Flu season comes around like clockwork every year, and sooner or later everyone gets infected. The annual flu shot is a key part of public health efforts to control the flu, but the vaccine’s effectiveness is notoriously poor, falling somewhere from 40% to 60% in a typical year. A growing body of evidence suggests that a history of exposure to influenza virus might be undermining the effectiveness of the annual flu vaccine....

One way to ameliorate the polluting impact of flue gases is to take the CO2 out of them and store it in geological formations or recycle it; there is, in fact, an enormous amount of research trying to find novel materials that can capture CO2 from these flue gasses. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are among the most promising of these materials, but most of these materials require drying the “wet” flue gas first, which is technically feasible but also very expensive — and thus less likely to be implemented commercially....

According to a study led by Professor Debra Fischer and graduate student Lily Zhao, there may be small, Earth-like planets in Alpha Centauri that have been overlooked. Meanwhile, the study ruled out the existence of a number of larger planets in the system that had popped up in previous models. “The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B,” said Fischer, a leading expert on exoplanets who has devoted decades of research to the search for an Earth analog....

Targeting a pathway that controls the movement of mitochondria, the powerhouses of all cells, could reduce cancer invasiveness and resistance to radiotherapy. A team of Hokkaido University scientists studied the molecules involved in mitochondrial movements within highly invasive breast cancer cells. They identified a pathway that ultimately leads to the dispersion of these energy-generating organelles towards the cells’ periphery, increasing cancer invasiveness. When this pathway was blocked, mitochondria aggregated within the cell’s center, where they started overproducing and leaking reactive oxygen species (ROS)—unstable oxygen-containing molecules....

This new image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals dark, windblown sand covering intricate sedimentary rock layers in Ganges Chasma, a canyon in the Valles Marineris system. These features are at once familiar and unusual to those familiar with Earth’s beaches and deserts. Most sand dunes on Earth are made of silica-rich sand, giving them a light color; these Martian dunes owe their dark color to the iron and magnesium-rich sand found in the region....

A Narrated Tour of the Moon Although the moon has remained largely unchanged during human history, our understanding of it and how it has evolved over time has evolved dramatically. Thanks to new measurements, we have new and unprecedented views of its surface, along with new insight into how it and other rocky planets in our solar system came to look the way they do. Evolution of the Moon From year to year, the moon never seems to change....

The design is based on a Stirling engine, developed in the 19th century that uses hot pressurized gas to push a piston. It would use a fifty-pound nuclear uranium battery to generate heat, which would be ferried off to eight Stirling engines to generate 500 watts of power. The test involved a pared-down prototype with a single Stirling engine that produced about 24 watts of power. Most deep space probes require 600 to 700 watts of power, so it will still take some time before an engine like this produces enough power....

The researchers will report their findings at the American Chemical Society National Meeting and Exposition. In the U.S. alone, 1.3 million tons of polyurethane waste is generated each year. The waste usually ends up in landfills or is incinerated, a process that requires a large energy input and generates toxic byproducts. “We want to solve the waste problem by repurposing polyurethane,” said Ephraim Morado, a graduate student in the laboratory of chemistry professor Steven Zimmerman, who led the research....

The Argonne quantum loop consists of a pair of connected 26-mile (42-kilometer) fiber-optic cables that wind circuitously between Argonne to the Illinois tollway near Bolingbrook, IL, and back. At 52 total miles (84 kilometers), it is currently among the longest ground-based quantum communication channels in the country. The loop will serve as a testbed for researchers interested in leveraging the principles of quantum physics to send unhackable information across long distances....

The study conducted experiments and found that conventional thinkers, who tend to rank low on openness to new ideas and experiences, generated more creative ideas than their peers after practicing “emotional reappraisal.” This technique involves viewing a situation through an alternate emotional lens, for example, trying to see an event that would typically induce anger as neutral or hopeful. The study, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, indicates that creativity is something that can be trained....

Galaxies’ spiral arms are responsible for scooping up gas to feed to their central supermassive black holes, according to a new high-powered simulation. Started at Northwestern University, the simulation is the first to show, in great detail, how gas flows across the universe all the way down to the center of a supermassive black hole. While other simulations have modeled black hole growth, this is the first single computer simulation powerful enough to comprehensively account for the numerous forces and factors that play into the evolution of supermassive black holes....

