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These latter events can happen in binary star systems, where two stars attempt to share dominion. While the exploding star gives off lots of evidence about its identity, astronomers must engage in detective work to learn about the errant companion that triggered the explosion. On Jan. 10 at the 2019 American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, an international team of astronomers announced that they have identified the type of companion star that made its partner in a binary system, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, explode....

A lensing cluster is a gravitationally bound collection of galaxies, hundreds or even thousands, whose mass acts as a gravitational lens to collect and reimage the light of more distant objects. These lensing clusters make excellent targets for astronomical research into the early universe because they magnify the faint radiation from more distant galaxies seen behind them, making these remote objects accessible to our telescopes. Most searches in “lensed galaxies” have so far been done at optical, near infrared or submillimeter wavelengths, and the latter have been successful at identifying luminous dusty galaxies from earlier cosmic epochs that are powered by bursts of star formation that were more common back then....

On April 18, 2015, a fast radio burst or FRB was detected by the 64-m Parkes radio telescope of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia within the framework of the SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts (SUPERB) project. An international alert was triggered to follow it up with other telescopes and within a few hours, a number of telescopes around the world were looking for the signal, including CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany....

The existence of such waves — gravitational waves — was first predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago on the basis of his theory of general relativity. And as always: Einstein was right. But it took until 2015 for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory to detect gravitational waves for the first time: findings which earned the LIGO team the Nobel Prize in physics two years later. In addition to the shockwave this discovery sent across the scientific community, it also gave researchers the new field of gravitational wave astronomy....

Stars formed in two different epochs through different mechanisms. There was a long dormant period in between, when star formation ceased. Our home galaxy has turned out to have a more dramatic history than was originally thought. Noguchi has calculated the evolution of the Milky Way over a 10 billion year period, including “cold flow accretion”, a new idea proposed by Avishai Dekel (The Hebrew University) and colleagues for how galaxies collect surrounding gas during their formation....

Now, a new study from Tulane University suggests that a low-carb diet may help those with unmedicated diabetes, as well as those who are at risk for developing the condition, reduce their blood sugar levels. The research, which was published recently in the journal JAMA Network Open, compared two groups: one that was given a low-carb diet and another that continued eating as normal. After six months, the low-carb diet group experienced higher decreases in hemoglobin A1c, a blood sugar level measure, than the control group....

The analysis, which included all randomized controlled trials published to date (18 studies with 3,478 patients), showed that muscle relaxants and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could effectively and rapidly reduce symptoms. The combination of NSAIDs and acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol) was associated with a greater improvement than NSAIDs alone. NSAIDs, which are medicines that are widely used to relieve pain, decrease inflammation, and reduce high temperatures, include the over-the-counter medications ibuprofen, aspirin, and naproxen....

Biomedical engineers have grown the first functioning human skeletal muscle from induced pluripotent stem cells. The advance builds on work published in 2015 when researchers at Duke University grew the first functioning human muscle tissue from cells obtained from muscle biopsies. The ability to start from cellular scratch using non-muscle tissue will allow scientists to grow far more muscle cells, provide an easier path to genome editing and cellular therapies, and develop individually tailored models of rare muscle diseases for drug discovery and basic biology studies....

Researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Heart Institute report in the journal Circulation they tested a manufactured peptide called pUR4 to block the fibronectin protein in human heart cells donated by heart failure patients. The treatment prevented the human heart cells from failing and restored their function. The treatment also reduced fibrosis and improved heart function after a simulated heart attack in mice. Fibronectin is normally a good actor in the body....

During a chance encounter with what appears to be an unusually strong blast of solar wind at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected particles being accelerated to ultra-high energies. This is similar to the acceleration that takes place around distant supernovas. Since we can’t travel out to the far-off stellar explosions right now, the shockwave that forms from the flow of solar wind around Saturn’s magnetic field provides a rare laboratory for scientists with the Cassini mission — a partnership involving NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — to observe this phenomenon up-close....

Located roughly 6500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Circinus (The Compass) this astronomical beauty formed during the final death throes of a massive star. CVMP 1 is a planetary nebula; it emerged when an old red giant star blew off its outer layers in the form of a tempestuous stellar wind [1]. As this cast-aside stellar atmosphere sped outwards into interstellar space, the hot, exposed core of the progenitor star began to energize the ejected gases and cause them to glow....

Due to the submicron size of the grains and their even distribution in the whole volume of the material, the yttrium oxide and magnesium oxide (Y2O3–MgO) ceramics possesses advanced optical, thermophysical, and mechanical properties (thermal stability, thermal conductivity, hardness, etc.) and surpasses its single-phase commercial analogs Y2O3 and MgO by these parameters. The team managed to achieve such advanced characteristics thanks to an innovative method – spark plasma sintering of yttrium and magnesium oxide nanopowders....

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, Dr. Emily Spaulding and Dr. Dustin Updike have identified a homolog of the well-known human protein Nucleolin in C. elegans, a small transparent roundworm. Nucleolin has been associated with human neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. However, this new discovery challenges recent theories about the role that structures inside the nucleus may play in such disorders and provides a powerful new tool for studying the function of Nucleolin and its contribution to disease....

Neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores left behind after massive stars collapse, contain the densest matter known in the Universe outside of a black hole. New results from Chandra and other X-ray telescopes have provided one of the most reliable determinations yet of the relation between the radius of a neutron star and its mass. These results constrain how nuclear matter – protons and neutrons, and their constituent quarks – interact under the extreme conditions found in neutron stars....

A research team led by Prof. MA Keping from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with scientists from the Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE) at Aarhus University (Denmark), revealed that narrow-ranged plants in China are more likely to be “losers”, whereas widespread species tend to be “winners” under the condition of intensive human activity. This study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on December 16, 2019....

The study, which investigated the effect of coffee ingestion in a 5km (3.1 miles) cycling trial, found that it had a positive effect on the time trial performance of both sexes. The study’s findings suggest that both men and women respond similarly to coffee and that coffee ingestion may be a practical source of caffeine prior to exercise to improve performance. Participants restricted coffee consumption for 12 hours before drinking either: coffee providing 3mg....

A recent study showed that using the combined treatment of kinase inhibitors dabrafenib and trametinib, while targeting different points in the same growth-factor pathway, delayed the development of treatment resistance in patients with BRAF-positive metastatic malignant melanoma. The results of a phase I/II study of treatment with the kinase inhibitors dabrafenib and trametinib were published online on September 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with a presentation at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Vienna....

They can already stand, walk, wriggle under obstacles, and change colors. Now researchers are adding a new skill to the soft robot arsenal: jumping. Using small explosions produced by a mix of methane and oxygen, researchers at Harvard have designed a soft robot that can leap as much as a foot in the air. That ability to jump could one day prove critical in allowing the robots to avoid obstacles during search and rescue operations....

In a new study, researchers identify three clinical COVID-19 phenotypes, reflecting patient populations with different comorbidities, complications and clinical outcomes. The three phenotypes are described in a paper published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE 1st authors Elizabeth Lusczek and Nicholas Ingraham of University of Minnesota Medical School, US, and colleagues. COVID-19 has infected more than 18 million people and led to more than 700,000 deaths around the world....

Now, researchers at Tulane University have shown in detail how COVID-19 affects the central nervous system, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. The findings are the first comprehensive assessment of neuropathology associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in a nonhuman primate model. The team of researchers found severe brain inflammation and injury consistent with reduced blood flow or oxygen to the brain, including neuron damage and death. They also found small bleeds in the brain....