Evolutionary biologists have always been fascinated by eyes. Charles Darwin, anticipating the skeptics, devoted a long explanation of how random mutation followed by natural selection could readily fashion such “organs of extreme perfection”. It is not surprising that these useful adaptations have evolved repeatedly across the animal kingdom – octopuses and squids, for instance, have independently acquired eyes uncannily similar to ours. Vision is so vital that most animals today have photoreceptors of some kind....

Over the past 20 years, scientists have been developing metamaterials, or materials that don’t occur naturally and whose mechanical properties result from their designed structure rather than their chemical composition. They allow researchers to create materials with specific properties and shapes. Metamaterials are still not widely used in everyday objects, but that could soon change. Tian Chen, a post-doc at two EPFL labs — the Flexible Structures Laboratory, headed by Pedro Reis, and the Geometric Computing Laboratory, headed by Mark Pauly — has taken metamaterials one step further, developing one whose mechanical properties can be reprogrammed after the material has been made....

Two-dimensional materials from layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but making/manufacturing them has been limited by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Columbia University researchers reported yesterday (February 21, 2020) in Science that they have invented a new method—using ultraflat gold films—to disassemble vdW single crystals layer by layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes....

About four billion years ago, the first signs of life emerged on Earth in the form of microbes. Although scientists are still determining exactly when and how these microbes appeared, it’s clear that the emergence of life is intricately intertwined with the chemical and physical characteristics of early Earth. “It is reasonable to suspect that life could have started differently—or not at all—if the early chemical characteristics of our planet were different,” says Dustin Trail, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester....

Professor Carmit Levy from the Department of Human Genetics and Biochemistry and Dr. Yftach Gepner from the School of Public Health and the Sylvan Adams Sports Institute at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine conducted the study. Prof. Levy notes that the new research has resulted in a very important discovery by merging scientific know-how from different schools at TAU, which may help avoid metastatic cancer, Israel’s top cause of death....

Researchers led by scientists at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have discovered why children have largely avoided severe symptoms of COVID-19. It turns out that children have a robust initial ‘innate’ immune response that quickly overpowers the virus. However, unlike the immune systems of adults, children’s immune systems do not retain memory of the virus and don’t adapt, so when they are exposed to SARS-CoV-2 again, their bodies still perceive it as a new threat....

The study, appearing online on December 17 in the journal Neuron, helps explain the molecular basis of complex brain abnormalities, including small brain size (microcephaly) observed in children who were suffering from a wide variety of clinical problems, ranging from severe cognitive deficits to autism spectrum disorders. The Yale team was led by Ketu Mishra-Gorur and Ahmet Caglayan in the lab of Murat Gunel, the Nixdorff-German Professor and chair in the Department of Neurosurgery, and professor of genetics and neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine....

Compared to the age of the solar system – about four-and-a-half billion years – a couple of decades are next to nothing. Some planetary locales change little over many millions of years, so for scientists who study the planets, any object that evolves on such a short interval makes for a tempting target for study. And so it is with the ever-changing rings of Saturn. Case in point: Saturn’s narrow, chaotic and clumpy F ring....

The AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), the largest global HIV research network, which recently expanded its focus to include evaluating outpatient treatment for COVID-19, today announced the launch of A5404, a clinical trial studying how prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 and receiving either an investigational COVID-19 therapy or placebo/active comparator affects participants’ immune responses to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. A5404 is a sub-study of the ACTIV-2 Outpatient Monoclonal Antibodies and Other Therapies Trial (ACTG A5401), which is evaluating multiple investigational agents to treat early, symptomatic COVID-19 in non-hospitalized individuals....

Pregnant people who contract COVID-19 have an increased risk of disease severity and death, yet only 31% of pregnant people in the United States had received vaccines as of September 2021. One barrier to vaccine acceptance is the concern that vaccination might disrupt pregnancy. A Yale co-led study, which looked at more than 40,000 pregnant individuals, adds new evidence supporting the safety of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy. The study found COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was not associated with preterm birth or small-for-gestational-age (SGA) when comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated pregnant people....

