CfA astronomer Igor Chilingarian led a team that has for the first time identified a set of galaxies with active nuclei hosting intermediate-mass black holes. They used optical and near-infrared galaxy surveys to identify candidate sources from the intensity and velocities of their atomic emission lines, selecting three hundred and five likely IMBH candidates. They then obtained X-ray measurements from the Chandra and/or XMM missions which confirmed that ten of these nuclei were IMBHs and were actively accreting....

Despite the hundreds of records of these enigmatic sources, researchers have only pinpointed the precise location of four such bursts. Now there’s a fifth, detected by a team of international scientists that includes West Virginia University researchers. The finding, which relied on eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China, was published today (Monday, January 6, 2020) in Nature. There are two primary types of fast radio bursts, explained Kshitij Aggarwal, a physics graduate student at WVU and a co-author of the paper: repeaters, which flash multiple times, and non-repeaters, one-off events....

Ph.D. students Ekaterina Chornaya, Anton Kochergin and graduated student Alexey Matkin, led by Evgenij Zubko, the leading researcher at the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) School of Natural Sciences, studied the asteroid 3200 Phaeton using the polarimetric method. They measured the degree of linear polarization of the sunlight scattered from the asteroid in collaboration with their colleagues from the Ussuriysk Astrophysical Observatory and the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences....

Delivering what has been so challenging to produce, researchers present an engineered analog of tooth enamel – an ideal model for designing biomimetic materials – designed to closely mimic the composition and structure of biological teeth’s hard mineralized outer layer. It demonstrates exceptional mechanical properties, they say. Natural tooth enamel – the thin outer layer of our teeth – is the hardest biological material in the human body. It is renowned for its high stiffness, hardness, viscoelasticity, strength, and toughness and exhibits exceptional damage resistance, despite being only several millimeters thick....

After the battle, the dragons decided to stay in the mortal world, taking human form to help with farming and expanding the country. Legend says the Mother Dragon landed in what is known today as Hạ Long Bay; her children set down in Bai Tu Long Bay. Some say the emeralds used during the attack were scattered around the waters and formed the islands seen today. The image at the top of this page shows the two bays along the northeast coast of Vietnam, about 170 kilometers (100 miles) east of Hanoi....

A team of researchers isolated and determined the unique genetic profile of beige fat for the first time, finding that beige fat is genetically distinct from brown fat and may have therapeutic potential for treating obesity. Scientists at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have isolated a new type of energy-burning fat cell in adult humans, which they say may have therapeutic potential for treating obesity. Called “beige fat,” the cells are found in scattered pea-sized deposits beneath the skin near the collarbone and along the spine in adult humans....

Spider silk is known for its exceptional toughness and flexibility. It is several times stronger than steel, and yet is much more flexible. As a result, efforts are being made by scientists around the world to try to develop analogs that could be used in industrial and medical applications. However, though it is known that the beta-sheets in spider silk are key to its strength, how the sheets are formed is poorly understood, making it difficult to create artificial variants....

Wladek Minor, PhD, of the School of Medicine, and other top structural biologists have led an international team of scientists to investigate the protein structures contained in the virus – structures that are vital to developing treatments and vaccines. The team has created a Web resource that provides scientists an easy way to see the progress of the structural biology community in this area. It also includes the team’s assessment of the quality of the individual models and enhanced versions of these structures, when possible....

To create an antiviral that prevents infection, researchers must first understand the exact mechanisms (at the molecular level) by which the virus infects a cell. This is the task that David Alsteens’ team at the University of Louvain’s Institute of Biomolecular Sciences and Technologies (UCLouvain) in Belgium has been working on for the past two years. They investigated the interaction between sialic acids (SAs), which are types of sugar residues found on the surface of cells, and the spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 (using atomic force microscopy) in a study to be published today (May 10, 2022) in the journal Nature Communications....

New research highlights the need for heightened awareness and early testing for patients with signs of clotting disorder following vaccination. New research has shown that early testing for blood clots in patients who had received the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine led to them being treated successfully, highlighting the need for heightened awareness of the risk among doctors. The work, led by researchers from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and the National Coagulation Centre at St James’s Hospital, is published in the British Journal of Haematology....

Fluid intelligence is arguably the defining feature of human cognition. It predicts educational and professional success, social mobility, health, and longevity. It also correlates with many cognitive abilities such as memory. Fluid intelligence is thought to be a key feature involved in “active thinking” – a set of complex mental processes such as those involved in abstraction, judgment, attention, strategy generation, and inhibition. These skills can all be used in everyday activities – from organizing a dinner party to filling out a tax return....

The uncertainty principle, first introduced by Werner Heisenberg in the late 1920’s, is a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics. In the quantum world, particles like the electrons that power all electrical products can also behave like waves. As a result, particles cannot have a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously. For instance, measuring the momentum of a particle leads to a disturbance of position, and therefore the position cannot be precisely defined....

Cassini scientists have announced that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Hubble researchers report additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa. “This is the closest we’ve come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. The methane hydrates could lead to less stable sediments in the region if the warming continues, states Matthew Hornbach, a marine geologist at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and lead author of the study. These warmer temperatures could destabilize up to 2.5 gigatonnes of methane hydrate along the continental slope of the eastern USA. This region is already prone to underwater landslides, which could release the methane....

An autonomous spacecraft exploring the far reaches of the cosmos descends through the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet. The robotic vehicle, and the researchers who programmed it, don’t know much about this environment. With so much uncertainty, how can the spacecraft plot a safe trajectory that will keep it from being squashed by some randomly moving obstacle or blown off course by sudden, gale-force winds? MIT researchers have developed a new technique that could help this spacecraft land safely....

The research findings, an important step towards commercial viability of perovskite solar cells, are published today (May 21, 2020) in the journal Science. Solar energy systems are now widespread in both industry and domestic housing. Most current systems rely on silicon to convert sunlight into useful energy. However, the energy conversion rate of silicon in solar panels is close to reaching its natural limits. So, scientists have been exploring new materials that can be stacked on top of silicon in order to improve energy conversion rates....

Instead of observing the optical light from starbursts, which is obscured by enormous quantities of dust, scientists instead observed radio waves, measuring the relative abundances of different types of carbon monoxide gas. They were able to differentiate between the gas expelled from massive stars, which shine very brilliantly for a short time, and that expelled from less massive stars, like our own Sun, which can shine steadily for billions of years....

During the end of the last ice age, there were dramatic changes in rainfall across a vast swath of Africa. As the world’s large ice sheets receded in northern and southern latitudes, rainfall in much of Africa increased dramatically, marking the beginning of what is known as the African Humid Period. In a study published in Science, researchers used a complex climate model to simulate that shift in rainfall and better understand the forces that drove it....

The image was taken on October 24, 2017 at 10:32 a.m. PDT (1:32 p.m. EDT). At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 6,281 miles (10,108 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of Jupiter at a latitude of 41.84 degrees. The spatial scale in this image is 4.2 miles/pixel (6.7 kilometers/pixel). The storm is rotating counter-clockwise with a wide range of cloud altitudes. The darker clouds are expected to be deeper in the atmosphere than the brightest clouds....

“Our study focused on a well-known compound, salen. We tried to assess the potential activity of this compound against a series of proteins of the SARS-CoV-2, which cause the COVID-19 disease. We found out that salen can potentially interact with the studied proteins, and the best results were obtained for the non-structural protein nsp14, which protects the virus from destruction,” says Damir Safin, Research Engineer at the Organic Synthesis Laboratory of Ural Federal University....