Much of Mars’ surface is covered by fine-grained materials that hide the bedrock, but elsewhere, such as in this scene, the bedrock is well exposed (except where covered by sand dunes). Colors are enhanced in the cutout of a pit exposing reddish layers. This is part of a stereo pair, so check out the stereo anaglyph for a 3D view. This is a stereo pair with ESP_039581_1520. The map is projected here at a scale of 25 centimeters (9....
Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons’ telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken on August 16 and transmitted home through NASA’s Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team’s first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft’s own cameras....
On the first day of the UK campaign for COVID-19 vaccination, there were reports of two cases of anaphylaxis — a severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction — within minutes of administration of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine. Subsequently further cases of suspected anaphylaxis to the Pfizer vaccine were reported. A new report published in Clinical & Experimental Allergy reveals that an allergy to the ingredient polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a cause of anaphylaxis to the vaccine....
MIT researchers have developed a simple, low-cost technology to administer powerful drug formulations that are too viscous to be injected using conventional medical syringes. The technology, which is described in a paper published today in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, makes it possible to inject high-concentration drugs and other therapies subcutaneously. It was developed as a solution for highly effective, and extremely concentrated, biopharmaceuticals, or biologics, which typically are diluted and injected intravenously....
“Our fiber-manufacturing system was developed specifically for the purpose of developing therapeutics for the wounds of war,” said Kit Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS and senior author of the research. “As a soldier in Afghanistan, I witnessed horrible wounds and, at times, the healing process for those wounds was a horror unto itself. This research is a years-long effort by many people on my team to help with these problems....
The computer-vision technique crunched data from hundreds of thousands of NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellite images to produce a high-precision picture of changes in ice-sheet motion. The new work provides a baseline for future measurement of Antarctic ice changes and can be used to validate numerical ice sheet models that are necessary to make projections of sea level. It also opens the door to faster processing of massive amounts of data....
Long-term care facilities (LTCFs) are a major driver of total COVID-19 deaths. Reported today (June 5, 2020) in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) geriatricians Rossana Lau-Ng, Lisa Caruso and Thomas Perls studied the past month’s case and death data reported by the Massachusetts Department of Health’s COVID-19 daily Dashboard along with data provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation and other countries....
The researchers also suggest that managing diastolic blood pressure can help reduce neurotic behaviors, anxiety, and the risk of heart and circulatory diseases. High blood pressure is a major risk for cardiovascular disease and is thought to be associated with psychological factors, such as anxiety, depression, and neuroticism—a personality trait characterized by susceptibility to negative emotions, including anxiety and depression. But which causes which isn’t entirely clear. In a bid to find out, the researchers used a technique called Mendelian randomization....
The study is a collaboration between researchers in the UK, US, and Belgium. The lead authors Prof David L Robertson (at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Scotland) and Prof Sergei Pond (at the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University, Philadelphia) were able to turn their experience of analyzing data from HIV and other viruses to SARS-CoV-2. Pond’s state-of-the-art analytical framework, HyPhy, was instrumental in teasing out the signatures of evolution embedded in the virus genomes and rests on decades of theoretical knowledge on molecular evolutionary processes....
A diet largely made up of plant-based foods such as root vegetables, pulses, fruit, and vegetables generally has a low climate impact and is also associated with health benefits such as a reduced risk of age-related diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as has been shown in several large studies. But there have been far fewer studies of how people’s health is affected by eating products based on what is known as texture plant proteins....
The virus that causes COVID-19 can infect and replicate in human kidney cells, but this does not typically lead to cell death.Kidney cells that already have features of injury may be more easily infected and develop additional injury. Researchers have studied human kidney cells in the lab to examine the effects of COVID-19 on kidney health. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of JASN. Many individuals who develop COVID-19 also experience kidney damage, but it’s unclear if this is a direct result of viral infection or a consequence of another condition or the body’s response to the infection....
Study finds funny stuff reduces credibility and support. Political candidates’ use of humor on social media could sometimes backfire on them with potential supporters, new research suggests. People were more likely to view messages using humor as inappropriate for a political candidate they didn’t know, the study found. That led participants to rate a candidate using humor as less credible than one who didn’t – and less likely to get their vote....
Recently, scientists have developed stretchable light-emitting devices called alternating-current electroluminescent (ACEL) displays that can be stuck on skin or other surfaces like a temporary tattoo. However, the displays require relatively high voltages to achieve sufficient brightness, which could create safety concerns. So, Desheng Kong and colleagues wanted to develop an ACEL that could operate at lower voltages and thus be safer for human skin. To make their device, the researchers sandwiched an electroluminescent layer, made of light-emitting microparticles dispersed in a stretchable dielectric material, between two flexible silver nanowire electrodes....
The National Institutes of Health has begun a clinical trial to assess the antibody response to an extra dose of an authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine in people with autoimmune disease who did not respond to an original COVID-19 vaccine regimen. The trial also will investigate whether pausing immunosuppressive therapy for autoimmune disease improves the antibody response to an extra dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in this population. The Phase 2 trial is sponsored and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH, and is being conducted by the NIAID-funded Autoimmunity Centers of Excellence....
The study is among the first to report on voluntary oral THC consumption in animals, a method of consumption that is similar to the way humans take the drug. In a recently published paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, researchers at IUPUI and Indiana University Bloomington said they found the mice were less active, and their body temperatures were lower, after consuming the edible THC. The researchers also noted that the effects of edible THC varied based on the subject’s sex, said Michael Smoker, first author of the paper and an addiction neuroscience Ph....
Our mouths may be home to a newly discovered set of multi-tasking taste cells that–unlike most known taste cells, which detect individual tastes–are capable of detecting sour, sweet, bitter and umami stimuli. A research team led by Kathryn Medler at the University at Buffalo reports this discovery in a study published 13th August in PLOS Genetics. Taste buds in the mouth are critical to our survival and help us to decide whether a food is a good source of nutrients or a potential poison....
At Earth, aurora are commonly seen as colorful displays of light in the night sky near the polar regions, where they are also known as the northern and southern lights. However, the proton aurora on Mars happens during the day and gives off ultraviolet light, so it is invisible to the human eye but detectable to the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument on the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft....
“Some candidate genes impacted female life span while others affected the male life span,” said Randy Strong, PhD, of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at UT Health San Antonio. “One cluster of genes increased longevity of both sexes. In a rarity for these types of studies, the findings were made in a population of mice with genetic diversity comparable to human populations.” The results were recently `published in the prestigious journal Science....
At the Department for Materials of the ETH in Zurich, Pietro Gambardella and his collaborators investigate tomorrow’s memory devices. They should be fast, retain data reliably for a long time and also be cheap. So-called magnetic “random access memories” (MRAM) achieve this quadrature of the circle by combining fast switching via electric currents with durable data storage in magnetic materials. A few years ago researchers could already show that a certain physical effect – the spin-orbit torque – makes particularly fast data storage possible....
“We know the blast waves of exploded stars can accelerate cosmic ray particles to speeds comparable to that of light, an incredible energy boost,” said Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of the study. “Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our analysis indicates Eta Carinae is one of them.” Astronomers know that cosmic rays with energies greater than 1 billion electron volts (eV) come to us from beyond our solar system....
