The 15-year analysis of Lyme disease was conducted by the national, independent nonprofit using its database of over 36 billion privately billed healthcare claims; this research expands upon a previous FAIR Health infographic that looked at 10 years’ worth of Lyme disease data. The difference between urban and rural areas The infographic reveals important differences in the prevalence of Lyme disease when comparing rural and urban locations. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of claim lines with Lyme disease diagnoses climbed by 60% in rural regions and 19% in urban areas, with diagnoses peaking nationwide in June and July of each year....

Radio and GPS signals behave strangely when they travel through this part of the sky. In the last 20 years, scientists and spacecraft operators noticed something else unusual as spacecraft pass through this region: They slow down. “At around 250 miles above Earth, spacecraft feel more drag, sort of like they’ve hit a speed bump,” said Mark Conde, a physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the principal investigator for NASA’s Cusp Region Experiment-2, or CREX-2, sounding rocket mission....

A key question regarding SARS-CoV-2 is whether it is behaving, or will behave, as a seasonal virus like influenza, or whether it will be equally transmitted during any time of the year. A first theoretical modeling study suggested that climate was not a driver in COVID-19 transmission, given the high number of susceptible individuals with no immunity to the virus. However, some observations suggested that the initial propagation of COVID-19 in China occurred in a latitude between 30 and 50o N, with low humidity levels and low temperatures (between 5o and 11 o C)....

Exercise has been shown to regulate the inflammatory response, balance oxidants such as free radicals that build up in the cells and damage DNA; and ameliorate the process by which cells protect themselves against these stressors. Furthermore, resistance training in older adults is recommended to help maintain muscle, flexibility and balance. Aging and related diseases are associated with alterations in oxidative status and low-grade inflammation, as well as a decreased endoplasmic reticulum (ER) unfolded protein response (UPR)....

Fortunately, only a small number of cases were found suggesting pets are not a major source of antibiotic-resistant infections in hospital patients. Healthy dogs and cats could be passing on multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs; bacteria that resist treatment with more than one antibiotic) to their hospitalized owners, and likewise, humans could be transmitting these dangerous microbes to their pets, according to new research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (April 15-18)....

An innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector – the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment – has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results. LZ is located deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) and is led by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The take-home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko....

They report their results in the IOP Publishing journal Superconductor Science and Technology. Corresponding author Anne Bergen, from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, said: “Wind turbine size has grown significantly over the last few decades. However, today’s technology has trouble keeping up with the trend toward ever-increasing unit power levels. “Permanent-magnet (PM) based direct-drive (DD) generators offer a solution in state-of-the-art multi-megawatt generators, but the feasibility of 10+ megawatt PM-DD turbines requires significant weight reduction....

The cells deliver IL-2, a naturally-occurring inflammatory molecule produced by the immune system that has powerful anti-cancer effects. It supercharges T cells, which are immune cells that can eliminate cancer cells and fight infection. IL-2 potent anti-cancer effects have been long-known, however, systemic administration of IL-2 has been limited due to the severe side effects it can cause. In the study, which was recently published in the journal Science, the researchers were able to keep the cytokine contained within the cancer by programming the tumor-infiltrating T cells to make their own IL-2 when they recognized a cancer cell....

Carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas, released as fossil fuels are burned. It is absorbed by trees as they grow and stored as wood. When trees get too hot and dry, they may close the pores in their leaves to save water, but that also prevents them from taking in more carbon. And when trees die, they release stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Tropical forests hold about 40% of all the carbon stored by land plants....

Reading and writing is something most of us take for granted. Grabbing a pen to jot something down or using our smartphone to read or answer a text message or email is something to which we don’t give even a moment’s thought. Reading and writing, however, are amazingly complex skills – as Falk Huettig from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and his colleagues Régine Kolinsky and Thomas Lachmann outline in the foreword to “The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning,” a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience....

