Using laboratory experiments involving water, jelly, and laser imaging, researchers were able to demonstrate how magma flows through the Earth’s crust to the surface through magma-filled cracks called dykes. This new approach to studying magma flow revealed that prior to a volcanic eruption there was recirculation of the fluid in the dyke and instability in the flow, details which had previously not been documented before. Nearly all volcanic eruptions are fed by dykes that transport magma from its source to the surface....

Some clinicians are concerned that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis has risen throughout Western society since the late 1980s. Is this correct? And if so, has the true incidence of PTSD really spiraled out of control, or has it simply become overdiagnosed? Experts debate the issue in The BMJ this week. PTSD is a serious and uncommon condition resulting from severe trauma, but it has unhelpfully become an umbrella term incorporating other disorders and normal reactions to stress, argue John Tully at the University of Nottingham and Dinesh Bhugra at King’s College London’s Institute for Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN)....

As a team of South African researchers we have identified a new lineage of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19. A lineage represents a genetically distinct virus population with a common ancestor. This virus may be designated as a variant in future, based on significantly altered properties, but first we need to understand it better. Our findings so far are set out in a non pre-peer reviewed paper. The new lineage, assigned the name C....

Stars have different evolutionary paths depending on their mass. Low-mass stars such as the Sun will eventually become white dwarfs. Massive stars, on the other hand, finish with a spectacular explosion known as a supernova, leaving either a neutron star or a black hole behind. The fate of both low- and high-mass stars is well understood but the situation for intermediate-mass stars, which weigh between seven and eleven times as much as the Sun, has remained unclear....

While it’s impossible to predict just where the next wildfire will start, new Department of Defense-sponsored research from BYU’s Fire Research Lab is getting into the microscopic details of how fires initiate to provide more insight into how wildfires burn through wildland fuels. “We are working on a small scale and hopefully that gives us some insight into what happens on a large scale,” said fire expert Thomas H. Fletcher, BYU professor of chemical engineering....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nanoletters. Enzo di Fabrizio, from the University of Genoa, Italy, and his team were able to snag DNA threads out of a dilute solution and lay them on a bed of nanoscopic silicon pillars. The pattern of pillars is extremely water-repellent, causing the moisture to evaporate quickly and leave behind strands of DNA stretched out and easily viewed. Tiny holes were drilled into the base of the nanopillar bed to allow beams of electrons to shine through, creating the high-resolution images where the corkscrew thread of the DNA double helix is clearly visible....

Yale’s latest work expanding the reach of quantum information science is actually a game of quantum pitch and catch. In a new study published April 23 in the journal Nature Physics, Yale researchers “pitch” a qubit — a tiny bit of quantum data — from one physical point in a microwave cavity to a separate point in a different cavity. It is the first time an end-to-end quantum transmission has been done on demand and represents the first of two Yale experiments involving “pitch-and-catch” technologies that will be published this year....

Scientists have captured real-time footage of how a crucial cellular process begins, findings that overturn a long-held theory about how the chaotic machinery of life organizes itself. This research also provides new ways to think about how drugs might interact with life’s moving parts at the molecular level. Using exquisitely sensitive Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence microscopy (TIRF), a team led by Tom Kirchhausen, Harvard Medical School professor of cell biology, has for the first time ever recorded the initial five seconds in the life of membrane vesicles, small bubbles that pinch off from the membrane to carry cargo into cells....

The survey’s 20 questions were designed to measure how Christiansburg’s 22,000 residents felt about drone delivery — the first time that this question had ever been posed to a community that had actually experienced the service. The survey was developed and conducted by researchers from the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP), a federally designated drone test site, and Lee Vinsel, an assistant professor of science, technology, and society in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences....

