NASA astronauts Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, and Frank Rubio joined Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for an all-day bone research session in the Kibo laboratory module. The quartet worked in Kibo’s Life Science Glovebox servicing research samples for the Osteopromotive Bone Adhesive study. Living in microgravity may affect skeletal stem cells and bone tissue regeneration, or bone repair. Researchers are studying a bone graft adhesive on the space station with the potential to reverse the effects of weightlessness on stem cells and bone tissue....

Although the Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass of only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated. This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which are often so thronged with stars that they have a continuous blur of starlight at their centers....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Fisheries Research. The new specialized fishing lines carry a mild, induced electric field near fishing lines to keep the sharks away. Coastal shark species, like hammerheads, use electrically sensitive organs in their snouts to navigate and find prey. In order to save the sharks, attaching pieces of rare-earth lanthanide metals, like neodymium and praseodymium, to longline fishing gear in place of lead weights appears to repel the sharks....

The increase in deaths occurred in states that were hit earliest by the pandemic — with the exception of Massachusetts. As the number of COVID-19 infections continues to rise nationwide, more than 360,000 Americans have already died from the potentially deadly viral infection. But recent reports describe an increase in mortality during the pandemic that cannot be explained by COVID-19 deaths alone. In a new study from the Richard A....

A team from Lawson Health Research Institute and Western University are the first in the world to profile the body’s immune response to COVID-19. By studying blood samples from critically ill patients at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC), the research team identified a unique pattern of six molecules that could be used as therapeutic targets to treat the virus. The study was recently published in Critical Care Explorations. Since the pandemic’s start there have been reports that the immune system can overreact to the virus and cause a cytokine storm – elevated levels of inflammatory molecules that damage healthy cells....

Retroviruses, including pathogens like HIV, incorporate into the chromosomes of host cells as part of their infectious lifecycle. Retroviruses don’t usually infect the germ cells that produce sperm and eggs and are therefore usually not passed from generation to generation, but this has happened several times during evolution. Out of the entire 3 billion nucleotides of the human genome, only 1.5% of the sequence forms the 20,000 genes that code for proteins – and 8% of the human genome comes from fragments of viruses....

“Scientists have been studying needle-free vaccine approaches for nearly two decades, but none of the technologies have lived up to the hype,” said Benjamin L. Miller, Ph.D., corresponding author and Dean’s Professor of Dermatology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Our patch overcomes a lot of the challenges faced by microneedle patches for vaccine delivery, the main method that’s been tested over the years, and our efficacy and lack of toxicity make me excited about the prospect of a product that could have huge implications for global health....

During the approximately three-minute test, called Ascent Abort-2, a test version of the Orion crew module launched at 7 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a modified Peacekeeper missile procured through the U.S. Air Force and built by Northrop Grumman. The Orion test spacecraft traveled to an altitude of about six miles, at which point it experienced high-stress aerodynamic conditions expected during ascent....

Scientists are preparing a massive computer model of the coronavirus that they expect will give insight into how it infects in the body. They’ve taken the first steps, testing the first parts of the model and optimizing code on the Frontera supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The knowledge gained from the full model can help researchers design new drugs and vaccines to combat the coronavirus....

But imagine if, instead of Newton’s second law of motion, which describes the relationship between an object’s mass and the amount of force needed to accelerate it, we only had reams of data related to throwing various objects into the air. This, says Thomas Yankeelov, approximates the current state of cancer research: data-rich, but lacking governing laws and models. The solution, he believes, is not to mine large quantities of patient data, as some insist, but to mathematize cancer: to uncover the fundamental formulas that represent how cancer, in its many varied forms, behaves....

A new study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research on November 4, 2019, published by Oxford University Press, suggests that adolescent e-cigarette users are more similar to conventional cigarette smokers than they are to non-tobacco users in terms of demographics and behavioral characteristics. While many public health advocates have suggested that vaping may lead to cigarette smoking, this new research suggests that cigarette smoking may be entirely attributable to adolescents’ pre-existing propensity to smoke, rather than their use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes)....

“Like a frog stared down by a snake,” goes an old Japanese expression, describing an animal petrified with fear. However, it now seems that this freeze in action may not be about fear at all, but rather a delicate waiting game of life and death. A new report from researchers at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Science shows that this common interaction is all about patience, with each animal waiting for and anticipating its opponent’s actions....

The Potsdam Institute of Climate Action Research team, led by Nico Wunderling, employed network analysis to understand the complicated workings of one of Earth’s most valuable and biodiverse carbon sinks. The areas most vulnerable to transformation to savannah are on the forest’s southern outskirts, where continuous clearance for pasture or soy has already weakened the forest’s resilience for years. Ripple effect The research team has discovered that even if a dry spell just impacts one particular section of the forest, the damage it causes extends beyond that region by a factor of one to three....

The Milky Way, our cosmic home, contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. The galaxy is thought to have formed 13.6 billion years ago, originating from a rotating cloud of gas composed of hydrogen and helium. The gas then accumulated over billions of years in a rotating disk, where stars like our sun were created. The research team presents their findings on the stars in the outer regions of the galactic disk in a new study that was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

The virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, presents at least six strains. Despite its mutations, the virus shows little variability, and this is good news for the researchers working on a viable vaccine. These are the results of the most extensive study ever carried out on SARS-CoV-2 sequencing. Researchers at the University of Bologna drew from the analysis of 48,635 coronavirus genomes, which were isolated by researchers in labs all over the world....

The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, probed the thermal history of the universe over the last 10 billion years. It found that the mean temperature of gas across the universe has increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees Kelvin today — approximately 4 million degrees Fahrenheit. “Our new measurement provides a direct confirmation of the seminal work by Jim Peebles — the 2019 Nobel Laureate in Physics — who laid out the theory of how the large-scale structure forms in the universe,” said Yi-Kuan Chiang, lead author of the study and a research fellow at The Ohio State University Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics....

A widely available and affordable drug, heparin, limits lung damage when inhaled by COVID-19 patients, according to world-first findings by researchers from The Australian National University (ANU). The researchers are coordinating multiple studies tracking hospital patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 13 countries who were given doses of inhaled heparin. ANU study lead Professor Frank van Haren said initial results indicate the drug could be “a promising treatment” and also “a possible preventative against the virus....

It opens up the possibility of many more survivors of supernovae traveling undiscovered through the Milky Way, as well as other types of supernovae occurring in other galaxies that astronomers have never seen before. Reported today (July 15, 2020) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), analyzed a white dwarf that was previously found to have an unusual atmospheric composition....

Black holes on a collision course … And an anniversary on Mars … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA! NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 Flight Crew Arrives at Launch Site On February 21, the members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center ahead of their flight to the International Space Station. The crew, including NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, are targeted for launch no earlier than February 27 from Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A....

Zoantharians, or colonial anemones, include species popular in the pet trade such as Zoanthus or Palythoa, but the new species are all much more cryptic, living in marine caves, cracks, or at depths below most recreational SCUBA diving (>20 m). The research was published December 29, 2017, in the open-access journal ZooKeys. The three new species belong to the genus Antipathozoanthus, which contains species that only live on top of black coral colonies....