Gravitational lensing can help astronomers study objects that would otherwise be too faint or appear too small for us to view. When a massive object — such as a massive cluster of galaxies, as seen here — distorts space with its immense gravitational field, it causes light from more distant galaxies to travel along altered and warped paths. It also amplifies the light, making it possible for us to observe and study its source....

Unexpected reduction in symptoms may result from lower stress and more control over diet at home. Patients’ irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms unexpectedly improved when they were under COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, reaffirming the gut-brain connection in functional gastrointestinal disorders, according to research that was selected for presentation at Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2021. “One of our main hypotheses was that these patients were going to be worse because of pressure and stress due to COVID-19,” said Juan Pablo Stefanolo, MD, a lead author on the study and a physician with the Neurogastroenterology and Motility section, Hospital de Clínicas José de San Martín, Buenos Aires University, Argentina....

Flux Ropes on the Sun This is an image of magnetic loops on the sun, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). It has been processed to highlight the edges of each loop to make the structure more clear. A series of loops such as this is known as a flux rope, and these lie at the heart of eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs.) This is the first time scientists were able to discern the timing of a flux rope’s formation....

A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs – taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts, too. Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or traumatic injury, they often feel that they’ve lost a part of who they are, even experiencing a grief akin to losing a loved one. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike salamanders or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool, adult human tissues generally do not regenerate – limb loss is permanent and irreversible....

The study, which is published today (May 27, 2021) in the European Heart Journal[1], recruited 686 patients from 14 institutions in seven countries on four continents[2] between July 2015 and December 2018 to investigate microvascular angina (MVA). Until now, MVA was widely thought to be a benign disease that mainly occurs in women. However, the study showed that during one to two years of follow-up until December 2019, events such as stroke, heart attack and hospitalization for chest pain (angina) occurred in nearly 8% of patients each year....

“Certain countries such as Peru and South Africa that have had severe COVID-19 outbreaks have received few vaccines, while many doses have gone to countries experiencing comparatively milder pandemic impacts, either in terms of mortality or economic dislocation,” said co-first author Caroline Wagner, an assistant professor of bioengineering at McGill University who previously served as a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). “As expected, we have seen large decreases in case numbers in many regions with high vaccine access, yet infections are resurging in areas with low availability,” said co-first author Chadi Saad-Roy, a Princeton graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics....

In spotted hyena societies, inherited social networks — passed from mothers to offspring — are essential to hyena life and survival, according to a new study. While the structure of animal social networks plays an important role in all social processes as well as health, survival, and reproductive success, the general mechanisms that determine social structure in the wild remain unknown. One proposed model, termed social inheritance, suggests that an offspring’s social affiliations tend to resemble those of their parents, particularly those of the mother....

The delicate stalk and pretty white flowers of Triantha occidentalis may seem like the perfect place to perch if you’re an insect, but get trapped in its sticky hairs and it will suck the nutrients from your dead corpse. That’s the surprising new finding by University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, detailed today in PNAS. Triantha – a species of false asphodel – is the first new carnivorous plant to be identified by botanists in 20 years....

NASA Flight Engineers Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio are cleaning up biology research hardware and finalizing sample processing after three full days of bone healing research. The duo worked inside the Kibo laboratory module servicing the samples and then stowing them into science freezers. Those samples will be packed on a future SpaceX Dragon cargo mission for return and then analyzed and compared to control samples in laboratories on Earth....

Arianespace will measure winds at high altitude with the help of balloons to ensure absolute safety for the launch. Meanwhile the team continues to monitor Webb which is kept in a stable condition in the fairing. The team is monitoring temperatures, relative humidity, and cleanliness of the air entering the fairing – critical parameters to keep Webb cool, dry, and clean before liftoff.

An international study, co-led by The University of Queensland’s Dr. Vera Weisbecker, has revealed that wombat jaws appear to change in relation to their diets. “The survival of wombats depends on their ability to chew large amounts of tough plants such as grasses, roots, and even bark,” Dr. Weisbecker said. “Climate change and drought are thought to make these plants even tougher, which might require further short-term adaptations of the skull....

NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft successfully refined its flight path Wednesday with the mission’s first trajectory correction maneuver. The maneuver took place on February 1. It is the first of a dozen planned rocket firings that, over the next five years, will keep Juno on course for its rendezvous with Jupiter. “We had a maneuver planned soon after launch but our Atlas V rocket gave us such a good ride we didn’t need to make any trajectory changes,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

In a rare non-magnetic kagome material, a topological metal cools into a superconductor through a sequence of novel charge density waves. Researchers have discovered a complex landscape of electronic states that can co-exist on a kagome lattice, resembling those in high-temperature superconductors, a team of Boston College physicists reports in an advance electronic publication of the journal Nature. The focus of the study was a bulk single crystal of a topological kagome metal, known as CsV3Sb5 – a metal that becomes superconducting below 2....

So far, the particles accelerated have been protons, electrons and ions, in concentrated beams. However, an international team called the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration, which includes Imperial College London researchers, are trying to create a muon beam. Muons are particles like electrons, but with much greater mass. This means they could be used to create beams with ten times more energy than the Large Hadron Collider. Muons can also be used to study the atomic structure of materials, as a catalyst for nuclear fusion, and to see through really dense materials that X-rays can’t penetrate....

But what if the pain didn’t come until 20 minutes after the hit? By then, the injury might be harder to heal. The same is true for the environment, say scientists and engineers at Rice University. If a chemical spill in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to clean up effectively. Living bioelectronic sensors they developed can help solve this problem. A team of researchers has engineered bacteria to quickly sense and report on the presence of a variety of contaminants....

“Our analysis suggests that this same pulsar could be responsible for a decade-long puzzle about why one type of cosmic particle is unusually abundant near Earth,” said Mattia Di Mauro, an astrophysicist at the Catholic University of America in Washington and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These are positrons, the antimatter version of electrons, coming from somewhere beyond the solar system.” A paper detailing the findings was published in the journal Physical Review D on December 17, 2019, and is available online....

Landers and rovers on Mars gather data that help scientists answer fundamental questions about the atmosphere, geology, surface environment, history of water, and potential for life on the Red Planet. To get these insights to Earth, they first transmit the data up to spacecraft in orbit around Mars. These orbiters then use their much larger, more powerful transmitters to ‘relay’ the data across space to large deep-space antennas on Earth....

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid. In a break from a number of other recent studies, Yale assistant professor of geology & geophysics Pincelli Hull and her colleagues argue in a new research paper in Science that environmental impacts from massive volcanic eruptions in India in the region known as the Deccan Traps happened well before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago and therefore did not contribute to the mass extinction....

A recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, led by OzGrav Alumni (Monash University) Dr. Alejandro Vigna-Gómez—and current DARK Fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute—shows that some binary black holes can originate from triple stellar systems. A triple stellar system consists of an inner binary and a triple stellar companion orbiting around it. If the inner binary is close enough, it can become a binary black hole which rapidly merges....

Decision theory is a field of mathematics that studies the patterns of decision making and strategy selection. In the terms of mathematics, decision making is an optimization task with multiple criteria. Expert opinions, judgments, and possible risks are considered variables, and the relations between participants and the search for an optimal solution are expressed as mathematical operations. LSGDM is a model in decision theory that describes decision making situations with over 20 expert-level participants....