On September 5, 2021, light from a very energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) – an incredibly energetic explosion that happened in a faraway galaxy – reached our planet. To get to Earth, it traveled for more than 12.8 billion years. The glow began its journey when the Universe (which is considered to be 13.7 billion years old) was just 880 million years old. A worldwide team of astronomers proceeded to study the explosion’s afterglow in the months that followed this finding in order to understand what caused it....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Current Biology. Orangutans have behavioral traditions that vary by regions. Orangutans in one area might use tools and others in another don’t. On the island of Sumatra in western Indonesia, orangutans by age 6 or 7 use sticks to probe logs for honey in the swampy regions west of the Alas River. Researchers have never observed this behavior in orangutans in coastal areas east of the river....

Artificial human organs, or organ-on-chip technologies, simulate a whole organ’s cell makeup and physiology. They act as alternatives to animal models in drug safety testing, but until now they have not been used to test how infectious diseases interact with the organs. Now, researchers from Imperial are using this technology to determine how pathogens interact with artificial organs. They hope it will help us to better understand the resulting disease and develop new treatments....

“The team continued our long string of successes by executing the orbit-insertion maneuver perfectly,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “With the navigation campaign coming to an end, we are looking forward to the scientific mapping and sample site selection phase of the mission.” Lauretta, along with his team, spent the last day of 2018 with his feet planted on Earth, but his mind focused on space....

“There are two neuronal circuits: one that helps promote action and the other that inhibits action,” said senior author Haining Zhong, Ph.D., a scientist with the OHSU Vollum Institute. “Dopamine promotes the first circuit to enable movement, and adenosine is the ‘brake’ that promotes the second circuit and brings balance to the system.” The discovery has the potential to immediately suggest new avenues for drug development to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease....

Dr. Debbie-Ann Shirley is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Virginia specializing in pediatric infectious diseases. Here she addresses some of the concerns parents may have about their teen or preteen getting the COVID-19 vaccine. 1. Does the vaccine work in adolescents? Yes, recently released data from Pfizer-BioNTech shows that the COVID-19 vaccine seems to work really well in this age group. The COVID-19 vaccine was found to be 100% efficacious in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in an ongoing clinical trial of children in the U....

Adults with food insecurity (i.e., inadequate access to food because of financial constraints) are 10% to 37% more likely to die prematurely from any cause other than cancer compared to food-secure people, found new research published today (January 20, 2020) in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). “Among adults who died prematurely, those experiencing severe food insecurity died at an age 9 years earlier than their food-secure counterparts,” writes lead author Dr....

“For decades, chemistry has been governed by two ambitions goals,” says Professor Stefan Tautz, head of the Quantum Nanoscience subinstitute at Forschungszentrum Jülich. “One of these is understanding chemical reactions directly from the spatial distribution of electrons in molecules, while the other is tracing electron dynamics over time during a chemical reaction.” Both of these goals have been achieved in separate ground-breaking discoveries in chemistry: frontier molecular orbital theory explained the role of the electron distribution in molecules during chemical reactions, while femtosecond spectroscopy made it possible to observe transition states in reactions....

As described in a March 25 paper in Physical Review Letters, the team — led by Gerald Gabrielse, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, and including postdoctoral fellows Stephan Ettenauer and Eric Tardiff and graduate students Jack DiSciacca, Mason Marshall, Kathryn Marable, and Rita Kalra — was able to capture individual protons and antiprotons in a “trap” created by electric and magnetic fields. By tracking the oscillations of each particle, the team was able to measure the magnetism of a proton 1,000 times more accurately than any proton had been measured before....

The universe is comprised of a large amount of invisible matter, dark matter. It fills the space between the galaxies and between the stars in the galaxies. Since the prediction of the existence of dark matter more than 70 years ago, all sorts of researchers – astronomers, cosmologists, and particle physicists have been looking for answers to what it could be. With the latest observations from the Planck satellite, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, may be closer than ever to a solution to the origin of the mysterious dark matter....

