Whether they occur on holiday routes or the daily commute, traffic jams affect cars as well as pedestrians. Scientists at the Research Center on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier) and the University of Arizona (United States) have demonstrated that ant colonies, however, are spared these problems and circulate easily, even in the event of extremely dense traffic, thus ensuring consistent efficiency in their foraging. These findings appear in the October 22, 2019, edition of eLife....

The study, one of the most thorough assessments of the quality of the world’s diet to date—and the first to include findings among children as well as adults—highlights the difficulties faced by governments around the world in promoting healthy eating. Despite modest global gains, there were significant regional differences, with healthy foods becoming more popular in the US, Vietnam, China, and Iran while declining in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Japan. “Intake of legumes/nuts and non-starchy vegetables increased over time, but overall improvements in dietary quality were offset by increased intake of unhealthy components such as red/processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, and sodium,” says lead author Victoria Miller, a visiting scientist from McMaster University in Canada who started this study as a postdoctoral scholar with Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean for Policy and Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School, and senior author on the paper....

The research analyzed the impact of sleep duration on the health of more than 7,000 men and women at the ages of 50, 60, and 70, from the Whitehall II cohort study. The study was published on October 18 in PLOS Medicine. Scientists investigated the relationship between how long each participant slept and their mortality, as well as whether they had been diagnosed with two or more chronic diseases (multimorbidity) – such as heart disease, cancer, or diabetes....

The study “Optimizing predictive models to prioritize viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs,” which was published by Lancet Microbe, was guided by Becker; Greg Albery, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Bansal Lab; and Colin J. Carlson, an assistant research professor at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. It also included collaborators from the University of Idaho, Louisiana State University, University of California Berkeley, Colorado State University, Pacific Lutheran University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, University of Glasgow, Université de Montréal, University of Toronto, Ghent University, University College Dublin, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, and the American Museum of Natural History....

Aeons ago, the universe was different: mergers of galaxies were common and gigantic black holes with masses equivalent to billions of times that of the Sun formed in their nuclei. As they captured the surrounding gas, these black holes emitted energy. Known as quasars, these very distant and tremendously high energy objects have local relatives with much lower energy whose existence raises numerous questions: are there also such “quiet” quasars at much larger distances?...

A team of astronomers led by Arjen van der Wel from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has found the most distant gravitational lens yet – a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: Lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare!...

CfA astronomers Joseph Rodriguez, Andrew Vanderburg, Jason Eastman, David Latham, and Samuel Quinn and their team of scientists discovered three small transiting planets orbiting the star GJ9827 which lies at a relatively close distance of 100 light-years. The three exoplanets have radii of about 1.6, 1.3, and 2.1 Earth-radii respectively. All of them are categorized as super-Earths, that is, with masses that are larger than Earth’s but less than Neptune’s....

“We can now trace the origins of water in our Solar System to before the formation of the Sun,” says John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), USA and lead author of the study published today (March 8) in the journal Nature. This discovery was made by studying the composition of water in V883 Orionis, a planet-forming disc about 1300 light-years away from Earth. When a cloud of gas and dust collapses it forms a star at its center....

It’s a complicated mystery of double-star systems, merging galaxies, and twin black holes that began in 2000 when the first such supernova was discovered, according to study leader Ryan Foley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “This story has taken lots of twists and turns, and I was surprised every step of the way,” he said. “We knew these stars had to be far from the source of their explosion as supernovae and wanted to find out how they arrived at their current homes....

After its launch in 2009, NASA’s NEOWISE spacecraft observed 163 comets during the WISE/NEOWISE prime mission. This sample from the space telescope represents the largest infrared survey of comets to date. Data from the survey are giving new insights into the dust, comet nucleus sizes, and production rates for difficult-to-observe gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Results of the NEOWISE census of comets were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal....

“This is the first time we’ve seen such a delicate piece of the galactic skeleton,” says the lead author Alyssa Goodman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Goodman presented the discovery on January 8 in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California. Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy — a pinwheel-shaped collection of stars, gas, and dust. It has a central bar and two major spiral arms that wrap around its disk....

In a paper published this week in the journal Science, scientists have, for the first time, provided evidence for a known blazar, designated TXS 0506+056, as a source of high-energy neutrinos. At 8:54 p.m. on September 22, 2017, the National Science Foundation-supported IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole detected a high energy neutrino from a direction near the constellation Orion. Just 44 seconds later an alert went out to the entire astronomical community....

“So astronomers went back through observations from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to check for radio transmissions coming from the object between the frequencies of 72 and 102MHz —similar to the frequency range in which FM radio is broadcast. While they did not find any signs of intelligent life, the research helped expand the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) from distant stars to objects closer to home. When ‘Oumuamua was first discovered, astronomers thought it was a comet or an asteroid from within the Solar System....

Recently, Cappelluti published findings that could give insight on a subject scientists and astrophysicists have been investigating for decades: What is dark matter and where does it come from? According to Esra Bulbul, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-author in Cappelluti’s study, about 95 percent of the mass in the universe is made up of material that is unknown and invisible to scientists, that is dark matter....

International Journal of Modern Physics has published an article by the IKBFU Physics and Mathematics Institute Artyom Astashenok and the Institute’s MA student Alexander Teplyakov. The article refers to the issue of the “Dark Energy” and an assumption is made that the Universe has borders. Artyom Astashenok told: “The fact that our Universe is expanding was discovered almost a hundred years ago, but how exactly this happens, scientists realized only in the 90s of the last century, when powerful telescopes (including orbital ones) appeared and the era of exact cosmology began....

Antimatter is material composed of the antiparticle partners of ordinary matter – when antimatter meets with matter, they quickly annihilate each other to form a burst of energy in the form of gamma-rays. Scientists have known since the early 1970s that the inner parts of the Milky Way galaxy are a strong source of gamma-rays, indicating the existence of antimatter, but there had been no settled view on where the antimatter came from....

Just like we take a shower to wash away all the dirt and other particles, semiconductors also require a cleaning process. However, its cleaning goes extreme to make even trace contaminants “leave no trace.” After all the chip fabrication materials are applied to a silicon wafer, a strict cleaning process is taken to remove residual particles. If this high-purity cleaning and particle-removal step goes wrong, its electrical connections in the chip are likely to suffer from it....

The SUP05 bacterial population puzzles researchers. Why, for example, are these microbes found in the open ocean, even though there is no basis for life for them there? SUP05 bacteria use the sulfur compound hydrogen sulfide as a source of energy, and this is mostly only found near the coasts. Together with the Collaborative Research Center 754 of GEOMAR and the University of Kiel, a group of researchers around Marcel Kuypers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen has now found some answers: In the sea off Peru during a trip with the research ship Meteor the researchers discovered a representative of the bacterial population that carries its own reserve of sulfur....

A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the world’s largest and longest record of wildlife parasite numbers, indicates that parasites may be highly susceptible to climate change. “People generally think that climate change will cause parasites to thrive, that we will see an increase in parasite outbreaks as the world warms,” said lead author Chelsea Wood, a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences....

Opel spent much of her Virgin Islands adventure on thesis research that shows that efforts to restore coral reefs have a positive impact on fish populations, both short- and long-term. The study was published in the December issue of Marine Biology with Opel as first author, a rare accomplishment for an undergraduate. “Reefs are not only biologically important — more than 4,000 species of fish rely on these ecosystems — they’re also really important for humans,” Opel said....