Have you ever pondered how people, without having a discussion or even giving it a second thought, instinctively form lanes when walking through a crowded area? A new theory, developed by mathematicians at the University of Bath in the UK and led by Professor Tim Rogers, explains this phenomenon. This theory is able to predict when lanes will be straight but also when they will be curved. The theory can even describe the tilt of a wonky lane when people are in the habit of passing on one side rather than the other (for instance, in a situation where they are often reminded to ‘pass on the right’)....

NASA | Missions Take an Unparalleled Look into Superstar Eta Carinae Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, combined data from NASA satellites, ground-based observing campaigns and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars’ interactions....

However, the past 12,000 years have been the most dynamic and impactful for human living. According to Clark Spencer Larsen, a professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University, our modern world all started with the advent of agriculture “The shift from foraging to farming changed everything,” Larsen said. Along with food crops, humans also planted the seeds for many of the most vexing problems of modern society. “Although the changes brought about by agriculture brought plenty of good for us, it also led to increasing conflict and violence, rising levels of infectious diseases, reduced physical activity, a more limited diet, and more competition for resources,” he said....

As far back as 1959, brewers at Guinness developed a system that fundamentally altered the texture of their draught beer. Now, researchers from Japan have solved the physics of Guinness’ cascading flow, which will have widespread applications to technology in life and environmental sciences. In a study recently published in Physical Review E, researchers from Osaka University have revealed why the nitrogen bubbles of Guinness draught beer flow similarly to a fluid....

While traditionally the fine structure constant is measured indirectly through calculations and measurements of other physical quantities, researchers at TU Wien have developed an experiment that allows for the direct measurement of the fine structure constant in the form of an angle. 1/137 — the secret code of the universe The fine structure constant describes the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. It indicates how strongly charged particles such as electrons react to electromagnetic fields....

Until a vaccine is available, curbing the coronavirus pandemic relies heavily on how quickly a potentially exposed individual can be tested and quarantined. However, the current diagnostic techniques vary in reliability and relevance, so an understanding of which test is most appropriate for a given circumstance is necessary to avoid false reports. Researchers from Van Yuzuncu Yil University, Marmara University, Yildiz Technical University, and Istanbul Yeni Yuzyil University evaluated the available COVID-19 diagnostic techniques and determined key steps required for better testing moving forward....

But the life of those materials is limited by how they handle heat. A team of FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers from Florida State University’s High-Performance Materials Institute is developing a design for a heat shield that better protects those extremely fast machines. Their work will be published in the November edition of Carbon. “Right now, our flight systems are becoming more and more high-speed, even going into hypersonic systems, which are five times the speed of sound,” said Professor Richard Liang, director of HPMI....

A University of Sydney biology student has uncovered a large, wingless, wood-eating cockroach that was believed to be extinct since the 1930s and is unique to Australia’s Lord Howe Island. “For the first 10 seconds or so, I thought ‘No, it can’t be’,” said Maxim Adams, an Honours student under Professor Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney’s School of Biological Sciences. “I mean, I lifted the first rock under this huge banyan tree, and there it was....

A number of existing strains of SARS-CoV-2, as well as other future variants that could arise, have the potential to escape the immune system’s cytotoxic T cell response in some portion of the population. That’s the conclusion of a new modeling study published on February 10th, 2022, in PLOS Computational Biology by Antonio Martín-Galiano of the Carlos III Health Institute, Spain, and colleagues. The T cell response in humans is genetically encoded by HLA molecules—this means different individuals have different HLAs, programmed to recognize invading pathogens based on different parts, or “epitopes” of the pathogens....

Examining the photos from people visiting mountain gorillas in East Africa, lead author and Oxford Brookes University Primate Conservation alumnus Gaspard Van Hamme said: “The risk of disease transmission between visitors and gorillas is very concerning. It is vital that we strengthen and enforce tour regulations to ensure gorilla trekking practices do not further threaten these already imperiled great apes.” In January 2021, captive gorillas at San Diego Zoo tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, providing evidence that the current pandemic has the potential to also possibly also can affect great apes....