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Largest real-world study of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Adolescents published by Israel’s Clalit Research Institute in The New England Journal of Medicine. The Clalit Research Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University, analyzed one of the world’s largest integrated health record databases to examine the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162B2 vaccine against the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 among adolescents. The study provides the largest peer-reviewed evaluation of the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine among adolescents in a nationwide mass-vaccination setting, and the first such study where the Delta variant was dominant....

Two COVID-19 pandemic curves emerged within many cities during the one-year period from March 2020 to March 2021. Oddly, the number of total daily infections reported during the first wave is much lower than that of the second, but the total number of daily deaths reported during the first wave is much higher than the second wave. This contradiction inspired researchers from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus to explore the uncertainty in the daily number of infections reported during the first wave, caused by insufficient contact tracing between March and April 2020....

Blue and humpback whales, along with other marine giants of today, regularly undertake long migrations to reach waters where predators are scarce to breed and give birth. They tend to congregate year after year along the same stretches of coastline. A new study by a team of scientists from various institutions, including the University of Utah, the Smithsonian Institution, Vanderbilt University, the University of Nevada, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Texas at Austin, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and the University of Oxford, indicates that nearly 200 million years before the evolution of giant whales, marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs, which were the size of school buses, may have also undertaken similar migrations for breeding and giving birth in safer environments....

A study led by the University of Vienna, with participation from the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), has found that fish living in the dark depths of the ocean (below 200 meters in the water column) will likely shrink in size due to climate warming, which could have significant ecological consequences. The findings of this research have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences....

The latest study is the first to show how the potent psychedelic changes our waking brain waves — with researchers comparing its powerful effects to ‘dreaming while awake’. The work, led by researchers from the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and published in the journal Scientific Reports on November 19, 2019, may help to explain why people taking DMT and ayahuasca experience intense visual imagery and immersive ‘waking-dream’ like experiences....

“We saw waves of infection rise in warm seasons and warm regions in the first year of the pandemic, and there is no evidence that this couldn’t happen again in the coming year,” said Ben Zaitchik, the co-chair of the World Meteorological Organization team and a Johns Hopkins University earth scientist. At the start of the pandemic, there was some speculation that seasonal weather could influence the spread of COVID-19, with the virus spreading more readily in cooler, drier weather and spreading less in warmer, wetter seasons....

Stretchable, bendable, and foldable electronics are crucial for the development of emerging technologies like adaptive displays, artificial skin, and biometric and wearable devices. This presents a unique challenge of balancing electronic performance and mechanical flexibility. The difficulty lies in finding a material that can withstand a wide array of deformations, like stretching, bending, and twisting, all while maintaining electrical conductivity. Adding to the challenge is the need for this conductivity to be engineered into a variety of different surfaces, such as cloth, fiber, glass, or plastic....

Researchers published the new phosphor on February 19 in the journal Joule. Phosphors, which are substances that emit light, are one of the key ingredients to make white LEDs. They are crystalline powders that absorb energy from blue or near-UV light and emit light in the visible spectrum. The combination of the different colored lights creates white light. The phosphors used in many commercial white LEDs have several disadvantages, however....

Despite substantial progress over the past half a century in understanding of how galaxies form, important open questions remain regarding how precisely the diffuse gas known as the ‘intergalactic medium’ is converted into stars. One possibility, suggested in recent theoretical models, is that the early phase of galaxy formation involves an epoch when galaxies contain a great amount of gas but are still inefficient at forming stars. Direct proof of such a ‘Dark Phase’ has been so far elusive, however — after all, dark galaxies do not emit much visible light....

Researchers analyzed nearly 130 subjects with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 illness between three and six months after initial infection. Three patients were hospitalized while the rest were treated as outpatients and experienced mild infection, with symptoms including headaches, chills, and loss of taste or smell. The results, published in Microbiology Spectrum, reveal approximately 90% of participants produced spike and nucleocapsid antibody responses, and all but one had persistent antibody levels at follow up....

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have shown for the first time that bursts of star formation have a major impact far beyond the boundaries of their host galaxy. These energetic events can affect galactic gas at distances of up to twenty times greater than the visible size of the galaxy — altering how the galaxy evolves, and how matter and energy is spread throughout the Universe. When galaxies form new stars, they sometimes do so in frantic episodes of activity known as starbursts....

Mining the world’s most comprehensive drug repurposing collection for COVID-19 therapies, scientists have identified 90 existing drugs or drug candidates with antiviral activity against the coronavirus that’s driving the ongoing global pandemic. Among those compounds, the Scripps Research study identified four clinically approved drugs and nine compounds in other stages of development with strong potential to be repurposed as oral drugs for COVID-19, according to results published today (June 3, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications....

The webs of Nephila pilipes also capture prey during the night, and the experiments demonstrated that the yellow color alone was very effective at luring nocturnal insects. Orb-weaving spiders are found in different light conditions, and comparisons between many different species revealed a link between light environments and orb-weaver body color patterns. Species that build their webs in well-lit environments are more likely to evolve the yellow mosaic color pattern, found to be so effective at luring prey in these experiments....

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light — gamma rays — from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and pulsars....

Horseshoe crabs, including the iconic Limulus we know today, have existed for more than 450 million years. Over that long history, evolutionary change has particularly affected the nature of their legs. A new fossil discovery in Britain captures a previously unseen stage in the evolution of these ancient arthropods — the transformation of two-branched legs into nearly identical but separately attached limbs, one of which was destined to disappear. “This fossil provides remarkable confirmation of the loss of a limb branch during horseshoe crab evolution, a change predicted by the common presence of two branches in the arthropods that appeared earlier, during the Cambrian explosion,” said Derek E....

Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy are now aboard the International Space Station following Crew Dragon’s hatch opening at 10:13 a.m. EDT, Saturday, April 9. It is the first mission with an entirely private crew to arrive at the orbiting laboratory. After a journey of almost 21 hours, Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy arrived at the International Space Station at 8:29 a....

Since August, beekeepers around the town of Ribeauville have been discovering that their hives are carrying unidentified colorful substances, which turned their honey into unnatural shades of blue and green. The investigation led them to blame a biogas plant, situated 2.5 miles away, which has been processing waste from a Mars plant producing M&M’s. The resulting honey is unsellable and has affected dozens of beekeepers in the region, which are already dealing with high bee mortality rates and dwindling honey supplies following a harsh winter....

Soil decontamination, which began in 2013 following the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, has now been nearly completed in the priority areas identified[1]. Indeed, areas that are difficult to access have not yet been decontaminated, such as the municipalities located in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear power plant. Olivier Evrard, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and coordinator of the study (CEA/CNRS/UVSQ), in collaboration with Patrick Laceby of Alberta Environment and Parks (Canada) and Atsushi Nakao of Kyoto Prefecture University (Japan), compiled the results of approximately sixty scientific studies published on the topic....

“We know that the mantle is heterogeneous in composition, but it’s been difficult to figure out how large or small those heterogeneities might be,” said Boda Liu, a Ph.D. student in geology at Brown. “What we show here is that there must be heterogeneities of at least a kilometer in size to produce the chemical signature we observe in rocks derived from mantle materials.” The research, which Liu co-authored with Yan Liang, a professor in Brown’s Department of Earth Environmental and Planetary Sciences, is published in Science Advances....

The runaway train that is climate change is about to blow past another milestone: global fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions will reach yet another record high. Driven by rising natural gas and oil consumption, levels of CO2 are expected to hit 37 billion metric tons this year, according to new estimates from the Global Carbon Project, an initiative led by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson. The findings are outlined in three new papers published in Earth System Science Data, Environmental Research Letters, and Nature Climate Change....