The study found that andrographolide successfully restored bacteriomes and viromes while increasing beneficial bacteria and decreasing harmful bacteria. The treatment also decreased gut inflammation and neuroinflammation. “Andrographolide, which is widely used in India and China, has been used for ages and has numerous beneficial effects for liver and gastrointestinal disease,” says Punnag Saha, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the lead researcher for the study....

The scientists presented their findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Raleigh, North Carolina, last week. The earliest primate, Purgatorius, a genus of four extinct species that lived 65 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous and Early Paleocene, ate insects and plants, but fossils yielded little information about where the creatures lived. The ankle bones were found in several museum trays from the Garbani Channel fossil location in Montana....

The East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, which feed many distinct glaciers, cover Antarctica. The WAIS has been thinning at an accelerated pace in recent decades as a result of the warming climate. The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers inside the ice sheet are especially sensitive to global warming and are already contributing to sea-level rise. New research headed by the University of Maine and the British Antarctic Survey, collaborating with Imperial College London academics, has calculated the rate of local sea level rise – an indirect metric of ice loss – around these especially vulnerable glaciers....

Scientists have now seen these cells in action in lung tissue as well as other organs that serve as barriers in the body, such as the small intestine, colon, and skin. When they employed drugs known as senolytics to eliminate these cells, lung tissue damage healed more slowly. “Senescent cells can occupy niches with privileged positions as ‘sentinels’ that monitor tissue for injury and respond by stimulating nearby stem cells to grow and initiate repair,” said Tien Peng, MD, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, allergy and sleep medicine, and senior author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Science....

HMS researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center examined the current literature on the safety and efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) use in infertile women, finding that antidepressant use during pregnancy is associated with increased risks of miscarriage, birth defects, preterm birth, newborn behavioral syndrome, persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn and possible longer term neurobehavioral effects. Elevated risk of miscarriage, preterm birth, neonatal health complications and possible long-term neurobehavioral abnormalities, including autism, suggest that a class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) should be prescribed only with great caution and with full counseling for women experiencing depression and attempting to become pregnant, according to HMS researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center....

AI Learns to Design Using Visual Cues As Humans Do Trained AI agents can adopt human design strategies to solve problems, according to findings published in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. Big design problems require creative and exploratory decision-making, a skill in which humans excel. When engineers use artificial intelligence (AI), they have traditionally applied it to a problem within a defined set of rules rather than having it generally follow human strategies to create something new....

“Makani is not a typical galaxy,” noted Coil, a physics professor at UC San Diego. “It’s what’s known as a late-stage major merger—two recently combined similarly massive galaxies, which came together because of the gravitational pull each felt from the other as they drew nearer. Galaxy mergers often lead to starburst events, when a substantial amount of gas present in the merging galaxies is compressed, resulting in a burst of new star births....

Using extremely faint light from galaxies 10.8-billion light years away, scientists have created one of the most complete, three-dimensional maps of a slice of the adolescent universe. The map shows a web of hydrogen gas that varies from low to high density at a time when the universe was made of a fraction of the dark matter we see today. The new study, led by Khee-Gan Lee and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in conjunction with researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, will be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters....

New research, led by Dr Richard West including Professor Peter Wheatley, Dr Daniel Bayliss and Dr James McCormac from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the University of Warwick, has identified a rogue planet. NGTS is situated at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in the heart of the Atacama Desert, Chile. It is a collaboration between UK Universities Warwick, Leicester, Cambridge, and Queen’s University Belfast, together with Observatoire de Genève, DLR Berlin and Universidad de Chile....

In 2004, scientists with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer spotted an object unlike any they’d seen in our Milky Way Galaxy: a large, faint blob of gas that seemed to have a star at its center. In the ultraviolet wavelengths used by the satellite, the blob appeared blue — though it doesn’t actually emit light visible to the human eye — and careful observations identified two thick rings within it, so the team nicknamed it the Blue Ring Nebula....

