A quiet months-long legal fight between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna over COVID-19 vaccine patents recently burst into public view. The outcome of the battle has important implications, not only for efforts to contain the pandemic but more broadly for drugs and vaccines that could be critical for future public health crises. I teach drug regulation and patent law at Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies....

But the recent closures of restaurants, bars, and movie theaters did not disperse crowds so much as move them outside. And when people flocked instead to beaches, parks, and hiking trails, officials began to shut those places down too. For one University of Chicago psychologist, those measures underscore a widespread urban problem. “If a city doesn’t have enough green space for the number of people who live there, that’s a public health issue,” said Assoc....

Innovation can be used with existing hardware, requires only a software update. A group of researchers led by a BYU computer engineering professor has created a protocol that significantly extends the distance a Wi-Fi-enabled device can send and receive signals. The engineering innovation requires no new hardware to enhance the signal range for “internet of things” devices, like a door sensor or motion detector, but can extend the distance these devices can be installed from a Wi-Fi access point by more than 60 meters (200 feet), according to test results....

I am a medical microbiologist and immunologist who studies the functions of vitamin D in immune cells. My laboratory has been interested in figuring out why the immune system has vitamin D receptors that determine which cells can use vitamin D. In the immune system, vitamin D acts to improve your ability to fight infections and to reduce inflammation. Where to get your vitamin D Vitamin D is called the sunshine vitamin since it is made in the skin after exposure to the sun....

But quality of evidence variable, and no clarity on optimal formulation or dose. A zinc supplement might help stave off the symptoms of respiratory tract infections, such as coughing, congestion, and sore throat, and cut illness duration, suggests a pooled analysis of the available evidence, published in the open access journal BMJ Open. But the quality of the evidence on which these findings are based is variable, and it’s not clear what an optimal formulation or dose of this nutrient might be, caution the researchers....

The research team is the first to combine 3D climate modeling with atmospheric chemistry to explore the habitability of planets around M dwarf stars, which comprise about 70% of the total galactic population. Using this tool, the researchers have redefined the conditions that make a planet habitable by taking the star’s radiation and the planet’s rotation rate into account. Among its findings, the Northwestern team, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, NASA’s Virtual Planet Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered that only exoplanets orbiting active stars — those that emit a lot of ultraviolet (UV) radiation — lose significant water to vaporization....

As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea satisfies right away three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: it orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. The final requirement is that it has enough mass for its own gravity to pull it into a roughly spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea....

The scientists published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. Because the sonically striking coughs are distinct from the choruses of other marine organisms like shrimp and sea urchins, the researchers discovered that they could record the scallops’ coughs from up to 10 meters away by using hydrophones, which are submersible acoustic sensors. Previous research has indicated that scallops feed less often and grow slower in the presence of toxic algae and decreased levels of oxygen concentration....

NASA’s InSight mission has ended after collecting unique science on Mars for more than four years. Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as “dead bus.” NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts....

A team of astronomers has used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii to discover four pairs of stars that orbit each other in less than 4 hours. Until now it was thought that such close-in binary stars could not exist. The new discoveries come from the telescope’s Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) Transit Survey, and appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. About half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy are, unlike our Sun, part of a binary system in which two stars orbit each other....

Just four days after heavy rain hit California, the state was drenched with another atmospheric river on January 4 and 5, 2023. A plume of moisture from the tropical Pacific interacted with a low-pressure system that rapidly strengthened over the northeast Pacific, producing a storm that caused flooding, toppled trees, and downed power lines. According to the National Weather Service, coastal areas of California saw wind speeds of 40 to 80 miles per hour....

As children, our parents encouraged us to take vitamins for growth and strength. Now, Japanese researchers have found that a specific supplement may even repair a broken heart. In a study that was recently published in the European Heart Journal, researchers from Osaka University discovered that a dietary supplement can significantly improve heart disease symptoms in a subset of patients. Coronary artery disease (CAD), which involves narrowing or even closing of the arteries of the heart and often leads to heart attack, is a major cause of death worldwide....

Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium in Pasadena will host the documentary’s screening on Saturday, November 16, 2019, at 7 p.m. It is the first of four documentaries about JPL missions to the Red Planet preceding the much-anticipated launch of the Mars 2020 rover next summer. From a parachute that could not be tested in conditions that would match the Martian atmosphere, to the late addition of an unwanted rover that would not have looked out of place in a toy store, the Mars Pathfinder mission was a doubter’s dream, taken on by a mostly young group of engineers and scientists guided by a grizzled manager known for being a maverick....

The microrobots safely eliminated the bacteria that causes pneumonia in the lungs of mice, resulting in 100% survival. In contrast, mice that were not treated all passed away three days after infection. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature Materials. The microrobots are constructed from algal cells whose surfaces are speckled with nanoparticles containing antibiotics. The algae provide mobility, allowing the microrobots to swim around and deliver antibiotics straight to more bacteria in the lungs....

To control the three-dimensional shape of engineered tissue, researchers grow cells on tiny, sponge-like scaffolds. These devices can be implanted into patients or used in the lab to study tissue responses to potential drugs. A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Boston Children’s Hospital has now added a new element to tissue scaffolds: electronic sensors. These sensors, made of silicon nanowires, could be used to monitor electrical activity in the tissue surrounding the scaffold, control drug release or screen drug candidates for their effects on the beating of heart tissue....

These findings reveal new information about the behavior of the material and particles that speed away from the Sun, bringing scientists closer to answering fundamental questions about the physics of our star. In the quest to protect astronauts and technology in space, the information Parker has uncovered about how the Sun constantly ejects material and energy will help scientists re-write the models we use to understand and predict the space weather around our planet and understand the process by which stars are created and evolve....

The galaxy, named GHZ2/GLASS-z12, was initially identified in the JWST GLASS survey, a survey that observes the distant Universe and behind massive clusters of galaxies. These observations consist of several images using different broad-band color filters, similar to the separate RGB colors in a camera. For distant galaxies, the light takes such a long time to reach us that the expansion of the Universe has shifted the color of this light towards the red end of the visible light spectrum in the so-called redshift....

New observations from NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicate that the gamma-ray burst unleashed by the collision is more complex than scientists initially imagined. “Usually when we see a short gamma-ray burst, the jet emission generated gets bright for a short time as it smashes into the surrounding medium – then fades as the system stops injecting energy into the outflow,” says McGill University astrophysicist Daryl Haggard, whose research group led the new study....

Study applies artificial intelligence to analyze content of nightmares using crowdsourced data from more than 800 people during pandemic lockdown in Finland. COVID-19 has turned 2020 into a nightmare for many people, as they struggle with health problems, economic uncertainty and other challenges. Now a team of researchers in Finland has evidence that the pandemic really is a bad dream. In a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists used artificial intelligence to help analyze the dream content of close to a thousand people and found that the novel coronavirus had infected more than half of the distressed dreams reported....

At first glance, the bone-dry landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile might seem inhospitable. But, it’s prime real estate for astronomers. This desert is now home to the largest ground-based radio telescope in the world! The telescope is called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or “ALMA for short. And, it’s allowing us to see the universe like we never have before,” says Kartik Sheth, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Va....