Jupiter, the mythical god of sky and thunder, would certainly be pleased at all the changes afoot at his namesake planet. As the planet gets peppered continually with small space rocks, wide belts of the atmosphere are changing color, hotspots are vanishing and reappearing, and clouds are gathering over one part of Jupiter, while dissipating over another. The results were presented today by Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting in Reno, Nevada....

Native reptile populations on Christmas Island have been in severe decline with two species, Lister’s gecko and the blue-tailed skink, entirely disappearing from the wild. While previously the main driver for this decline is likely predation by invasive species and habitat destruction, a silent killer is now threatening to wipe the species out entirely. Those bred in captivity on the Australian Territory in the Indian Ocean have also been mysteriously dying, leaving the two species – which number only around 1000 each – in danger of extinction....

After sifting through data from one of the final Titan flybys of the Cassini mission, the researchers detailed their findings in “The Bathymetry of Moray Sinus at Titan’s Kraken Mare,” which published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “The depth and composition of each of Titan’s seas had already been measured, except for Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare – which not only has a great name, but also contains about 80% of the moon’s surface liquids,” said lead author Valerio Poggiali, research associate in Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CCAPS), in the College of Arts and Sciences....

Researchers presented their findings at the Fukushima Symposium conference on the 12th and 13th of November at the University of Tokyo on the radioactivity that is persisting in the ocean waters close to Japan’s failed nuclear power plant at Fukushima Daiichi. The findings show that levels of radioactivity in the sea around the plant remain stable, rather than falling as expected. The run-off from rivers, as well as continuing leaks from the plant may be to blame and contaminated sediment and marine organisms could also be involved....

“Reforestation is an important part of tackling climate change, but we need to carefully consider the best places for it. In some places, changes to water availability will completely change the local cost-benefits of tree-planting programs,” said Laura Bentley, a plant scientist at the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and first author of the report. Planting large areas of trees has been suggested as one of the best ways of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, since trees absorb and store this greenhouse gas as they grow....

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021, might be able to look far enough back into the early Universe to see a galaxy hosting a nascent massive black hole. Now, a simulation done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has suggested what astronomers should look for if they search the skies for a DCBH in its early stages. The first-of-its-kind simulation, reported September 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that the direct formation of these black holes would be accompanied by specific kinds of intense radiation, including X-rays and ultraviolet emission that would shift to infrared by the time they reach the telescope....

Does a strong carbon signal in Martian rocks indicate biological processes of some type? Any strong carbon signal is intriguing when you’re hunting for life. It’s a common element in all the forms of life we know of. But there are different types of carbon, and carbon can become concentrated in the environment for other reasons. It doesn’t automatically mean life is involved in carbon signatures. Carbon atoms always have six protons, but the neutron count can vary....

On the floor of the trough is some grooved material that we typically see in middle-latitude regions where there has been glacial flow. These depressions with concentric troughs exist elsewhere on Mars, and their origins remain a matter of debate. NB: The Context Camera is another instrument onboard MRO, and it has a larger viewing angle than HiRISE, but less resolution capability than our camera. The map is projected here at a scale of 50 centimeters (19....

“Most people in the coffee industry are using fine-grind settings and lots of coffee beans to get a mix of bitterness and sour acidity that is unpredictable and irreproducible,” says co-senior author Christopher Hendon, a computational chemist at the University of Oregon. “It sounds counterintuitive, but experiments and modeling suggest that efficient, reproducible shots can be accessed by simply using less coffee and grinding it more coarsely.” Though lots of factors are involved, the norm for brewing an espresso shot is to grind a relatively large amount of coffee beans (~20 grams) almost as finely as possible....

UC Davis Health infectious diseases expert answers common questions about Merck’s new COVID-19 treatment. A new COVID-19 treatment that could be given in the days after COVID-19 symptoms arise to prevent severe disease has been developed by Merck & Co. The treatment would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19. Studies have shown it reduces hospitalizations and deaths by half in people recently infected with the coronavirus. Merck has applied to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for emergency use authorization (EUA) of the pill, called molnupiravir....

Rice University scientists have theoretically determined that the properties of atom-thick sheets of boron depend on where those atoms land. Calculation of the atom-by-atom energies involved in creating a sheet of boron revealed that the metal substrate – the surface upon which two-dimensional materials are grown in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) furnace – would make all the difference. Theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his Rice colleagues found in previous work that CVD is probably the best way to make highly conductive 2D boron and that gold or silver might be the best substrates....

Four Key Population Categories Identified for Minimizing Spread of COVID-19 and Reducing Fatalities Researchers in China identified four key population categories useful in guiding COVID-19 public health policies aimed at minimizing the spread of the disease and reducing fatalities. The team, led by Dr. Baoguo Jiang of the Department of Orthopedics & Traumatology at Peking University People’s Hospital, published their findings in the journal Precision Clinical Medicine on May 28....

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with their collaborators at the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Ragon Institute, have been working on a CRISPR-based diagnostic for COVID-19 that can produce results in 30 minutes to an hour, with similar accuracy as the standard PCR diagnostics now used. The new test, known as STOPCovid, is still in the research stage but, in principle, could be made cheaply enough that people could test themselves every day....

To many, that may seem like a good thing, but just the opposite is true. “We know that high-potency products should not have a place in the medical realm because of the high risk of developing cannabis-use disorders, which are related to exposure to high THC-content products,” said the study’s lead author, Alfonso Edgar Romero-Sandoval, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health....

V Hya is a carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star located approximately 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. More than 90-percent of stars with a mass equal to or greater than the Sun evolve into AGB stars as the fuel required to power nuclear processes is stripped away. Among these millions of stars, V Hya has been of particular interest to scientists due to its so-far unique behaviors and features, including extreme-scale plasma eruptions that happen roughly every 8....

Galaxies more than 1 million light-years apart should have completely independent lives in terms of when they give birth to new stars. But galaxies separated by up to 13 million light-years slowed down and then simultaneously accelerated their birth rate of stars, according to a Rutgers-led study published in the Astrophysical Journal. “It appears that these galaxies are responding to a large-scale change in their environment in the same way a good economy can spur a baby boom,” said lead author Charlotte Olsen, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick....

“These nano-motors not only helped us better understand the nature of moving against flows at the tiny scales we can’t easily see, but also could be the first step in developing smart material and robotic systems in the microscopic world,” says Jun Zhang, a professor of physics and mathematics at New York University and a co-author of the paper, which was published on October 25, 2019, in the journal Physical Review Letters....

Glioblastoma multiforme, a type of brain tumor, is one of the most difficult-to-treat cancers. Only a handful of drugs are approved to treat glioblastoma, and the median life expectancy for patients diagnosed with the disease is less than 15 months. MIT researchers have now devised a new drug-delivering nanoparticle that could offer a better way to treat glioblastoma. The particles, which carry two different drugs, are designed so that they can easily cross the blood-brain barrier and bind directly to tumor cells....

Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan’s National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated. The international team, led by Joel Hochstetter with Professor Zdenka Kuncic and Professor Tomonobu Nakayama, found that by keeping the network of nanowires in a brain-like state “at the edge of chaos,” it performed tasks at an optimal level....

During flight day four, each solar array was moved to different positions by flight controllers to test the strength of the WiFi signal with the arrays in different configurations. The WiFi transfer rate between the camera on the tip of the solar array panels and the camera controller was tested by the Integrated Communications Officer, or INCO. The goal was to determine the best position for the most efficient transfer of imagery files....