Red nuggets were first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope at great distances from Earth, corresponding to times only about three or four billion years after the Big Bang. They are relics of the first massive galaxies that formed within only one billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers think they are the ancestors of the giant elliptical galaxies seen in the local Universe. The masses of red nuggets are similar to those of giant elliptical galaxies, but they are only about a fifth of their size....

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have discovered a nanoparticle released from cells, called a “supermere,” which contains enzymes, proteins, and RNA associated with multiple cancers, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and even COVID-19. The discovery, reported on December 9, 2021, in Nature Cell Biology, is a significant advance in understanding the role extracellular vesicles and nanoparticles play in shuttling important chemical “messages” between cells, both in health and disease. “We’ve identified a number of biomarkers and therapeutic targets in cancer and potentially in a number of other disease states that are cargo in these supermeres,” said the paper’s senior author, Robert Coffey, MD....

It was the first test of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, known as DESI, which is now almost completed. The long-awaited instrument is designed to explore the mystery of dark energy, which makes up about 68 percent of the universe and is speeding up its expansion. DESI’s components are designed to automatically point at preselected sets of galaxies, gather their light, and then split that light into narrow bands of color to precisely map their distance from Earth and gauge how much the universe expanded as this light traveled to us....

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a new method for scheduling radiation therapy that could be significantly more effective at killing cancer cells than traditional treatment regimens. This new approach takes into account the fact that tumors are composed of various types of cells, including cancer stem cells, which are particularly resistant to radiation. Many previous studies on optimizing radiation treatment schedules have assumed that all cancer cells are the same, but this new method accounts for the heterogeneous nature of tumors and could lead to better patient outcomes....

The study was recently published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. “We need a better understanding of how experiences of discrimination impact health and dementia risk as well as racial/ethnic disparities in dementia,” said Mike Bancks, Ph.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of epidemiology and prevention at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and corresponding author of the study. In the study, researchers assessed data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a medical research study involving more than 6,500 men and women from six communities in the United States—Baltimore; Chicago; Forsyth County, North Carolina; Los Angeles; New York City; and St....

The researchers warn that the delay in starting vital blood pressure-lowering medications could result in thousands of preventable heart attacks or strokes, as these medications play a crucial role in preventing deadly heart and circulatory diseases. Using data on routinely dispensed prescriptions in England, Scotland, and Wales, scientists found that 491,306 fewer people than expected started taking blood pressure-lowering medication between March 2020 and the end of July 2021. If these individuals’ high blood pressure remains untreated over their lifetime, the team estimate that this could lead to more than 13,500 additional cardiovascular events, including over 2,000 heart attacks and 3,000 strokes....

“This research helps us to better understand which reefs along Florida’s reef tract are vulnerable to habitat loss and require management and restoration efforts to prevent further habitat loss,” said the study’s lead author John Morris, a researcher at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. “On the contrary, we also identified reefs that may be potential hold-outs to reef development and are more likely to persist in the future.” The researchers analyzed the benthic ecology, which is the assemblage of all living organisms inhabiting the sea floor, and parrotfish data from 723 reef sites in three biogeographic regions across the state’s reef tract to calculate each site’s carbonate budget....

The US Environmental Protection Agency suggested this month to designate PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common forever chemicals, as “superfunds” which would make it easier for the EPA to monitor them and organize cleanup operations. Cleanups would certainly be more effective if the forever chemicals could be destroyed during the process, and several researchers have been researching ways to do so. A team of researchers from the University of Washington has created a new technique for destroying both PFOA and PFOS....

A recent study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology details the discovery of a mouse-sized mammal foot inside the gut contents of a Microraptor zhaoianus, a small feathered dinosaur from the early Cretaceous period. This is a rare and unique find, as there is only one previous report of a dinosaur with mammalian gut contents, and it’s not closely related to Microraptor. It’s extremely rare to find conclusive evidence of a dinosaur’s diet because of how difficult it is for a dinosaur’s gut contents to be preserved, says Corwin Sullivan, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and co-author of the paper....

