Women who have COVID-19 towards the end of their pregnancy are vulnerable to birth-related complications. They are more likely to have complications than those who get COVID-19 in the earlier stages of pregnancy or who haven’t had COVID-19 at all. The findings show that preterm births, stillbirths and newborn deaths are more common among women who have the virus 28 days, or less, before their delivery date. The majority of complications, which also include COVID-related critical care admissions, occurred in unvaccinated women, according to one of the first national studies of pregnancy and COVID-19....

Testicular pain, erectile dysfunction, reduced sperm count and quality, decreased fertility are direct consequence of infection, new study shows. Multiple tissues of the male genital tract can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study in large animal models. The study, in SARS-CoV-2 infected-rhesus macaques, revealed the prostate, vasculature of testicles, penis, and testicles were all infected with the virus. The surprising discovery was made utilizing a PET scan specially designed to reveal sites of infection spreading over time in a whole-body scan....

Study is the first to demonstrate cross-protective immunity by vaccines. Northwestern Medicine scientists have shown for the first time that coronavirus vaccines and prior coronavirus infections can provide broad immunity against other, similar coronaviruses. The findings build a rationale for universal coronavirus vaccines that could prove useful in the face of future epidemics. “Until our study, what hasn’t been clear is if you get exposed to one coronavirus, could you have cross-protection across other coronaviruses?...

Professor Nobuyuki Zettsu from the Center for Energy and Environmental Science in the Department of Materials Chemistry of Shinshu University in Japan and the director of the center, Professor Katsuya Teshima, led the research. The authors published their results online in January this year in Scientific Reports. “Owing to some intrinsic characteristics of liquid electrolytes, such as low lithium transport number, complex reaction at the solid/liquid interface, and thermal instability, it has not been possible to simultaneously achieve high energy and power in any of the current electrochemical devices,” said Nobuyuki Zettsu, as first author on the paper....

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has used the drill on its robotic arm to collect a powdered sample from the interior of a rock called “Cumberland.” Plans call for delivering portions of the sample in coming days to laboratory instruments inside the rover. This is only the second time that a sample has been collected from inside a rock on Mars. The first was Curiosity’s drilling at a target called “John Klein” three months ago....

The name “ultra-diffuse galaxies” refers to their exceedingly low luminosity. When compared to “normal” galaxies of comparable mass, the distribution of baryons — gas and stars — in ultra-diffuse galaxies is significantly more spread out. In the following Q&A, Hai-Bo Yu, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, discusses the findings he and UCI’s Manoj Kaplinghat, a long-term colleague of Yu’s, published in The Astrophysical Journal regarding newly found ultra-diffuse galaxies and their dark matter halos....

Kwanzaa Tholus measures about 22 by 12 miles (35 by 19 kilometers) and is elevated about 2 miles (3 km) above its surroundings. Because the mountain does not rise sharply above the ground, it is difficult to see in the mosaic on the left, although a small crescent-shaped shadow stands out. The image on the right, which is an elevation map of the area, shows where Kwanzaa Tholus is more prominently....

Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the clock is the first timekeeper stable enough to map a spacecraft’s trajectory in deep space while being small enough to fly onboard the spacecraft. A more stable clock can operate farther from Earth, where it needs to work well for longer periods than satellites closer to home. Atomic clocks, like those used in GPS satellites, are used to measure the distance between objects by timing how long it takes a signal to travel from Point A to Point B....

An active galaxy is one whose nucleus contains a massive black hole that is vigorously accreting material. In the process, the nucleus typically ejects jets of particles and radiates brightly at many wavelengths, in particular at X-ray wavelengths. Nearly half of all active galactic nuclei are seen emitting X-rays that are of relatively high energy, with less energetic X-rays absent. Since typical physical processes will generate both kinds, the usual explanation is that thick gas clouds swarm near the nuclei, and they absorb the lower energy X-ray emission, leaving the higher energy radiation relatively unaffected....

