NGC 6380 is not a particularly exciting name, but it indicates that this cluster is cataloged in the New General Catalogue (NGC), which was originally compiled in 1888. This cluster has, however, been known by many other names. It was originally discovered by James Dunlop in 1826, and he rather immodestly named it Dun 538. Eight years later, in 1834, it was independently rediscovered by John Herschel and he (similarly immodestly) went on to name it H 3688....

An international consortium of leading migraine scientists identified more than 120 regions of the genome that are connected to risk of migraine. The groundbreaking study helps researchers better understand the biological basis of migraine and its subtypes and could speed up the search for new treatment of the condition, which affects over a billion individuals wordwide. In the largest genome study of migraine yet, researchers have more than tripled the number of known genetic risk factors for migraine....

Health administration costs were more than fourfold higher per capita in the U.S. than in Canada ($2,479 vs. $551 per person) which implemented a single-payer Medicare for All system in 1962. Americans spent $844 per person on insurers’ overhead while Canadians spent $146. Additionally, doctors, hospitals, and other health providers in the U.S. spent far more on administration due to the complexity entailed in billing multiple payers and dealing with the bureaucratic hurdles insurers impose....

“There is no need for the implants to be removed because they will ultimately be absorbed by the body,” says first author Saifullah Dehghani Nazhvani, of the Shiraz University School of Veterinary Medicine’s department of surgery in Iran. “Therefore, the implants can be used for wild birds, such as eagles, owls, and seagulls.” Nazhvani works at a veterinary clinic at Shiraz University, where they frequently see wild and companion birds suffering from fractures in their wings or legs....

For the first time, scientists believe they have detected a merger of two black holes with eccentric orbits. According to a paper published in Nature Astronomy by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and the University of Florida, this can help explain how some of the black hole mergers detected by LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration are much heavier than previously thought possible....

A new study of airflow patterns inside a car’s passenger cabin offers some suggestions for potentially reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission while sharing rides with others. The study, by a team of Brown University researchers, used computer models to simulate the airflow inside a compact car with various combinations of windows open or closed. The simulations showed that opening windows — the more windows the better — created airflow patterns that dramatically reduced the concentration of airborne particles exchanged between a driver and a single passenger....

Scientific experts agree that widespread testing, contract tracing and isolation of infected individuals will be critical for reopening society until a vaccine for coronavirus becomes available. Contact tracing, the determination of who a person diagnosed with COVID-19 encountered while possibly infectious, has attracted the attention of technology companies. Most notably, Apple and Google have partnered to develop a tool that tracks interactions between people with smartphones running their operating systems, so that people who were recently nearby an infected individual will be notified and advised to receive testing....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed comet 46P/Wirtanen on December 13, when the comet was 7.4 million miles (12 million kilometers) from Earth. In this visible-light image, the comet’s nucleus is hidden in the center of a fuzzy glow from the comet’s coma. The coma is a cloud of gas and dust that the comet has ejected during its pass through the inner solar system due to heating from the Sun....

V 372 Orionis is a particular type of variable star known as an Orion Variable. These young stars experience some tempestuous moods and growing pains, which are visible to astronomers as irregular variations in luminosity. Orion Variables are often associated with diffuse nebulae, and V 372 Orionis is no exception; the patchy gas and dust of the Orion Nebula pervade this scene. This image overlays data from two of Hubble’s instruments....

However, NGC 3384 also displays a hint of disc-like structure towards its center, in the form of a central ‘bar’ of stars cutting through its center. Many spirals also boast such a bar, the Milky Way included; galactic bars are thought to funnel material through and around a galaxy’s core, helping to maintain and fuel the activities and processes occurring there. NGC 3384 is located approximately 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion)....

The players are two dwarf galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, both of which orbit our own Milky Way Galaxy. But as they go around the Milky Way, they are also orbiting each other. Each one tugs at the other, and one of them has pulled out a huge cloud of gas from its companion. Called the Leading Arm, this arching collection of gas connects the Magellanic Clouds to the Milky Way....

This image also conceals an astronomical interloper. A minor asteroid, only a handful of kilometers across, can be seen streaking across the upper left-hand side of this image. The trail of the asteroid is visible as four streaks of light separated by small gaps. These streaks of light represent the four separate exposures that were combined to create this image, the small gaps between each observation being necessary to change the filters inside NASA/ESA Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)....

This newly released Hubble image shows the globular cluster IC 4499. Globular clusters are big balls of old stars that orbit around their host galaxy. It has long been believed that all the stars within a globular cluster form at the about same time, a property which can be used to determine the cluster’s age. For more massive globulars however, detailed observations have shown that this is not entirely true — there is evidence that they instead consist of multiple populations of stars born at different times....

The researchers from Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology engineered functional human spinal cord tissues, from human materials and cells, and implanted them in lab models that featured chronic paralysis, successfully restoring walking abilities in 80% of tests.The technology behind the breakthrough uses patient tissue samples, transforming it into a functioning spinal cord implant via a process that mimics the development of the spinal cord in human embryos.The researchers: “Our goal for the next few years is to engineer personalized spinal cord implants to repair tissue damaged from injury without the risk of implant rejection....

Published in Animal Conservation today (January 27, 2020) the study saw researchers from ZSL’s Institute of Zoology and Imperial College London analyze the genetic diversity of 149 African lions in the KAZA (Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area) in northern Botswana between 2010 to 2013. While human impacts are the leading cause of genetic diversity loss in many cases, scientists studying the lions found that diversity loss across the population was instead caused by the lions’ need to adapt to differing habitats....

The research team recruited participants enrolled in a local opioid treatment program to test the effects of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, a treatment that involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized environment. Published in the Journal of Addictions Nursing, the first paper describes a pilot study of 31 participants that showed that those who had received hyperbaric oxygen therapy as part of a planned methadone taper were able to maintain a significantly larger dose reduction of 4....

The immunologists, led by Dr. Nigel Stevenson, Assistant Professor in Viral Immunology at Trinity, have found how SARS and MERS proteins block the induction of antiviral proteins, which prevents us from mounting a powerful innate immune response against infection. The coronaviruses SARS and MERS emerged in 2002 and 2012, respectively. Both had higher fatality rates than COVID-19 (around 10% and 40%, respectively), but both infected far fewer people (around 10,000 and 3,000, respectively)....

Field trial shows simple QKD system works with existing telecommunication network in Italy. In a new study, researchers demonstrate an automated, easy-to-operate quantum key distribution (QKD) system using the fiber network in the city of Padua, Italy. The field test represents an important step toward implementing this highly secure quantum communication technology using the type of communication networks already in place in many regions around the world. QKD offers impenetrable encryption for data communication because it uses the quantum properties of light to generate secure random keys for encrypting and decrypting data....

This natural color image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on November 19, 2009, at a distance of approximately 713,300 miles (1,148,000 kilometers) from Rhea. 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....

New composite images made from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are the most detailed global infrared views ever produced of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And data used to build those images provides strong evidence that the northern hemisphere of the moon has been resurfaced with ice from its interior. Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) collected light reflected off Saturn, its rings and its ten major icy moons — light that is visible to humans as well as infrared light....