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Similar to Lyme disease, a new tick-borne infection known as Borrelia miyamotoi has been discovered in people in the United States. A new tick-borne infection that shares many similarities with Lyme disease has been discovered in 18 patients in southern New England and neighboring New York by researchers at the Yale Schools of Public Health and Medicine. The report is published in the January 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine....

The fossils represent the first record of theropods — a dinosaur group that includes both modern birds and their closest non-avian dinosaur relatives — from the Chilean portion of Patagonia. The researchers’ finds include giant megaraptors with large sickle-like claws and birds from the group that also includes today’s modern species. “The fauna of Patagonia leading up to the mass extinction was really diverse,” said lead author Sarah Davis, who completed this work as part of her doctoral studies with Professor Julia Clarke at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences Department of Geological Sciences....

Physicists were surprised by the 2022 discovery that electrons in magnetic iron-germanium crystals could spontaneously and collectively organize their charges into a pattern featuring a standing wave. Magnetism also arises from the collective self-organization of electron spins into ordered patterns, and those patterns rarely coexist with the patterns that produce the standing wave of electrons physicists call a charge density wave. In a study published this week in the journal Nature Physics, Rice University physicists Ming Yi and Pengcheng Dai, and many of their collaborators from the 2022 study, present an array of experimental evidence that shows their charge density wave discovery was rarer still, a case where the magnetic and electronic orders don’t simply coexist but are directly linked....

The most recent report, authored by 23 researchers at 14 institutes, was published today (January 11, 2022) in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. It summarizes two international datasets: from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and from the National Centers for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that analyze observations of ocean heat content and their impact dating from the 1950s....

The newly found galaxy, labelled CR7, is three times brighter than the brightest distant galaxy known up to now. Astronomers have long theorized the existence of a first generation of stars — known as Population III stars — that were born out of the primordial material from the Big Bang [1]. All the heavier chemical elements — such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and iron, which are essential to life — were forged in the bellies of stars....

Yes, NASA really is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. That spacecraft is DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Now, asteroids hit the Earth all of the time. Luckily, the ones that are big enough to cause widespread damage are pretty rare and none are expected in the near future. NASA and others are actively tracking asteroids, but also we haven’t found all of them yet. So, it makes sense to do this first test to demonstrate if we needed to protect the Earth what might we do....

UCLA astrophysicists are among the first scientists to use the James Webb Space Telescope to get a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the universe.The studies reveal unprecedented detail about events that took place within the first billion years after the Big Bang.The UCLA projects were among a small number selected by NASA to test the capabilities of the Webb telescope. The earliest galaxies were cosmic fireballs converting gas into stars at breathtaking speeds across their full extent, reports a study led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) published in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal....

The widespread use of Roundup on farms has sparked concerns over potential health and environmental effects globally. Since the 1990s use of the herbicide boomed, as the farming industry adopted “Roundup Ready” genetically modified crop seeds that are resistant to the herbicide. “Farmers spray their corn and soy fields to eliminate weeds and boost production, but this has led to glyphosate leaching into the surrounding environment. In Quebec, for example, traces of glyphosate have been found in Montérégie rivers,” says Andrew Gonzalez, a McGill biology professor, and Liber Ero Chair in Conservation Biology....

Black holes are objects with such strong gravitational fields that not even light travels quickly enough to escape their grasp, hence the description ‘black’. They are hugely important in astronomy because they offer the most efficient way of extracting energy from matter. As a direct result, gas in-fall – accretion – onto black holes must be powering the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. The center of almost every galaxy – like our own Milky Way – contains a so-called supermassive black hole, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun....

In a study published on February 15 in the journal Pediatrics, researchers in the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital found that in the United States, youth suicides increased during COVID-19, with significantly more suicides than expected among males, non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaskan Native youth, and non-Hispanic Black youth. “To our knowledge, no national study examined changes in youth suicide rates that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jeffrey A Bridge, PhD, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital....

Infrared spectroscopy is a non-invasive tool to identify unknown samples and known chemical substances. It is based on how different molecules interact with infrared light. You may have seen this tool at airports, where they screen for illicit drugs. The technique has many applications: liquid biopsy, environmental gas monitoring, contaminant detection, forensic analyses, exoplanet search, etc. But the traditional infrared spectroscopy methods provide low (temporal) resolution data. They are usually only applied for static samples because spectral data acquisition is a slow process....

Most black holes are too small on the sky for us to determine their immediate environment, but we can still explore these mysterious objects by watching how matter behaves as it nears, and falls into, them. As material spirals towards a black hole, it is heated up and emits X-rays that, in turn, echo and reverberate as they interact with nearby gas. These regions of space are highly distorted and warped due to the extreme nature and crushingly strong gravity of the black hole....

“The closer to humans and their infrastructure, the smaller the habitats used by various types of animals,” summarizes Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell. This reduction in animal movements can have significant consequences for ecosystems, for instance, a reduction in seed dispersal, changes to food chains, and decreasing animal numbers. Martin Wikelski and his colleagues have identified several root causes for this development: Human infrastructure disturbs and fragments the habitats of wild animals, which limits their movements....

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Rhea. Image scale is 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) per pixel. The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on September 15, 2017. The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington....

“The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are intended to provide science-based dietary advice that promotes good health and reduces major chronic diseases. Thus, it is critical to examine the associations between DGAs-recommended dietary patterns and long-term health outcomes, especially mortality,” said corresponding author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Nutrition. The was recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Few studies have evaluated whether greater adherence to the DGAs-recommended dietary patterns is associated with long-term risk of total and cause-specific mortality....

A massive and rare merging of two galaxies has been spotted in images taken by the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation. Follow-up studies by several telescopes on the ground and in space, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, tell a tale of two faraway galaxies intertwined and furiously making stars. Eventually, the duo will settle down to form one super-giant elliptical galaxy....

This is despite sharp declines in overall childhood death rates over the past decade, helped in part by the introduction of new vaccination programs, suggest the researchers. The UK has one of the highest childhood death rates in Europe, and the researchers wanted to find out if anything had changed since they last analyzed data on childhood deaths for 2003-5. They drew on electronic death registrations for England and Wales, covering children from the ages of 28 days up to 15 years, for the period 2013 to 2015 inclusive....

Among the key findings: Greenland has an anomalously high heat flux in a relatively large northern region spreading from the interior to the east and west.Southern Greenland has relatively low geothermal heat flux, corresponding with the extent of the North Atlantic Craton, a stable portion of one of the oldest extant continental crusts on the planet.The research model predicts slightly elevated heat flux upstream of several fast-flowing glaciers in Greenland, including Jakobshavn Isbræ in the central-west, the fastest-moving glacier on Earth....

By using multiple observatories, two recent studies show how solar flares exhibit pulses or oscillations in the amount of energy being sent out. Such research provides new insights into the origins of these massive solar flares as well as the space weather they produce, which is key information as humans and robotic missions venture out into the solar system, farther and farther from home. The first study spotted oscillations during a flare — unexpectedly — in measurements of the Sun’s total output of extreme ultraviolet energy, a type of light invisible to human eyes....

Normally, “More than 10,000 species of microorganism live in the human intestine,” said corresponding author Jung Ok Shim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, Department of Pediatrics, Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul. Disruption of the microbiome of the human gastrointestinal tract can trigger IBS. Typically, IBS causes bloating, diarrhea, and stomach pain or cramps. Previous studies of gut bacteria in patients with IBS have been controversial, with inconsistent results, due to small sample size and lack of consistent analytical methods used among these studies, said Shim....