However, nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again. What makes that especially strange is that it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say. “This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes. She is lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon and a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA)....

Astronomers have found two close pairs of quasars in the distant Universe. Follow-up observations with Gemini North spectroscopically resolved one of the distant quasar pairs, after their discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia spacecraft. These quasars are closer together than any pair of quasars found so far away, providing strong evidence for the existence of supermassive black hole pairs as well as crucial insight into galaxy mergers in the early Universe....

This study, carried out during the first wave of the pandemic, found that patients with COVID-19, in the acute phase of infection, have significantly reduced plasma levels of the full-length ACE2 protein, which SARS-CoV-2 binds to enter cells, compared to non-infected controls. In addition, the plasma levels of a lower molecular mass (70 kDa) ACE2 fragment, generated as a result of interaction with the virus, are increased. These abnormal levels of ACE2 and truncated ACE2 (70 kDa fragment) return to normal after the patients’ recovery....

Sophisticated and swift, the new system provides a glimpse into the game-changing role machine learning will play in future discoveries in particle physics as data sets get bigger and more complex. The LHC creates some 40 million collisions every second. With such vast amounts of data to sift through, it takes powerful computers to identify those collisions that may be of interest to scientists, whether, perhaps, a hint of dark matter or a Higgs particle....

Children who reported playing video games for three hours or more per day performed better on cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games. This is according to a study of nearly 2,000 that was published recently in JAMA Network Open. For this research, data was analyzed from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and other entities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)....

A recent study looked at the strength, durability, and breadth of neutralizing antibody responses generated by breakthrough infections in individuals vaccinated against SARS-CoV2. The findings are published this week in Cell, one of the scientific journals of Cell Press. Alexandra Walls and David Veesler in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle led the project. Characteristics of the Delta and Omicron coronavirus variants of concern include enhanced transmissibility and immune evasion even in non-immunologically naïve individuals, compared to the ancestral pandemic coronavirus....

The serendipitous discovery, made by engineers at the quantum computing start-up Diraq and UNSW Sydney, is detailed on January 12 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. “This was a completely new effect we’d never seen before, which we didn’t quite understand at first,” said lead author Dr. Will Gilbert, a quantum processor engineer at Diraq, a UNSW spin-off company based at its Sydney campus. “But it quickly became clear that this was a powerful new way of controlling spins in a quantum dot....

Two weeks after your second COVID-19 vaccine dose, the protective effects of vaccination will be at their highest. At this point, you’re fully vaccinated. If you still get COVID-19 after this point, you’ve suffered a “breakthrough” infection. Broadly speaking, breakthrough infections are similar to regular COVID-19 infections in unvaccinated people – but there are some differences. Here is what to look out for if you’ve had both jabs. According to the COVID Symptom Study, the five most common symptoms of a breakthrough infection are a headache, a runny nose, sneezing, a sore throat, and loss of smell....

The biomarker, called “brain-derived tau,” or BD-tau, outperforms current blood diagnostic tests used to detect Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration clinically. It is specific to Alzheimer’s disease and correlates well with Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). “At present, diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease requires neuroimaging,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt. “Those tests are expensive and take a long time to schedule, and a lot of patients, even in the U....

As record temperatures and large wildfires scorch California, NASA’s Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) has been tracking the heat wave from low Earth orbit. While ECOSTRESS’s primary mission is to measure the temperature of plants heating up as they run out of water, it can also measure and track heat-related phenomena like heat waves, wildfires, and volcanoes. At 3:56 p.m. PDT (6:56 p.m. EDT) on August 14, as the space station passed over Los Angeles, ECOSTRESS was able to take a snapshot of the soaring land surface temperatures across the county, home to more than 10 million people....

The findings were recently published in the journal Cell Systems. The research was led by Kshitiz, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, in collaboration with scientists Chi V. Dang from Johns Hopkins and Andre Levchenko from Yale. Nearly a decade ago, the researchers observed a strange phenomenon while looking at cancer cells under hypoxia—or a lack of oxygen. “As tumors grow and become large, they run out of oxygen and new blood vessels are created,” says Kshitiz....

A unique collaboration among experts from several areas within MSK leads to findings about how inflammation appears to be driving the neurologic effects seen in some COVID-19 patients. One of the dozens of unusual symptoms that have emerged in COVID-19 patients is a condition that’s informally called “COVID brain” or “brain fog.” It’s characterized by confusion, headaches, and loss of short-term memory. In severe cases, it can lead to psychosis and even seizures....

These images show two such objects that Cassini originally detected in spring 2016, as the spacecraft transitioned from more equatorial orbits to orbits at increasingly high inclination about the planet’s equator. Imaging team members studying these objects gave them the informal designations F16QA (right image) and F16QB (left image). The researchers have observed that objects such as these occasionally crash through the F ring’s bright core, producing spectacular collisional structures, similar to those created in 2006 and 2007 by the object designated S/2004 S 6....

Investigators from Cedars-Sinai Cancer, in a large-scale nationwide study, have confirmed that rates of pancreatic cancer are rising – and are rising faster among younger women, particularly black women, than among men of the same age. Their work was published on February 10, 2023, in the peer-reviewed journal Gastroenterology. “We can tell that the rate of pancreatic cancer among women is rising rapidly, which calls attention to the need for further research in this area,” said Srinivas Gaddam, MD, associate director of Pancreatic Biliary Research at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study....

“Cholesterol determination is currently performed using colorimetry, chromatography, and enzymes. However, these methods use either extremely aggressive reagents or complex and expensive equipment, or – as recognizing and sensitive elements that determine cholesterol levels – enzymes – biological molecules that are extracted from living organisms. For example, the enzyme cholesterol oxidase is produced by some species of bacteria.” He continues, “Also enzymes are natural polymers, proteins, therefore, they are prone to denaturation and require certain storage conditions, temperature and acidity regimes....

Researchers at Penn State University have developed a chemical model that mimics a possible step in the formation of cellular life on Earth four billion years ago. Using large “macromolecules” called polymers, the scientists created primitive cell-like structures that they infused with RNA — the genetic coding material that is thought to precede the appearance of DNA on Earth — and demonstrated how the molecules would react chemically under conditions that might have been present on the early Earth....

Researchers in photochemistry are working on the question of how light can be used to initiate chemical reactions. “The idea is that light penetrates a molecule and triggers a reaction there,” says chemist Professor Martin Goez from MLU, whose research group developed the new process. Of particular interest are electrons, which are released by the light energy from their molecular compound in vitamin C and then exist freely in the water....

A team led by Professor Frank Glorius of the University of Münster has developed a new method for producing vicinal diamines, a common structure found in biologically active molecules, natural products, and drugs. These compounds contain two functional groups, each with a nitrogen atom bonded to two neighboring carbon atoms. The team’s method, which was published in the journal Nature Catalysis, is a direct and efficient way to produce these compounds....

Two supermassive black holes that are 9 billion light-years apart from one another seem to be circling one other every two years. The two enormous entities are nearly 50 times further apart than our sun and Pluto and each has a mass that is hundreds of millions of times greater than that of our sun. The colossal collision between the two is anticipated to shock space and time when it occurs in around 10,000 years, spreading gravitational waves across the cosmos....

The study, recently published in Nature Cell Biology, was led by Dr. James Lo, an associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, examined gene expression in individual beta cells from mice to identify the number of different beta cell types in the pancreas. The research team found four distinct types of beta cells, with one group, known as cluster 1, standing out due to their superior insulin production and sugar metabolism capabilities....