An incredible discovery has been made by astronomers, as they have detected, for the first time, an exoplanet whose orbit is deteriorating around an evolved, or older, host star. This unlucky planet seems destined to spiral closer and closer toward its aging star until it ultimately collides and is obliterated. By offering the first glimpse at a system at this advanced stage of evolution, the discovery provides fresh insights into the drawn-out process of planetary orbital decay....

Volunteers lay down in containers similar to bathtubs covered with waterproof fabric to keep them dry and evenly suspended in water. As a result, the body experiences ‘supportlessness’ – something close to what astronauts feel while floating on the International Space Station. This is only the second time a dry immersion campaign takes place with all-female participants, and it is a first for Europe. ESA decided to launch the study, called Vivaldi, to address the gender gap in science data....

Mass melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a major cause of high sea levels during a period known as the Last Interglacial (129,000-116,000 years ago), an international team of scientists led by UNSW’s Chris Turney has found. The research was published on February 11, 2020, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The extreme ice loss caused a multi-meter rise in global mean sea levels – and it took less than 2˚C of ocean warming for it to occur....

An international research team determined that ancestors of modern domestic horses and the Przewalski horse moved from the territory of Eurasia (Russian Urals, Siberia, Chukotka, and eastern China) to North America (Yukon, Alaska, continental USA) from one continent on another at least twice. It happened during the Late Pleistocene (2.5 million years ago – 11.7 thousand years ago). The analysis results are published in the journal. The findings and description of horse genomes are published in the journal Molecular Ecology....

Two University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers have identified and corrected a subtle error that was made when applying Einstein’s equations to model the growth of the universe. Physicists usually assume that a cosmologically large system, such as the universe, is insensitive to details of the small systems contained within it. Kevin Croker, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Joel Weiner, a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, have shown that this assumption can fail for the compact objects that remain after the collapse and explosion of very large stars....

Artificial intelligence (AI) may offer a way to accurately determine that a person is not infected with COVID-19. An international retrospective study finds that infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, creates subtle electrical changes in the heart. An AI-enhanced EKG can detect these changes and potentially be used as a rapid, reliable COVID-19 screening test to rule out COVID-19 infection. The AI-enhanced EKG was able to detect COVID-19 infection in the test with a positive predictive value — people infected — of 37% and a negative predictive value — people not infected — of 91%....

A volcanic eruption around 579 million years ago buried a “nursery” of the earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, new research suggests. A team from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in collaboration with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, looked for evidence of life from the mysterious Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) in which the first ‘animals’ – complex multicellular organisms –appeared....

Spectacular new pictures, created from images from both ground- and space-based telescopes, tell the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. New data from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has revealed a remarkable ring of gas in a system called 1E 0102.2-7219, expanding slowly within the depths of numerous other fast-moving filaments of gas and dust left behind after a supernova explosion....

In the spring of the year 1006, one thousand and seven years ago this April, observers in China, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Switzerland (and perhaps North America) reported seeing what might be the brightest stellar event in recorded history: a supernova (“SN1006”) that was relatively close to Earth, only about seven thousand light-years away. It was reportedly so bright that it cast shadows at night. In 1965, radio astronomers identified the residue of this event, a so-called supernovae remnant, in the form of a sixty light-year diameter shell of glowing gas....

The formation of a stratosphere layer in a planet’s atmosphere is attributed to “sunscreen”-like molecules, which absorb UV and visible radiation coming from the star and then release that energy as heat. The new study suggests that the “hot Jupiter” WASP-18b, a massive planet that orbits very close to its host star, has an unusual composition, and the formation of this world might have been quite different from that of Jupiter as well as gas giants in other planetary systems....

The discovery brings the astronomers closer to determining the appearance of galaxies in the universe, estimated to be 200-400 million years after the Big Bang, according to Yan, lead author and associate professor of physics and astronomy at MU. “Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Yan said. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought....