The paper, “All-Soft Material System for Strong Soft Actuators,” is based on work in Kramer-Bottiglio’s lab combining a heating composite they’ve developed with an actuator created in a lab at Columbia. The combination resulted in a new, silicone-based material that’s completely soft and electrically stimulated. It produces forces comparable to well-established pneumatically powered soft robots without the need for bulky components such as air compressors. “Soft roboticists have been searching for new actuator technologies,” said Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science....

The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Center is a cooperation between the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). The building is a donation from the Klaus Tschira Stiftung (KTS), a foundation that promotes natural sciences, mathematics, and computer science. ESO will run the facility. This trailer presents the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Center, a new cutting-edge astronomy center for the public. The ESO Supernova — which is free to enter — has the largest tilted planetarium in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and a captivating 2200 m2 interactive astronomical exhibition....

A Rutgers philosopher examines the ethical questions around human challenge trials for COVID-19 vaccines. The first human challenge trial to test COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is set to begin in January in the United Kingdom. These trials, in which healthy volunteers are infected with the virus after being given different vaccines under development, have sparked ethical debates around the benefits of developing a vaccine quickly and the risks of directly exposing people to coronavirus....

Supermassive black holes typically grow by pulling in material from a disk of surrounding matter. For the most rapid growth, this process generates prodigious amounts of radiation in a very small region around the black hole, and produces an extremely bright, compact source called a quasar. Theoretical calculations indicate that most of the early growth of black holes occurs while the black hole and disk are surrounded by a dense cloud of gas that feeds material into the disk....

Stars form when gravitational forces coalesce the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material forms clumps dense enough to become stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is still very uncertain. The infall of matter is probably not symmetric, it may be inhibited by the pressure of very hot radiation around the young stellar embryo, or perhaps it is constrained in other ways. These processes enable surrounding material to develop into disks around the stars, and it in turn can evolve into planets....

In this unusual comparison image — a rare case of dynamic evolution captured with ground-based telescopes — we see the difference 15 years can make. It may be the mere blink of an eye on a cosmic timescale, but it provides us with a wonderful opportunity to observe a truly dynamic system as it changes shape in our skies. These images show the evolution not only of R Aquarii, but also of our observational capabilities....

The swap in technology will allow turbine blades to perform as well, but can be made on-site at a much lower cost, 25-40% less. This drop in manufacturing cost could help make wind energy more competitive as economical as fossil fuels without government subsidies. The fabric is lighter than fiberglass and allows for the production of much longer blades, which can capture more of the wind’s energy. The architectural fabrics will be wrapped around a metal spaceframe, resembling a fishbone....

“These observations of the faintest, largest structures in the universe are a key to understanding how our Universe evolved through time, how galaxies grow and mature, and how the changing environments around galaxies created what we see around us,” writes Erika Hamden in a related Perspective. The analysis was done on SSA22, a massive proto-cluster of galaxies located about 12 billion light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius. Galaxy clusters, the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the Universe, can contain anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies....

While Michael Faraday was already probing the link between magnetism and electricity with coils in the early 19th century in the basement of the Royal Institution, astronomers nowadays still cannot deploy coils light-years away. Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), an international team led by Dr. LI Di from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has obtained accurate magnetic field strength in molecular cloud L1544 — a region of the interstellar medium that seems ready to form stars....

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals....

A United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandate to limit the dosage of acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol and the brand name Tylenol) in pills that combine acetaminophen and opioid medications is significantly associated with subsequent reductions in serious liver injury, researchers report in the medical journal JAMA. The federal mandate was announced in 2011 and implemented in 2014. “The FDA mandate that limits acetaminophen dosage to 325 milligrams per tablet in combination acetaminophen-opioid medications was associated with a significant and persistent decline in the yearly rate of hospitalizations and proportion per year of acute liver failure cases involving acetaminophen and opioid toxicity,” said study leader and University of Alabama at Birmingham surgeon-scientist Jayme Locke, M....

Tagging reveals that closely bonded female bats leave the roost separately but reunite when hunting. During nightly foraging trips, female vampire bats preferentially meet up with roostmates they have a close social bond with, according to a report publishing September 23rd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, by Simon Ripperger and Gerald Carter of The Ohio State University in the USA and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. The study suggests that previously documented cooperation in this species also extends beyond the roost....

Over the course of the coronavirus epidemic, COVID-19 outbreaks have hit communities across the United States. As clusters of infection shift over time, local officials are forced into a whack-a-mole approach to allocating resources and enacting public health policies. In a new study led by the University of Utah, geographers published the first effort to conduct daily surveillance of emerging COVID-19 hotspots for every county in the contiguous U.S. The researchers hope that timely, localized data will help inform future decisions....

An advanced telescope imaging system that started taking data in June 2012 is the first of its kind capable of spotting planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system. The collaborative set of high-tech instrumentation and software, called Project 1640, is now operating on the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, after more than six years of development. Researchers and engineers behind the project come from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, N....

“NASA’s Space Launch System core stage is part of the Artemis program, which is a national asset,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard. “The SLS rocket was built to deliver American astronauts and maximum payloads to the Moon and deep space destinations. Rolling out the completed core stage from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility to go on to NASA’s Stennis Space Center for further testing is an exciting leap forward in the Artemis program as NASA teams make progress toward the launch pad....

The idea that these signals implicate dark matter is based on a second Nature paper published this week, by Prof. Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University, which suggests that the signal is proof of interactions between normal matter and dark matter in the early universe. According to Prof. Barkana, the discovery offers the first direct proof that dark matter exists and that it is composed of low-mass particles. The signal, recorded by a novel radio telescope called EDGES, dates to 180 million years after the Big Bang....

Although genetic and genomic technologies have enormous potential for protecting marine life, they are currently being underutilized. Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the University of Melbourne and Melinda Coleman with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia argue this point in an essay published on October 17th in PLOS Biology, an open-access journal. There isn’t any part of our oceans that is left untouched by humans....

A new study from researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, suggests that men who regularly lift heavy objects at work have higher sperm counts. The study, is part of the Environment and Reproductive Health (EARTH) cohort, a clinical study that aims to explore how exposure to environmental chemicals and lifestyle choices affect reproductive health. “We already know that exercise is associated with multiple health benefits in humans, including those observed on reproductive health, but few studies have looked at how occupational factors can contribute to these benefits,” said first author Lidia Mínguez-Alarcón, a reproductive epidemiologist in Brigham’s Channing Division of Network Medicine and co-investigator of the EARTH study....

None of the mutations currently documented in the SARS-CoV-2 virus appear to increase its transmissibility in humans, according to a study led by University College London researchers. The analysis of virus genomes from over 46,000 people with COVID-19 from 99 countries is published today (November 25, 2020) in Nature Communications. First and corresponding author Dr. Lucy van Dorp (UCL Genetics Institute) said: “The number of SARS-CoV-2 genomes being generated for scientific research is staggering....

Graphite has been the default choice of active material for anodes in lithium–ion batteries since their original launch by Sony but researchers and manufacturers have long sought a way to replace graphite with silicon, as it is an abundantly available element with ten times the gravimetric energy density of graphite. Unfortunately, silicon has several other performance issues that continue to limit its commercial exploitation. Due to its volume expansion upon lithiation silicon particles can electrochemically agglomerate in ways that impede further charge-discharge efficiency over time....