The study evaluated 14 water-stressed locations across the globe for the feasibility of a hypothetical structure capable of capturing water vapor from above the ocean and condensing it into fresh water – and doing so in a manner that will remain feasible in the face of continued climate change. Kumar, graduate student Afeefa Rahman and atmospheric sciences professor Francina Dominguez published their findings today (December 6) in the Nature journal Scientific Reports....

By their direct-write colloidal assembly process, the researchers can build centimeter-high crystals, each made from billions of individual colloids, defined as particles that are between 1 nanometer and 1 micrometer across. “If you blew up each particle to the size of a soccer ball, it would be like stacking a whole lot of soccer balls to make something as tall as a skyscraper,” says study co-author Alvin Tan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering....

The technology enables scientists to capture CO2 and transform it into useful substances like carbon monoxide and synthetic natural gas in a single, continuous process, potentially leading to more sustainable methods of chemical production. Dr. Melis Duyar, Senior Lecturer of Chemical Engineering at the University of Surrey commented: “Capturing CO2 from the surrounding air and directly converting it into useful products is exactly what we need to approach carbon neutrality in the chemicals sector....

Engineers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have received federal funding for a rapid COVID-19 test using a newly developed technology. Srikanth Singamaneni, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and his team have developed a rapid, highly sensitive and accurate biosensor based on an ultrabright fluorescent nanoprobe, which has the potential to be broadly deployed. Called plasmonic-fluor, the ultrabright fluorescent nanoprobe can also help in resource-limited conditions because it requires fewer complex instruments to read the results....

“The conventional thinking was that dust carried by storms over the Arabian Peninsula dominated air quality over the region,” says Sergey Osipov from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Chemistry. His team worked on the project with KAUST’s Georgiy Stenchikov and Alexander Ukhov, and colleagues from King Saud University and The Cyprus Institute. “Our research has demonstrated that hazardous fine particulate matter, which is distinct from the less harmful coarse desert dust particles, is largely anthropogenic in origin and is a leading health risk factor, as well a significant contributor to climate change,” Osipov says....

Since NASA launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey Orbiter to the Red Planet almost 22 years ago, the spacecraft has looped around Mars more than 94,000 times. That’s about the equivalent of 1.37 billion miles (2.21 billion kilometers), a distance that has required extremely careful management of the spacecraft’s fuel supply. This feat is all the more impressive given that Odyssey has no fuel gauge; engineers have had to rely on math instead....

Oil and water do not mix, but what happens where oil and water meet? Or where air meets liquid? Unique reactions occur at these interfaces, which a team of researchers based in Japan used to develop the first successful construction of uniform, electrically conductive nanosheets needed for next-generation sensors and energy production technologies. The research collaboration from Osaka Prefecture University, the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute, and the University of Tokyo published their approach today (October 28, 2021) in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces....

The findings were published on August 8 in the Royal Society journal Open Science. The first author is Derek Siveter of the University of Oxford, and additional authors are from the University of Leicester, Imperial College London, and the University of Manchester. Reference: “A three-dimensionally preserved lobopodian from the Herefordshire (Silurian) Lagerstätte, UK” by Derek J. Siveter, Derek E. G. Briggs, David J. Siveter, Mark D. Sutton and David Legg, 8 August 2018, Royal Society Open Science....

In a new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, two researchers from the University of Rochester’s Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology and the Israeli-based Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya conclude that when the possibility of sex looms, people are more likely to change their attitudes and engage in deceptive self-presentation. In other words, they conform, embellish, and sometimes lie. The duo of Gurit Birnbaum, a social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the IDC Herzliya, and Harry Reis, a professor of clinical and social sciences in psychology and Dean’s Professor in Arts, Sciences & Engineering at the University of Rochester, hypothesized that sexual thoughts—or, in the researchers’ more precise terms, the activation of an individual’s sexual system—would increase a person’s efforts to manage first impressions, bringing with it deceptive self-presentation....