Both are rule-breakers. Strange metals don’t behave like regular metals, whose electrons act independently; instead their electrons behave in some unusual collective manner. For their part, high-temperature superconductors operate at much higher temperatures than conventional superconductors; how they do this is still unknown. In many high-temperature superconductors, changing the temperature or the number of free-flowing electrons in the material can flip it from a superconducting state to a strange metal state or vice versa....

The star is an M- dwarf with a mass of only 0.12 solar-masses and an effective surface temperature of about 3000 kelvin. The comparatively low surface temperature means that its habitable zone lies very close to the star and Proxima b, with its mass of about 1.2 Earth-masses, lies about twenty times closer to the star than the Earth does to the Sun, orbiting in only 11.2 days. Being as close as it is to its star, Proxima b (like all habitable-zone exoplanets around M-dwarf stars) is susceptible to stellar flares, winds, X-rays, and other kinds of activity that could disrupt its atmosphere and possibilities for life....

Rabbits are able to express pain through grimaces. Rabbits have become the latest focus of scientists trying to measure animal discomfort by monitoring facial expressions. Traditionally, researchers had to rely on after-the-fact measurements involving weight loss or food and water consumption, as well as subjective judgments done by the researchers themselves. Scientists have been able to adapt the earlier discovered mouse grimace scale to rabbits. Matthew Leach, an animal welfare researcher at Newcastle University in the UK, has been working on the various pain expressions in different animals....

Since NASA’s Galileo mission yielded strong evidence of a global ocean underneath Europa’s icy shell in the 1990s, scientists have considered that moon one of the most promising places in our solar system to look for ingredients to support life. There’s even evidence that the salty water sloshing around the moon’s interior makes its way to the surface. By studying this material from the interior, scientists developing future missions hope to learn more about the possible habitability of Europa’s ocean....

The formation of the largest structures in the Universe is a longstanding problem In the present universe, there are clusters of galaxies that have hundreds of member galaxies including tens of massive galaxies. Clusters of galaxies are the largest astronomical objects in the Universe. They are connected with each other and make up a huge network of galaxies called the “large-scale structure” of the Universe. Thus, clusters of galaxies are essential parts of the structure of the universe, and it is a major area of astronomy research how these clusters of galaxies formed and evolved through the 13,8 billion years long history of the universe....

Madagascar hissing cockroaches aren’t something pleasant to see, but if you’re trapped under a collapsed building, then cockroach biobots might help come to your rescue. The researchers state that the trick to cockroach biobots is to fire wireless signals at the roach’s antennae and other sensory organs to guide it toward a desired location. The scientists presented their findings at last month’s 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society in San Diego, California....

For the first time, researchers have successfully tested, in a simulated environment, the potential to ventilate two lungs of different compliances from a single ventilator. While the authors do not condone the practice of ventilator splitting and say the findings must be interpreted and applied with caution, the experiments demonstrate the hope of simultaneously ventilating two test lungs of different compliances — using only standard hospital equipment — and modifying the pressure, flow, and volume of air in each lung, in case of extreme emergencies....

Through a series of genetic and other tests the team have revealed that the golden-crowned manakin – first discovered in Brazil in 1957 but not seen again until 2002 – is in fact a hybrid species. “While hybrid plant species are very common, hybrid species among vertebrates are exceedingly rare,” says Associate Professor Jason Weir, senior author of the research. A hybrid species forms when two parental species mate to produce a hybrid population, which then stops being able to freely interbreed with the parental species....

It is now recognized that COVID-19 is not a purely respiratory disease. In addition to affecting the lungs, SARS-CoV-2 can impact the cardiovascular system, the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. More than one in three people with COVID-19 report neurological symptoms such as loss of, or change in, their sense of smell or taste, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and nausea. In some patients, the disease can even result in stroke or other serious conditions....

Over 15,000 years ago – some experts even say 40,000 – people began domesticating wolves and eventually started to breed dogs. The role played by these animals nevertheless remains shrouded in mystery. The scenes discovered by the Max Planck researchers provide a first-ever insight into life with dogs in early human history. Hunting scenes are depicted in some of the rock art. Men are shown with bows and arrows shooting at gazelles, antelopes, lions, and leopards which are contained by dogs....