The researchers identified problematic social media use in teens who reported six or more addiction-like behaviors, such as feeling bad when not using social media, trying but failing to spend less time using it, and using social media to escape from negative feelings. The situation is worse in schools where differences in wealth between classmates are greater. The authors say the results – based on more than 179,000 schoolchildren in 40 countries – suggest that new strategies are needed for social media use that promote ways to disengage....

VEXAS syndrome is a rare but serious condition with a high mortality rate. Approximately half of those diagnosed, mostly men, die within five years of diagnosis. The syndrome is often associated with unexplained fevers and low blood oxygen levels in individuals who have been diagnosed with other diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and blood cancer. The symptoms are believed to be related to an overactive immune system, which causes inflammation and classifies VEXAS syndrome as an autoimmune disorder....

“We’ve created the Google Maps of editing the genome,” said co-corresponding author Yong Cheng, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Hematology. “With this tool, we provide a new approach to identify places to safely integrate a gene cassette. We created step-by-step directions, so you can follow the steps and easily find safe harbor sites in specific tissues.” Gene therapy, in which a patient is given a functioning copy of a dysfunctional gene, has demonstrated success in treating some genetic disorders....

Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have now devised a potential treatment that could make passing kidney stones faster and less painful. They have identified a combination of two drugs that relax the walls of the ureter — the tube that connects the kidneys to the bladder — and can be delivered directly to the ureter with a catheter-like instrument. Relaxing the ureter could help stones move through the tube more easily, the researchers say....

Patients admitted with COVID-19 at select hospitals may now volunteer to enroll in a clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy of a potential new treatment for the disease. The Phase 3 randomized, controlled trial is known as ACTIV-3, and as a “master protocol,” it is designed to expand to test multiple different kinds of monoclonal antibody treatments. It also can enroll additional volunteers in the middle of the trial, if a specific investigational treatment shows promise....

The study, by researchers at John Jay College, the City University of New York (CUNY), appears in Justice Evaluation Journal, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. “The increase in nonviolent crimes must be a consideration when assessing the legalization of recreational marijuana,” says Nathan J. Connealy, a doctoral student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY, who led the study. “But the significant revenue these dispensaries generated in Denver may lead other jurisdictions to ask whether the public will tolerate increases in nonviolent crime given the potential monetary benefits of legalizing recreational marijuana....

Breakthrough forensic research at Northumbria University, Newcastle, has revealed for the first time that textile fibers can, under certain circumstances, be transferred between clothing in the absence of contact. This new forensic discovery has not been demonstrated before and could have a major implication for fiber evidence in certain criminal cases. Researchers within Northumbria University’s Department of Applied Sciences have proved that contactless transfer of fibers between garments can be possible through airborne travel....

In the same way that optical lenses focus light, waveguide lenses serve to direct electromagnetic radio wave energy in a given direction – for instance to send out a radar or a communication signal – and minimize energy loss in the process. Traditional waveguide lenses have complex electrically-sensitive ‘dielectric’ material to restrict electromagnetic signals as desired, but this water drop waveguide lens – once its top plate has been added on – comes down purely to its curved shape directing signals through it....

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA’s (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope are showing that fierce winds from a supermassive black hole blow outward in all directions — a phenomenon that had been suspected, but difficult to prove until now. This discovery has given astronomers their first opportunity to measure the strength of these ultra-fast winds and prove they are powerful enough to inhibit the host galaxy’s ability to make new stars....

The unexpected simulation outcome runs counter to the longstanding belief by many in the environmental science community that future global climate change will make tropical oceans inhospitable to phytoplankton, which are the base of the aquatic food web. The UCI researchers provide the evidence for their findings in a paper published today (January 27, 2020) in Nature Geoscience. Senior author Adam Martiny, UCI professor in oceanography, explained that the prevalent thinking on phytoplankton biomass is based on an increasingly stratified ocean....