Diamonds that formed deep in the Earth’s mantle contain evidence of chemical reactions that occurred on the seafloor. Probing these gems can help geoscientists understand how material is exchanged between the planet’s surface and its depths. New work published in Science Advances confirms that serpentinite — a rock that forms from peridotite, the main rock type in Earth’s mantle, when water penetrates cracks in the ocean floor — can carry surface water as far as 700 kilometers deep by plate tectonic processes....

The spatial boundaries, or transitions, between different phases will support localized wave excitations, the researchers found. “These findings could lead to possible applications of these exotic excitations in space and laboratory plasmas,” said Yichen Fu, a graduate student at PPPL and lead author of a paper in Nature Communications that outlines the research. “The next step is to explore what these excitations could do and how they might be utilized....

Called chemical biosignatures, compounds in a planet’s atmosphere that could indicate life typically include gases found in abundance in Earth’s atmosphere today. “There’s been a lot of thought put into oxygen and methane as biosignatures. Fewer researchers have seriously considered nitrous oxide, but we think that may be a mistake,” said Eddie Schwieterman, an astrobiologist in UCR’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. This conclusion, and the modeling work that led to it, are detailed in an article published in the Astrophysical Journal on October 4, 2022....

These gamma rays are of the highest energy ever observed from SNRs, and are probably produced in collisions between cosmic rays (protons) accelerated in G106.3+2.7 and a nearby molecular cloud. “SNR G106.3+2.7 is thus the first candidate object with sufficient evidence in the Milky Way that can accelerate cosmic rays (protons) up to 1 PeV (peta electron volts),” said HUANG Jing, one of the leading researchers of the study from the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences....

Fear memories are formed when humans associate things with strong, negative emotional responses. A team of scientists from Uppsala University in Sweden have developed a technique that allows them to erase new emotional memories from the brain, making it possible to erase your fears. The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. Memories in the brain are created by consolidation. At first, the memory is unstable, but proteins form in the brain to fix it into place....

The Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) is an iconic North American bird declared extinct at the beginning of the 20th century, after the death of the last specimen at the Cincinnati zoo in 1918. It was the member of the parrot family to live in the highest northern latitude of the planet, and was distributed from southern New England to the Gulf of Mexico, and all the way to eastern Colorado....

Existing limited evidence suggests that wearing face coverings to protect against COVID-19 does not lead to a false sense of security and is unlikely to increase the risk of infection through wearers foregoing other behaviors such as good hand hygiene, say researchers from the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. Writing in BMJ Analysis, the researchers say that the concept of ‘risk compensation’ is itself the greater threat to public health as it may discourage policymakers from implementing potentially effective measures, such as wearing face coverings....

Whether we’re night owls or morning larks, our body clocks are set by the sun. Theoretically, changing day length and light exposure over the course of the year could affect the duration and quality of our sleep. But figuring out how this applies in practice is difficult. Although studies where people assess their own sleep have suggested an increase in sleep duration during winter, objective measures are needed to determine how exactly the seasons affect sleep....

But new research turns that theory on its head, suggesting that reduced brain volume may represent a genetically-conferred predispositional risk factor for heavier alcohol consumption. “Our results suggest that associations between alcohol consumption and reduced brain volume are attributable to shared genetic factors,” said senior author Ryan Bogdan, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and director of the Brain Lab at Washington University in St....

The presence of Marburg virus, a close relative to Ebola virus that also causes hemorrhagic disease in people, was detected in advance of any reported cases of human illness in Sierra Leone. However, the virus’s presence in bats means people who live nearby could be at risk of becoming infected. No outbreaks have been reported to date. The findings, based on PCR, antibody, and virus isolation data, were officially published today (January 24, 2020) in the journal Nature Communications....

The existence of black holes was first predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. These objects have so strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape them. Dense and massive, black holes deform space-time (a physical construct with three spatial and one temporal dimension). Many mathematical models used to describe black holes include corrections to account for such space-time curvatures. The main condition of existence for every black hole model is its stability in cases of minor spatial or temporal changes....