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin....

A new study led by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has shown that people who are vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, and have a history of certain psychiatric conditions, have a heightened risk of COVID-19 — a finding that may be related to impaired immune response as well as risky behaviors associated with some disorders. The researchers from UCSF and the San Francisco VA Health Care System found that patients over 65 with substance abuse, psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, adjustment disorder and anxiety, faced increased risks of up to 24% for breakthrough COVID....

What makes this moon so alluring is the possibility that it may possess all of the ingredients necessary for life. Scientists have evidence that one of these ingredients, liquid water, is present under the icy surface and may sometimes erupt into space in huge geysers. But no one has been able to confirm the presence of water in these plumes by directly measuring the water molecule itself. Now, an international research team led out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected the water vapor for the first time above Europa’s surface....

The Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Northwest Fisheries Science Center presented their annual “California Current Ecosystem Status Report” to the Pacific Fishery Management Council at the Council’s meeting in Rohnert Park, California, on Friday, March 9. The California Current encompasses the entire West Coast marine ecosystem, and the report informs the Council about conditions and trends in the ecosystem that may affect marine species and fishing in the coming year....

Until now, this question could only be addressed by studying living animals and their relatives, but now the research team has found evidence that a key step in this major evolutionary transition occurred long before complex animals appear in the fossil record, in the fossilized embryos that resemble multicellular stages in the life cycle of single-celled relatives of animals. The team discovered the fossils named Caveasphaera in 609 million-year-old rocks in the Guizhou Province of South China....

Saturn was thought to be the only planet in our solar system with rings for a very long time. The rings around Saturn were discovered nearly 400 years ago by the famous astronomer, Galileo Galilei. He used a very simple telescope that he constructed himself from lenses and pointed it at the planets in the night sky. One of the first objects he looked at was Saturn. At first, he thought that Saturn had two large moons on either side of the planet because his telescope wasn’t very good and only produced very blurry images....

A study reveals one of the reasons why neurons die in Parkinson’s patients According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, around 7 million individuals worldwide suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Although the origins of this neurodegenerative disorder are not entirely understood, it is known that many of its symptoms are caused by the death of neurons that create dopamine. A study conducted in mice by a research team at the University of Cordoba has uncovered one of the causes of this neuronal loss: the key resides in the protein called DJ1, whose association with Parkinson’s disease has previously been established, but its specific role was unknown until now....