An Antares rocket stands at the Wallops Flight Facility launch pad in Virginia ready to boost the Cygnus cargo craft to orbit on Saturday. It will lift off at 12:40 p.m. EST placing Cygnus, carrying more than 8,300 pounds of station gear and science experiments, into space about nine minutes later. Once on orbit, Cygnus will deploy its cymbal-shaped UltraFlex solar arrays which will power the vehicle during its journey to the orbiting lab....

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory researchers evaluated commercial ultraviolet (UV) sources for viral disinfection to combat COVID-19 on land and at sea, and established a dedicated UV characterization lab in five days to ensure safe introduction and effective operation of UV sources across the Fleet. The Navy is investigating UV-C band (UVC) light as a potential disinfection technique for niche applications against COVID-19 for materiel going onto a ship, for common use areas on a ship, and general room disinfection on ships or shore facilities....

Mechanical ventilation is a small but important part of the management of pandemic virus infections that affect the lungs, including SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), and influenza. Ventilators are typically expensive to purchase and maintain, and need considerable training to use. Most also rely on the provision of high-flow oxygen and medically pure compressed air, which are not readily available in many countries around the world. Affordable, reliable and easy to use A team of researchers, co-ordinated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory, aim to produce and test plans for the creation of an affordable, reliable, and easy-to-operate ventilator that does not rely so heavily on compressed gases and mains electricity supply....

A study of adolescent eating habits found that certain ultra-processed foods, such as candy, prepackaged pastries, and frozen desserts, may act as a “gateway” and lead to increased consumption of other unhealthy foods.43% of the adolescents estimated that they increased their intake of ultra-processed foods between 2019, before pandemic restrictions were implemented, compared to 2022, after pandemic restrictions were lifted.57% of adolescents estimated that they decreased their intake of ultra-processed foods between 2019 and 2022....

Would you like icy organics with that? Maybe not in your coffee, but researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are creating concoctions of organics, or carbon-bearing molecules, on ice in the lab, then zapping them with lasers. Their goal: to better understand how life arose on Earth. In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research team provides the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place on icy particles in the frigid reaches of our solar system, and in the even chillier places between stars....

After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar light of the host dwarf galaxy. This observation could help scientists better understand the relationships between black holes and galaxies....

Like crystals, quasicrystals are also tightly arranged, but what’s different about them is the fact that they possess an unprecedented pentagonal symmetry, such that the atomic arrangement is highly ordered but not periodic. This distinctive feature gives them unique properties, like high stability, resistance to heat, and low friction. Since their discovery only about 30 years ago, scientists globally have been trying to understand the properties of quasicrystals, in an effort to make more advancements in materials research....

In the renowned journal The Lancet, Professor Gerry Killeen, the AXA Research Chair in Pathogen Ecology at University College Cork (UCC), states that the results of a major trial on bed nets treated with a combination of two insecticides instead of one highlight the significant impact that such combinations can have on reducing the burden of malaria in rural Africa. According to Professor Killeen, the trial clearly demonstrates the potential of these combinations to make a difference in the fight against the disease....

Researchers killed both viruses using UV-LED lights, which can alternate between white light and decontaminating ultraviolet (UV) light. With a cheap retrofit, they could also be used in many standard lighting fixtures, giving them a “unique appeal” for public spaces, says Christina Guzzo, senior author of the study. “We’re at a critical time where we need to use every single possible stop to get us out of this pandemic,” says Guzzo, an assistant professor in the department of biological sciences....

The dwarf nova system consists of a white dwarf star with a brown dwarf companion. The white dwarf is stripping material from the brown dwarf, sucking its essence away like a vampire. The stripped material forms an accretion disk around the white dwarf, which is the source of the super-outburst. Such systems are rare and may go for years or decades between outbursts, making it a challenge to catch one in the act....

The University of Queensland, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Monash University, and Queensland Health have developed a technology to manipulate viruses synthetically allowing rapid analysis and mapping of new potential virus variants. UQ’s lead researcher Professor Alexander Khromykh said the technology was ideal for use during a global pandemic such as COVID-19. “This technique should give us the ability to answer questions about whether potential virus variants are susceptible to a particular drug or vaccine, even before they emerge in nature,” Professor Khromykh said....

Taking vitamin D and calcium twice a day may reduce your chances of getting vertigo again, according to a study published in the August 5, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “Our study suggests that for people with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, taking a supplement of vitamin D and calcium is a simple, low-risk way to prevent vertigo from recurring,” said Ji-Soo Kim, M....

“This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is giving us some surprises that can potentially help us understand magnetic processes on both stars and planets,” said Melodie Kao, who led this study while a graduate student at Caltech, and is now a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Arizona State University. Brown dwarfs are objects too massive to be considered planets, yet not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen in their cores — the process that powers stars....

Even temporary rises in local temperatures significantly damage long-term economic growth in the world’s developing nations, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist. Looking at weather data over the last half-century, the study finds that every 1-degree-Celsius increase in a poor country, over the course of a given year, reduces its economic growth by about 1.3 percentage points. However, this only applies to the world’s developing nations; wealthier countries do not appear to be affected by the variations in temperature....

The answer, surprisingly, is yes! Titan, which is the largest moon of Saturn, has lakes and rivers on its surface. Unlike Earth, the rivers and lakes, and streams on Titan are made out of methane and ethane. But very much like Earth, there’s what we call a hydrologic cycle. So methane can move back and forth between the surface and the atmosphere. That means that we don’t just have lakes and streams and rivers....

“Medium-deep” refers to the faintest objects that can be seen in this image, which are about 29th magnitude (1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye), while “wide-field” refers to the total area that will be covered by the program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon. The image is comprised of eight different colors of near-infrared light captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), augmented with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope....

In their paper, the researchers explore how these marine giants can influence the amount of carbon in our air and waters and potentially contribute to the overall reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The study was published on December 15 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “Understanding the role of whales in the carbon cycle is a dynamic and emerging field that may benefit both marine conservation and climate-change strategies,” write the authors, led by Heidi Pearson, a biologist from the University of Alaska Southeast....

Important new findings from UM School of Medicine could help guide healthcare clinicians with managing hospitalized patients in the weeks ahead. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients have a greater risk of dying if they are men or if they are obese or have complications from diabetes or hypertension, according to a new study conducted by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers. In a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the researchers evaluated nearly 67,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in 613 hospitals across the country to determine the link between certain common patient characteristics and the risk of dying from COVID-19....

However, why do TCs have such powerful destructive energy? Kerry Emanuel’s earlier research on TC intensity suggested the “heat engine” idea, which explained the intensity of a TC from the standpoint of the energy cycle and highlighted the fact that the energy originates from the warm ocean. Following this concept, Professor Zhenxi Zhang of China’s Inner Mongolia University of Technology and Professor Wen Zhou of China’s Fudan University investigated the spatial characteristics of the energy-driving North Atlantic TCs....

Human evolution has provided us a level of protection from the existential threat of cold temperature with the capacity to produce heat from fat stored in the body. However, with age, people become more susceptible to cold as well as inflammation and metabolic problems which can lead to a host of chronic diseases. Researchers at Yale and the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) have found one culprit in this process — the same immune cells within fat that are designed to protect us from cold temperatures....