The spiral galaxy is seen edge-on, with its disk of stars shown in pink. The filaments, shown in green and blue, extend beyond the disk into the galaxy’s extended halo. Green indicates filaments with their magnetic field pointing roughly toward us and blue with the field pointing away. This phenomenon, with the field alternating in direction, has never before been seen in the halo of a galaxy. “This is the first time that we have clearly detected what astronomers call large-scale, coherent, magnetic fields far in the halo of a spiral galaxy, with the field lines aligned in the same direction over distances of a thousand light-years....

Of all the varieties of exploding stars, the ones called Type Ia are perhaps the most intriguing. Their predictable brightness lets astronomers measure the expansion of the universe, which led to the discovery of dark energy. Yet the cause of these supernovae remains a mystery. Do they happen when two white dwarf stars collide? Or does a single white dwarf gorge on gases stolen from a companion star until bursting?...

Until now, astronomers could only very rarely directly observe the exoplanets they discovered, as they are masked by the enormous luminous intensity of their stars. Only a few planets located very far from their host stars could be distinguished on a picture, in particular thanks to the SPHERE instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and similar instruments elsewhere. Jens Hoeijmakers, researcher at the Astronomy Department of the Observatory of the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and member of NCCR PlanetS, wondered if it would be possible to trace the molecular composition of the planets....

Suffice it to say that getting a better look at things produces major scientific advances. In a paper published on July 18 in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of scientists led by Craig DeForest — solar physicist at Southwest Research Institute’s branch in Boulder, Colorado — demonstrate that this historical trend still holds. Using advanced algorithms and data-cleaning techniques, the team discovered never-before-detected, fine-grained structures in the outer corona — the Sun’s million-degree atmosphere — by analyzing images taken by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft....

A University of Washington (UW) astronomer is using Earth’s interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host. “Characterization by proxy” is the technique used by Sarah Ballard, a post-doctoral researcher at the UW, to infer the properties of small, relatively cool stars too distant for measurement, by comparing them to closer stars that now can be directly observed....

In their research, entitled “Increase in Pediatric Respiratory Visits Associated with Santa Ana Wind-driven Wildfire Smoke and PM2.5 levels in San Diego County,” Sydney Leibel, MD, MPH, and co-authors report that the Lilac Fire, which burned from December 7-16, 2017, resulted in 16 more visits each day to the ER by children under the age of 19 for breathing complaints. The complaints included difficulty breathing, respiratory distress, wheezing and asthma....

When we think about sponges, we tend to think of something soft and squishy. But researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are using the glassy skeletons of marine sponges as inspiration for the next generation of stronger and taller buildings, longer bridges, and lighter spacecraft. In a new paper published in Nature Materials, the researchers showed that the diagonally-reinforced square lattice-like skeletal structure of Euplectella aspergillum, a deep-water marine sponge, has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than the traditional lattice designs that have used for centuries in the construction of buildings and bridges....

People rely on a highly tuned sense of touch to manipulate objects, but injuries to the skin and the simple act of wearing gloves can impair this ability. Surgeons, for example, find that gloves decrease their ability to manipulate soft tissues. Astronauts are also hampered by heavy spacesuits and find it difficult to work with equipment while wearing heavy gloves. In this week’s issue of Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, scientists report the development of a new tactile-enhancement system based on a highly sensitive sensor....

It’s a favorite first-order for the day, but while a quick coffee may perk us up, new research from the University of South Australia shows that too much could be dragging us down, especially when it comes to brain health. In the largest study of its kind, researchers have found that high coffee consumption is associated with smaller total brain volumes and an increased risk of dementia. Conducted at UniSA’s Australian Centre for Precision Health at SAHMRI and a team of international researchers, the study assessed the effects of coffee on the brain among 17,702 UK Biobank participants (aged 37-73), finding that those who drank more than six cups of coffee a day had a 53 percent increased risk of dementia....

The marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata, which lives within the internal canals of a sponge, is one of only two such species possessing a branching body, with one head and multiple posterior ends. An international research team led by the Universities of Göttingen and Madrid is the first to describe the internal anatomy of this intriguing animal. The researchers discovered that the complex body of this worm spreads extensively in the canals of their host sponges....