A newly published study from Stanford scientists details the advanced weather model they developed, showing that there is plenty of wind to provide half the world’s power by 2030 and potentially exceed the total demand by several times if enough turbines are in place. If the world is to shift to clean energy, electricity generated by the wind will play a major role – and there is more than enough wind for that, according to new research from Stanford and the University of Delaware....

Images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star in the throes of a fiery outburst, spraying the cosmos with dust. The findings offer a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets, and even life. The star, cataloged as WISE J180956.27-330500.2, was discovered in images taken during the WISE survey in 2010, the most detailed infrared survey to date of the entire celestial sky....

Working memory is the handy ability to consciously hold and manipulate new information in mind. It takes mental work. In particular, participating neurons in the prefrontal cortex have to work together in synchrony to focus our thoughts, whether we’re remembering a set of directions or tonight’s menu specials. Researchers based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT show how that focus emerges in a new study. The key measure in the study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports is the variability of the neurons’ activity....

Wolf-Rayet stars are massive, powerful, and energetic stars that are just about reaching the end of their lives. They flood their surroundings with thick, intense, fast-moving winds that push and sweep at the material found there, carving out weird and wonderful shapes as they do so. These winds can create strong shockwaves when they collide with the comparatively cool interstellar medium, causing them to heat up anything in their vicinity....

A multidisciplinary team at Yale, led by Yale Cancer Center members, has defined a subgroup of genetic mutations that are present in a significant number of melanoma skin cancer cases. Their findings shed light on an important mutation in this deadly disease, and may lead to more targeted anti-cancer therapies. The study is published in Nature Genetics. The role of mutations in numerous genes and genomic changes in the development of melanoma — a skin cancer with over 70,000 new cases reported in the United States each year — is well established and continues to be the focus of intense research....

The idea of implantable sensors that continuously transmit information on vital values and concentrations of substances or drugs in the body has fascinated physicians and scientists for a long time. Such sensors enable the constant monitoring of disease progression and therapeutic success. However, until now implantable sensors have not been suitable to remain in the body permanently but had to be replaced after a few days or weeks. On the one hand, there is the problem of implant rejection because the body recognizes the sensor as a foreign object....

While other studies have looked at how stressors affect social development over the course of a lifetime, this study emphasizes the significance of early adulthood and how it may be influenced by external events. “If everything goes well, young adults select into social networks, initiate friendships and romantic relationships, and find their occupational niche,” says lead author Dr. Bühler of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “Our findings, however, show that external stressors and environmental variations may set young adults on a less fortunate path....

To date, Congress has authorized roughly $3 trillion in COVID-19 relief assistance — the largest relief package in history. With more COVID relief money on the way, a new study led by two Brigham Young University business professors finds these newly available funds led to a significant surge in health sector lobbying activity, especially within the pharmaceutical industry. The research, publishing Wednesday, August 12, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, finds the lobbying expenditures ($248....

Through state-of-the-art mathematical modeling and historical documents, the study points to community health programs and social distancing practices as the most likely explanations for the epidemic’s sudden and mysterious collapse, which was hailed by survivors at the time as a miracle. The historical analysis underscores the critical importance of the cooperation and active recruitment of communities in efforts to defeat epidemics and pandemics such as COVID-19, rather than relying too heavily on government regulation....

After a patient has a heart attack, a cascade of events leading to heart failure begins. Damage to the area in the heart where a blood vessel was blocked leads to scar tissue. In response to scarring, the heart will remodel to compensate. This process often ends in ventricular or valve failure. A team of researchers is hoping to halt the progression from heart attack to heart failure with a small device called “Therepi....

Hurricane Ida may have moved on, but the web of problems the powerful hurricane left behind after striking southern Louisiana remain. In many of the hardest-hit communities, access to power, air conditioning, and gas remains a challenge. Large numbers of homes have been destroyed or severely damaged. Some key roads and bridges are out, and returning residents are facing curfews and boil water warnings. Five days after catastrophic storm surge, winds, and downpours pummeled the Mississippi River Delta, Landsat 8 acquired imagery of the storm-damaged region....

The hardware that makes up NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is rapidly taking shape, as engineering components and instruments are prepared for delivery to the main clean room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. In workshops and labs across the country and in Europe, teams are crafting the complex pieces that make up the whole as mission leaders direct the elaborate choreography of building a flagship mission. The massive 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module recently moved from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, where engineers will install electronics, radios, antennas, and cabling....

A team of scientists, led by former UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral scholar Feige Wang and including Professor Joe Hennawi and current postdoc Riccardo Nanni, announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the most distant quasar discovered to date. Seen as it would have appeared more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early universe....

“This architecture was originally designed for optimization problems,” recalls Wolfgang Lechner of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. “In the process, we reduced the architecture to a minimum in order to solve these optimization problems as efficiently as possible.” The physical qubits in this architecture encode the relative coordination between the bits rather than representing individual bits. “This means that not all qubits have to interact with each other anymore,” explains Wolfgang Lechner....

Simon Fraser University virologist Masahiro Niikura and his doctoral student Nicole Bance are among an international group of scientists that has discovered a new class of molecular compounds capable of killing the influenza virus. Working on the premise that too much of a good thing can be a killer, the scientists have advanced previous researchers’ methods of manipulating an enzyme that is key to how influenza replicates and spreads. Their new compounds will lead to a new generation of anti-influenza drugs that the virus’ strains can’t adapt to, and resist, as easily as they do Tamiful....

Researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently published their findings in the journal Science Immunology, revealing that by blocking an iron uptake receptor, disease pathology is reduced and the activity of anti-inflammatory regulatory T cells is increased in a mouse model of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Lupus, including SLE, occurs when the immune system attacks a person’s own healthy tissues, causing pain, inflammation and tissue damage. Lupus most commonly affects the skin, joints, brain, lungs, kidneys and blood vessels....

This treatment involves the use of a modified form of the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacterium, which has had its disease-causing abilities removed and reprogrammed to target P. aeruginosa. The modified bacterium is used in conjunction with low doses of antibiotics that would not be effective on their own. Researchers tested the efficacy of the treatment in mice, finding that it significantly reduced lung infections. The “living medicine” doubled mouse survival rate compared to not using any treatment....

Artificial molecules could one day form the information unit of a new type of computer or be the basis for programmable substances. The information would be encoded in the spatial arrangement of the individual atoms – similar to how the sequence of base pairs determines the information content of DNA, or sequences of zeros and ones form the memory of computers. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have taken a step towards this vision....

The researchers believe that this newly found behavior has significant implications for comprehending the function of phosphate ions in biocatalysis, energy balance within cells, and the creation of biomaterials. The study has recently been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Phosphate is everywhere,” said UCSB chemistry professor Songi Han, one of the authors of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The ion consists of one phosphorus atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms....

“The Sun was very active in its early life—it had more eruptions and gave off a more intense stream of charged particles. I think of my son, he’s three, he’s very active too,” says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, professor at the University of Chicago, and author of the study. “Almost nothing in the Solar System is old enough to really confirm the early Sun’s activity, but these minerals from meteorites in the Field Museum’s collections are old enough....