The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best ever image of the globular cluster Messier 15, a gathering of very old stars that orbits the center of the Milky Way. This glittering cluster contains over 100,000 stars, and could also hide a rare type of black hole at its center. This multi-colored firework display is a cluster of stars known as Messier 15, located some 35,000 light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse)....

A minimally invasive treatment that injects allograft disc tissue into the spine to relieve pain associated with degenerative disc disease provides significant improvement in pain and function over a sustained period, according to new research to be presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Scientific Meeting in Phoenix. The treatment, known as viable disc allograft supplementation, injects specialized cells and fluid into a patient’s damaged disc. The cells of the injected fluid encourage the cells in the damaged disc to regenerate with healthy tissue....

Two recently launched instruments captured images of Hurricane Ian on Tuesday, September 27, 2022, as the storm approached Cuba on its way north toward the U.S. mainland. Designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, these instruments were created to provide forecasters data on weather over the open ocean. COWVR (short for Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer) and TEMPEST (Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems) observe the planet’s atmosphere and surface from aboard the ISS, which passed in low-Earth orbit over the Caribbean Sea at about 12:30 a....

To make room for Prichal, the uncrewed Progress 78 cargo craft undocked from Nauka at 6:23 a.m. Thursday, November 25, and burned up upon reentry in the Earth’s atmosphere later that morning. Prichal, named for the Russian word for pier, has five available docking ports to accommodate multiple Russian spacecraft and provide fuel transfer capability to the Nauka module. Named for the Russian word for “science,” Nauka launched to the space station in July....

New analysis shows hydroxychloroquine does not lower mortality in COVID-19 patients, and is associated with increased mortality when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin. A new meta-analysis of published studies into the drug hydroxychloroquine shows that it does not lower mortality in COVID-19 patients, and using it combined with the antibiotic azithromycin is associated with a 27% increased mortality. The study is published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, the official journal of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID)....

In most current technologies, data is encoded as a zero or a one, depending on the number of electrons that reach a capacitor. With spintronics, data is also transferred according to the direction in which these electrons spin. In a new study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Duke University and Weizmann Institute researchers led by Michael Therien, professor of Chemistry at Duke, report a keystone achievement in the field: the development of a conducting system that controls the spin of electrons and transmits a spin current over long distances, without the need for the ultra-cold temperatures required by typical spin-conductors....

Researchers at CWRU School of Medicine have discovered a new technique that converts fibroblasts into oligodendrocytes, enabling “on demand” production of myelinating cells. Researchers at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine have discovered a technique that directly converts skin cells to the type of brain cells destroyed in patients with multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and other so-called myelin disorders. This discovery appears today in the journal Nature Biotechnology. This breakthrough now enables “on-demand” production of myelinating cells, which provide a vital sheath of insulation that protects neurons and enables the delivery of brain impulses to the rest of the body....

Silicon is one of the planet’s most abundant materials and a critical component in everything from the semiconductors that power our computers to the cells used in nearly all solar energy panels. For all of its abilities, however, silicon has some problems when it comes to converting light into electricity. Different colors of light are comprised of photons, particles that carry light’s energy. Silicon can efficiently convert red photons into electricity, but with blue photons, which carry twice the energy of red photons, silicon loses most of the energy as heat....

These methods, which are often promoted by organizations such as UNESCO and the World Bank, involve empowering students to take a more active role in decision-making and participation in their own education. Despite being widely adopted in many countries and receiving significant investment in terms of time, money, and resources, there is limited research on the implementation and outcomes of learner-centered pedagogy. New research, by Dr. Nozomi Sakata, Dr. Leanne Cameron, and Dr....

The study is one of two telemedicine studies recently published in NEJM Catalyst by researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). The second study demonstrates the success of URMC’s effort to provide mental health services to nursing homes via a hybrid model that includes telemedicine. “For patients, the message is clear and reassuring: Telemedicine is an effective and efficient way of receiving many kinds of health care,” said Kathleen Fear, Ph....

