NASA hosted a joint media briefing on Wednesday, January 11, about the Roscosmos-led investigation to update the public on the Soyuz status and the forward strategy. As a part of the work, Roscosmos engineers determined the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is not viable for a normal crew return, but is available for crew return in an emergency aboard the space station. The Soyuz MS-22 will be replaced by the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft that will launch to the space station without a crew on Monday, February 20....

Discovery lays groundwork for designing novel antiviral drugs. With an alarm code, we can enter a building without bells going off. It turns out that the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has the same advantage entering cells. It possesses the code to waltz right in. Today (July 24, 2020), in Nature Communications, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) reported how the coronavirus achieves this....

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly across the world – affecting 170 countries with more than 530,000 confirmed cases worldwide. The coronavirus outbreak was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, and has since stated that the disease is ‘accelerating’. In order to curb the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, countries across the world are implementing strict measures – placing cities and even entire countries on lockdown....

Reducing visceral fat is the true goal of weight loss. The green Mediterranean diet (MED) significantly reduces visceral adipose tissue, a type of fat around internal organs that is much more dangerous than the extra “tire” around your waist. The green Mediterranean diet was pitted against the Mediterranean diet and a healthy diet in a large-scale clinical interventional trial- the DIRECT PLUS. Subsequent analysis found that the green Med diet reduced visceral fat by 14....

“These findings open up the possibility of designing a new gene therapy or drug because now we can convert cancerous cells back into their normal state,” said Bumsoo Han, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering and program leader of the Purdue Center for Cancer Research. Han has a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering. The time machine that Han’s lab built is a lifelike reproduction of a pancreatic structure called the acinus, which produces and secretes digestive enzymes into the small intestine....

UK scientists led by the University of Leeds in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh have replicated the highly sophisticated surface design of a human tongue and demonstrated that their printed synthetic silicone structure mimics the topology, elasticity, and wettability of the tongue’s surface. These factors are instrumental to how food or saliva interacts with the tongue, which in turn can affect mouthfeel, swallowing, speech, nutritional intake, and quality of life....

If you want to read a mouse’s mind, it takes some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in the rodent’s head. Stanford scientists have demonstrated a technique for observing hundreds of neurons firing in the brain of a live mouse, in real time, and have linked that activity to long-term information storage. The unprecedented work could provide a useful tool for studying new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s....

The Vermicella parscauda (Weipa bandy-bandy) is a small (50-100 cm or 20-40 in) black and white banded snake found only in Australia. It belongs to a group of venomous snakes known as burrowing elapids. But despite being part of a highly venomous family including cobras and the infamous Australian taipans, bandy-bandys pose no risk to humans and their venom could actually contain medicinal properties. Dr. Kevin Arbuckle is leading the molecular data analysis part of the research at Swansea....

A jerk is a measurement of a sudden acceleration change and is commonly used in fields such as engineering, sports science, manufacturing, and more. Researchers have now proposed that examining the impact of jerks can also offer deeper insights into gameplay. The game refinement theory posits that acceleration, or the rate at which information speed changes, represents the balance between certainty and uncertainty in a game. This balance is referred to as the game refinement value (GR) and serves as an indicator of a player’s level of engagement....

The team used a next-generation DNA sequencing technique called loop-seq, which they developed, to demonstrate that the specific sequence of bases along a section of DNA determines the local bendability of the molecule. Via a large number of measurements, coupled with computational analysis and machine learning, they determined the mechanical code, i.e., the mapping between the local sequence and the local deformability of DNA. Additionally, the researchers found that the mechanical code of DNA can be modified by ‘methylation’, which is a known chemical modification that DNA bases are routinely subject to at various stages in an organism’s development....

Out of the 140 million people worldwide who wear contact lenses, between 30% to 50% experience CLIDE. CLIDE occurs due to an inadequate flow of tears from the outer surface of the contact lens to the inner surface, resulting in excessive tear evaporation and the associated symptoms of CLIDE. Current treatments for this condition include rewetting drops, gels, or lubricants, more frequent lens replacement, or changes in the lens material....

Much of what we know about the earliest life on Earth comes from the organic remains of organisms without hard parts. Yet the vast majority of fossils rely on hard tissue such as shells, teeth, and bones for their preservation. Soft tissue parts, such as eyes and internal organs, tend to decay before they can fossilize. This also is true for organisms made up entirely of soft tissue, such as worms....

“We wanted to investigate whether case studies on asthma exacerbations mentioned sexual activity as a possible cause,” said Ariel Leung, MD, an ACAAI member and lead author of the study. “Many people don’t realize that the energy expenditure of sexual activity is about equivalent to walking up two flights of stairs. Reported cases are infrequent, possibly because those suffering an asthma flare may not realize the trigger.” The study collected available literature on sexual intercourse as an underdiagnosed trigger for asthma exacerbations....

Around ten percent of the population suffer from anxiety disorders, and current treatment options only offer effective help for a proportion of those affected. One of the changes observed in the brains of patients with anxiety disorders is an increased neuronal activity in the amygdala, a brain region that plays a key role in processing emotions such as anxiety or fear. An overactivation of the amygdala is thought to be involved in causing exaggerated anxiety....

The research lays the foundations for futuristic soft active matter with highly distributed and tightly integrated sensing, actuation, computation, and control, said Dr. Samuel Stanton, manager of the Complex and Dynamics Systems Program within the Engineering Sciences Directorate at the Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, located at Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina. ARO funds research to initiate scientific and far-reaching technological discoveries in extramural organizations, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and private industry that may make future American Soldiers stronger and safer....

After examining data gathered over a 10-year period, the team from Northumbria’s Department of Mathematics, Physics, and Electrical Engineering found that magnetic waves in the Sun’s corona – its outermost layer of atmosphere – react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun. These magnetic waves, known as Alfvénic waves, play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and the solar system. The waves were previously thought to originate at the Sun’s surface, where boiling hydrogen reaches temperatures of 6,000 degrees and churns the Sun’s magnetic field....

Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) are a relatively new class of materials made from complex, multicomponent alloys. They have the moldable pliability of plastics at high temperatures but the strengths of metals at room temperature. BMGs owe their properties to their unique atomic structures: When metallic glasses cool from a liquid to a solid, their atoms settle into a random arrangement and do not crystallize the way traditional metals do. Exactly what happens during this glass transition, for all forms of glass, has puzzled researchers for centuries....

A recently published study details how scientists used light from an exploding star as a probe to study the gas conditions in the space between the host galaxy’s stars, revealing that the distant galaxy‘s interstellar conditions appear “reassuringly normal.” Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier… An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star’s fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9....

Astronomical observations of young protostars indicate that early planetary systems evolved from the dust in a protoplanetary disk very quickly – in under five million years. Such short timescales require very efficient mechanism(s) to transport material inward towards the central star, but the mechanism(s) that do this are uncertain. Several have been invoked, however, in which magnetic fields play a key role, either in the stellar wind or in the disk itself....

That’s what Dan Milisavljevic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University, believes he saw six years after “SN 2012au” exploded. “We haven’t seen an explosion of this type, at such a late timescale, remain visible unless it had some kind of interaction with hydrogen gas left behind by the star prior to the explosion,” he said. “But there’s no spectral spike of hydrogen in the data – something else was energizing this thing....