Participants will be assigned at random to one of two treatment arms of equal size. One group will receive both dexamethasone, a corticosteroid available as a generic drug, and remdesivir, a broad-spectrum antiviral discovered and developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc., of Foster City, California. Remdesivir, also known as Veklury, was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients aged 12 years and older....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. This reference genome could even allow pigs to be engineered to provide organs for transplant into human patients. The sequence is from a domestic Duroc pig (Sus scrofa domesticus), which was born in Illinois in 2001. A year later, it was used to create clones that were used at the National Swine Resource and Research Center (NSRRC) in Columbia, Missouri. The NIH launched the NSRRC in 2003 to encourage new research in pig disease models....

People show prejudice and discriminatory attitudes towards individuals not vaccinated against COVID-19 across all inhabited continents of the world. This is the finding of a global study from Aarhus University in Denmark, which has just been published today (December 8) in the journal Nature. Many vaccinated people do not want close relatives to marry an unvaccinated person. They are also inclined to think that the unvaccinated are incompetent as well as untrustworthy, and they generally feel antipathy against them....

Catmint, also known as catnip, is well-known for its intoxicating effect on cats. The odor responsible for the cats’ strange behavior is nepetalactone, a volatile iridoid produced by catmint. An international team of researchers has now found through genome analysis that the ability to produce iridoids had already been lost in ancestors of catmint in the course of evolution. Hence, nepetalactone biosynthesis is the result of “repeated evolution.” Nevertheless, this particular iridoid differs considerably from other compounds in this group of natural products with regards to its chemical structure and properties, and most likely its ecological functions (Science Advances)....

The scientists published their findings in two papers in the journal Nature. This could imply that hearts may be coaxed into healing themselves. Richard Lee and his colleagues at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston Massachusetts, traced the birth and fate of heart muscle cells in mice. They found that less than 1% can regenerate themselves normally. After a heart attack this proportion goes up, but only to 3%....

Two years ago a second, similar faint dwarf galaxy was found near it, and the relative motions of these two galaxies strongly suggest they have very little or no dark matter; for comparison, in the Milky Way (a normal galaxy) the dark matter contains nearly ten times more mass than the stellar matter. Astronomers also noted that, if these mass and motion measurements are accurate, they might be used to test and reject (or confirm) one long-standing alternate theory of gravity to Einstein’s....

A large international team of astronomers led by Jun Hashimoto (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) and Ruobing Dong (Princeton University) has used the High Contrast Instrument for the Subaru Next Generation Adaptive Optics (HiCIAO) to observe and examine PDS 70,[1] a young star about 10 million years old with a mass similar to that of the Sun. Images captured from the observations clearly show a giant gap inside the protoplanetary disk, the largest ever found among lower mass stars similar to the Sun....

In 1963, astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified the first quasi-stellar object or “quasar,” an extremely bright but distant object. He found the single quasar, the active nucleus of a far-away galaxy known to astronomers as 3C 273, to be 100 times more luminous than all the stars in our Milky Way combined. Now, the GRAVITY international team of astronomers, including Prof. Hagai Netzer of Tel Aviv University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, have concluded that gas clouds rapidly moving around a central black hole form the very heart of this quasar....

Image-processing software is a hot commodity: Just look at Instagram, a company built around image processing that Facebook is trying to buy for a billion dollars. Image processing is also going mobile, as more and more people are sending cellphone photos directly to the Web, without transferring them to a computer first. At the same time, digital-photo files are getting so big that, without a lot of clever software engineering, processing them would take a painfully long time on a desktop computer, let alone a cellphone....

Most of today’s robotic grippers use a combination of the operator’s skill and embedded sensors, intricate feedback loops, or cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to grasp fragile or irregularly shaped items. However, scientists at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have shown that there is a simpler method. Taking inspiration from nature, scientists created a new type of soft, robotic gripper that employs a network of thin tentacles to entangle and grab objects, similar to how jellyfish collect their prey....

Multiple arcs are revealed around Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant star to Earth, in this new image from ESA’s Herschel space observatory. The star and its arc-shaped shields could collide with an intriguing dusty ‘wall’ in 5,000 years. Betelgeuse rides on the shoulder of the constellation Orion the Hunter. It can easily be seen with the naked eye in the northern hemisphere winter night sky as the orange–red star above and to the left of Orion’s famous three-star belt....