UC Riverside experts share their thoughts on the new COVID-19 variant. The heavily mutated variant of COVID-19, named Omicron by the World Health Organization, or WHO, has been detected in several countries. How worried should we be about this variant? Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical officer to President Biden, has said it would take a couple of weeks before Omicron’s threat could be judged. Meanwhile, experts at the University of California, Riverside, share their thoughts on this new variant of SARS-CoV-2....

“This is the first direct evidence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in any free-living species, and our findings have important implications for the ecology and long-term persistence of the virus,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, Huck Chair in Emerging Infectious Diseases, clinical professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences, and associate director of the Animal Diagnostic Laboratory, Penn State. “These include spillover to other free-living or captive animals and potential spillback to human hosts. Of course, this highlights that many urgent steps are needed to monitor the spread of the virus in deer and prevent spillback to humans....

As the ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus begins to evade once promising treatments, such as monoclonal antibody therapies, researchers have become more interested in these “decoy” nanoparticles. Mimicking regular cells, decoy nanoparticles soak up viruses like a sponge, inhibiting them from infecting the rest of the body. In a new study, Northwestern University synthetic biologists set out to elucidate the design rules needed make decoy nanoparticles effective and resistant to viral escape....

The research is led by graduate physics student Jie Gu and post-doctoral fellow Biswanath Chakraborty, in collaboration with another graduate student, Mandeep Khatoniyar. According to Vinod Menon, chair of physics in City College’s Division of Science and the research team’s mentor, their double feat, reported in the journal “Nature Nanotechnology,” marks an important milestone in the field of 2D materials and, more broadly, LEDs. While such LEDs have been realized in other materials at low temperatures, this device operates at room temperature and is fabricated using the now well known “scotch tape” based technique....

Meinert‘s team uses a so-called Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) for their experiments. This exotic state of matter consists of a dense cloud of ultracold atoms. By means of sophisticated laser excitation, the researchers create a single Rydberg atom within the gas. In this giant atom, the electron is a thousand times further away from the nucleus than in the ground state and thus only very weakly bound to the core....

To solve the plastic conundrum, we need to develop “circular” systems, in which the source materials used to produce the plastics come full circle after disposal and recycling. At Tokyo Institute of Technology, a team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Daisuke Aoki and Professor Hideyuki Otsuka is pioneering a novel concept. In their new environmentally friendly process, plastics produced using biomass (bioplastics) are chemically recycled back into fertilizers. This study will be published on October 28, 2021, in Green Chemistry, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry focusing on innovative research on sustainable and eco-friendly technologies....

Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. It’s not just something you do in yoga class – breathing this way actually provides a powerful medical benefit that can help the body fight viral infections. The reason is that your nasal cavities produce the molecule nitric oxide, which chemists abbreviate NO, that increases blood flow through the lungs and boosts oxygen levels in the blood. Breathing in through the nose delivers NO directly into the lungs, where it helps fight coronavirus infection by blocking the replication of the coronavirus in the lungs....

The islands Reunion and Mauritius, both well-known tourist destinations, are hiding a microcontinent, which has now been discovered. The continent fragment known as Mauritia detached about 60 million years ago while Madagascar and India drifted apart, and had been hidden under huge masses of lava. Such micro-continents in the oceans seem to occur more frequently than previously thought, says a study in the latest issue of Nature Geosciences (“A Precambrian microcontinent in the Indian Ocean”)....

The observation that most of the viruses that cause human disease come from other animals has led some researchers to attempt “zoonotic risk prediction” to second-guess the next virus to hit us. However, in an Essay publishing today (April 20th, 2021) in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Michelle Wille at the University of Sydney, Australia with co-authors Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, it is proposed that these zoonotic risk predictions are of limited value and will not tell us which virus will cause the next pandemic....

University of Birmingham researchers from the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing have reported their achievement in Nature. It is the first in the world for a quantum gravity gradiometer outside of laboratory conditions. The quantum gravity gradiometer, created under a contract for the Ministry of Defence and under the Gravity Pioneer project financed by the UKRI, was used to discover a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world circumstances one meter below the earth’s surface....