Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in joints and organs, affects movement and the skin, and causes fatigue. Symptoms can be debilitating in extreme cases, and consequences can be deadly. Currently, there is no cure for the condition, which affects around 50,000 people in the UK. Available treatments are predominantly immuno-suppressors, which act by suppressing the immune system to ameliorate symptoms. In their study, published in the journal Nature on April 27, 2022, the scientists carried out whole genome sequencing on the DNA of a Spanish child named Gabriela, who was diagnosed with severe lupus when she was 7 years old....

In the early 1970s, the late Jacob Bekenstein provided a proof for the nonexistence of hair made of scalar fields given a set of assumptions on the properties of the latter. Researcher Lior Burko of Theiss Research said, “Since Bekenstein’s proof, several papers found examples for scalar hair, and all these examples violate one or another of the assumptions made by Bekenstein. But in all cases, the hair was made of the scalar field itself....

The study, published in Science, deepens understanding of the normal process of sex determination in mammals. The findings could also have important implications for patients with differences in sex development (DSDs), in which reproductive organs don’t develop as expected. The Science study was a collaboration between the laboratories of the late Danielle Maatouk, Ph.D., assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and corresponding author Robin Lovell-Badge, Ph....

Just like humans, every mouse is different. Some are quick to explore a new environment while others prefer to stay within the comfort of their nest. Some prefer to stay close to their cage mates, while others prefer to be alone. These unique characteristics of an individual remain fairly stable throughout life and define their personality. In humans, personality can be measured using multiple-choice questionnaires to derive personality scores but how can one measure personality in animals?...

Scientists have taken the first step at estimating the best large-scale uses for food processing waste, first analyzing its contents and, based on those findings, proposing production opportunities ranging from sustainable fuels, biogas and electricity to useful chemicals and organic fertilizer. This work is known as valorization, or determining the potential value of something “that is otherwise valueless or even a drain on resources for a company – when you have to spend money to get rid of it,” said Katrina Cornish, senior author of the study and professor of horticulture and crop science and food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University....

A positive and negative charge A positively charged atomic nucleus is surrounded by negatively charged electrons in an electrically neutral atom, which surrounds the atomic nucleus like a cloud. “If you now switch on an external electric field, this charge distribution shifts a little,” explains Professor Philipp Haslinger, whose research at the Atominstitut at Vienna University of Technology is supported by the FWF START program. “The positive charge is shifted slightly in one direction, the negative charge slightly in the other direction, the atom suddenly has a positive and a negative side, it is polarised....

Researchers at The Ohio State University have recently discovered a new way to predict the behavior of spatiotemporal chaotic systems, such as changes in Earth’s weather, that are particularly difficult for scientists to forecast using a new type of machine learning technique called next generation reservoir computing. The research, which was recently published in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, makes use of a brand-new, highly efficient algorithm that, when combined with next-generation reservoir computing, can learn spatiotemporal chaotic systems in a fraction of the time required by traditional machine learning algorithms....

Kidney glomeruli – constituent microscopic parts of the organ- were generated from human embryonic stem cells grown in plastic laboratory culture dishes containing a nutrient broth known as culture medium, containing molecules to promote kidney development. They were combined with a gel-like substance, which acted as natural connective tissue – and then injected as a tiny clump under the skin of mice. After three months, an examination of the tissue revealed that nephrons: the microscopic structural and functional units of the kidney – had formed....

Utilizing the electric field effect, a new technology called “screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics,” or SFPV, reduces the cost and complexity of fabricating solar cells and could provide a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative to accelerate the usage of solar energy. A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley....

Making progress on that vision, MIT researchers have designed a system that lets these types of robots learn complicated tasks that would otherwise stymie them with too many confusing rules. One such task is setting a dinner table under certain conditions. At its core, the researchers’ “Planning with Uncertain Specifications” (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous — and potentially contradictory — requirements to reach an end goal....

Wood is considered an attractive construction material for both aesthetic and environmental purposes. Construction of useful wood objects requires complicated structures and ways to connect components together. Researchers created a novel 3D design application to hugely simplify the design process and also provide milling machine instructions to efficiently produce the designed components. The designs do not require nails or glue, meaning items made with this system can be easily assembled, disassembled, reused, repaired, or recycled....

Phosphine is among the stinkiest, most toxic gases on Earth, found in some of the foulest of places, including penguin dung heaps, the depths of swamps and bogs, and even in the bowels of some badgers and fish. This putrid “swamp gas” is also highly flammable and reactive with particles in our atmosphere. Most life on Earth, specifically all aerobic, oxygen-breathing life, wants nothing to do with phosphine, neither producing it nor relying on it for survival....

This color-enhanced image was taken on December 16, 2017 at 9:47 a.m. PST (12:47 p.m. EST), as Juno performed its tenth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 5,600 miles (8,787 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of 38.4 degrees north. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager. This image has been processed from the raw JunoCam framelets by removing the effects of global illumination....

Creating an effective way to target cancer cells with drugs is challenging on multiple fronts. For example, the drugs don’t always travel deeply enough through tissues, and they can get diluted in body fluids or sidetracked and taken up by healthy organs. To get around these issues, scientists have turned in some cases to loading pharmaceuticals into bacteria, which can effectively contain drug compounds and propel themselves. The microbes can also be guided by a magnetic field or other mechanism to reach a specific target....

Solar energy collection has had some vast improvements over the last few years; however these new prototypes from German-born, Barcelona-based architect André Broessel are quite striking since his concept uses a spherical glass to amplify the sun’s rays for electricity generation. Traditionally, solar energy collection becomes effective on vast scales, especially in solar farms, where panels orient themselves optimally to gather the most light possible. The spherical ball acts as a ball lens, and its specific geometric structure is said to improve energy efficiency by 35%....

Ten days after the merger, the continuum emission peaked at infrared wavelengths with a temperature of approximately 1300 Kelvin (1,o00 Celsius or 1,900 Fahrenheit), and continued to cool and dim. The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on the Spitzer Space Telescope observed the region around GW170817 for 3.9 hours in three epochs 43, 74, and 264 days after the event (SAO is the home of IRAC PI Fazio and his team)....

Life is filled with patterns. It’s common for living things to create a repeating series of similar features as they grow: think of feathers that vary slightly in length on a bird’s wing or shorter and longer petals on a rose. It turns out the brain is no different. By employing advanced microscopy and mathematical modeling, Stanford scientists have discovered a pattern that governs the growth of brain cells or neurons....

While parts of the world experience economic hardship, a team of Portuguese, UK, Japanese, Italian and Dutch astronomers has found an even bigger slump happening on a cosmic scale. In the largest ever study of its kind, the international team of astronomers has established that the rate of formation of new stars in the Universe is now only 1/30th of its peak and that this decline is only set to continue....

The UNC School of Medicine laboratory of Camille Ehre, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, produced striking images in respiratory tract cultures of the infectious form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus produced by infected respiratory epithelial cells. The New England Journal of Medicine featured this work in its “Images in Medicine” section. Ehre, a member of the UNC Marsico Lung Institute and the UNC Children’s Research Institute, captured these images to illustrate how intense the SARS-CoV-2 infection of the airways can be in very graphic and easily understood images....

New research has uncovered that pollen preserved in 250 million-year-old rocks contain compounds that function like sunscreen, these are produced by plants to protect them from harmful ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation. The findings suggest that a pulse of UV-B played an important part in the end Permian mass extinction event. Scientists from the University of Nottingham, China, Germany, and the UK led by Professor Liu Feng from Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology have developed a new method to detect plant’s sunscreen-like compounds in fossil pollen grains....