“In our study we showed that exercise is one of the best ways to turn on neurogenesis and then, by figuring out the molecular and genetic events involved, we determined how to mimic the beneficial effects of exercise through gene therapy and pharmacological agents,” said Rudolph Tanzi, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit, vice chair of the Department of Neurology, and co-director of the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH....

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara are manipulating light on superconducting chips, and forging new pathways to building the quantum devices of the future – including super-fast and powerful quantum computers. The science behind tomorrow’s quantum computing and communications devices is being conducted today at UCSB in what some physicists consider to be one of the world’s top laboratories in the study of quantum physics. A team in the lab of John Martinis, UCSB professor of physics, has made a discovery that provides new understanding in the quantum realm and the findings are published this week in Physical Review Letters....

The latest work builds off a 2002 study by members of the team showing that restricting sleep in participants diminished their antibody response to influenza vaccination, leading to about half of the antibody levels seen in controls at 10 days after an inoculation. Their interest in the work was revived during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when they began to connect with others who had studied this question and started to pull together the meta-analysis....

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however – when intense enough – they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an X1.5-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc....

An international team of astronomers may have found a new way to map quasars, the energetic and luminous central regions typically found in distant galaxies. Team leader Prof. Andy Lawrence of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh presents the new results on Monday 1 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland. If a star passes too close to a giant black hole found in the center of a galaxy, it will be shredded by the strong gravitational field....

On July 5, NASA will launch a sounding rocket mission called the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation or SUMI, to study the intricate, constantly changing magnetic fields on the sun in a hard-to-observe area of the sun’s low atmosphere called the chromosphere. The primary objective of the SUMI experiment is to test the technologies that have been developed for making magnetic field measurements in the upper chromosphere/ lower transition region. Transition region magnetic field measurements are very important, but the most important Zeeman sensitive lines are in the ultraviolet which are impossible to observe from the Earth....

Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia and the University of Southern Denmark discovered that walking 10,000 steps per day reduces the risk of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and mortality. A power walk, however, demonstrated advantages above and beyond the number of steps completed. “The take-home message here is that for protective health benefits people could not only ideally aim for 10,000 steps a day but also aim to walk faster,” said co-lead author Dr....

Until now, the invisibility cloaks put forward by scientists have been bulky devices — an obvious flaw for those interested in Harry Potter-style applications. However, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a cloak that is just micrometers thick and can hide three-dimensional objects from microwaves in their natural environment, in all directions and from all of the observers’ positions. Presenting their study in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, the researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have used a new, ultrathin layer called a “metascreen....

A team led by biologists at the Natural History Museum (University of Oslo) has uncovered a group of species in which change in appearance seems to have been brought to a complete halt. The tiny annelid worms belonging to the genus Stygocapitella live in sandy beaches around the world. In their 275-million-year-old history the worms have evolved ten distinct species. But what makes the group stand out is its presence of only four different appearances, or morphotypes....

A Nature study authored by a global team of scientists and led by Sumit Chanda, Ph.D., professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, has identified 21 existing drugs that stop the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The scientists analyzed one of the world’s largest collections of known drugs for their ability to block the replication of SARS-CoV-2, and reported 100 molecules with confirmed antiviral activity in laboratory tests....

Scientists at Lancaster University and the University of Oxford have created a nano-electronic circuit which vibrates without any external force. Using a tiny suspended wire, resembling a vibrating guitar string, their experiment shows how a simple nano-device can generate motion directly from an electrical current. The research was published on October 14, 2019, in Nature Physics. To create the device, the researchers took a carbon nanotube, which is wire with a diameter of about 3 nanometers, roughly 100,000 times thinner than a guitar string....

Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. In the latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigators have developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring. The team tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results....

When a couple of plucky graduate students took the first picture with their pieced-together microscope, it turned out better than they’d hoped. Sure, there was a hole in one section and another was upside down — but they could still find Waldo. By the following day, the duo sorted out their software issues and demonstrated a successful proof-of-principle device on the classic children’s puzzle book. By combining 24 smartphone cameras into a single platform and stitching their images together, they created a single camera capable of taking gigapixel images over an area about the size of a piece of paper....

“While the overall risk of developing seizures or epilepsy was low—less than 1% of all people with COVID-19, given the large number of people who have been infected with COVID-19, this could result in increases in the number of people with seizures and epilepsy,” said study author Arjune Sen, MD, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England. “In addition, the increased risk of seizures and epilepsy in children gives us another reason to try to prevent COVID-19 infections in kids....

From providing living cells with energy, to nitrogen fixation, to the splitting of water molecules, the catalytic activities of metalloenzymes – proteins that contain a metal ion – are vital to life on Earth. A better understanding of the chemistry behind these catalytic activities could pave the way for exciting new technologies, most prominently artificial photosynthesis systems that would provide clean, green and renewable energy. Now, researchers with the U....

After a two-day journey, the unpiloted spacecraft will dock automatically to the Poisk module’s space-facing port at 8:01 p.m. Saturday, February 25. NASA coverage of rendezvous and docking will begin at 7:15 p.m. on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. This new Soyuz will replace the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft following a radiator coolant leak on December 14, 2022. The Soyuz MS-22 transported NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin to the space station last September....

New study shows online push by foreign disinformation accounts didn’t change attitudes or voting behavior—but disinformation effort may still have had consequences. Russian Twitter campaigns during the 2016 presidential race primarily reached a small subset of users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, shows a new study by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. In addition, the international research team found that despite Russia’s influence operations on the platform, there were no measurable changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior among those exposed to this foreign influence campaign....

A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, or lowers the temperature or pressure needed to start one, without itself being consumed during the reaction. Catalysis is the process of adding a catalyst to facilitate a reaction. During a chemical reaction, the bonds between the atoms in molecules are broken, rearranged, and rebuilt, recombining the atoms into new molecules. Catalysts make this process more efficient by lowering the activation energy, which is the energy barrier that must be surmounted for a chemical reaction to occur....

Because there are new scientific domains to explore. Quantum physics governs the domain of the very small. It allows us to understand – and use to our advantage – uniquely quantum phenomena for which there is no classical counterpart. We can use the principles of quantum physics to design sensors that make more precise measurements, computers that simulate more complex physical processes, and communication networks that securely interconnect these devices and create new opportunities for scientific discovery....

The good news is: We have answers. And those answers come courtesy of Norman Loeb, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Loeb is the principal investigator for an experiment called the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES). CERES instruments measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space and how much thermal energy is emitted by Earth to space. Five CERES instruments are on orbit aboard three satellites, and the CERES team at Langley is preparing to launch a sixth CERES instrument, CERES FM6, to orbit later this year....