“To date, swimming soft robots have not been able to swim faster than one body length per second, but marine animals – such as manta rays – are able to swim much faster, and much more efficiently,” says Jie Yin, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. “We wanted to draw on the biomechanics of these animals to see if we could develop faster, more energy-efficient soft robots....

In 1999, when the asteroid Dinkinesh was first discovered, it was given the provisional designation 1999 VD57. It earned an official number, (152830), several years later when its orbit was sufficiently well determined. But, like most of the millions of small asteroids in the main asteroid belt, it was left unnamed. However, once the Lucy team identified this asteroid as a target, the team proposed this new name, inspired by Lucy’s mission to explore remnants of the early solar system....

NASA has announced the decision, based on a recently completed schedule risk assessment of the remaining integration and test activities before launch, accounting for impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and technical challenges. Previously, Webb was targeted to launch in March 2021. Testing of the observatory continues to go well at Northrop Grumman, the mission’s main industry partner in Redondo Beach, California, despite the challenges of the coronavirus situation. The factors for the new launch date include the impacts of augmented safety precautions, reduced on-site personnel, shift work disruption and technical challenges....

Bursts of vigorous activity lasting two minutes at a time and totaling just 15 minutes a week are associated with a reduced risk of death. This is according to new research that was published on October 27 in the European Heart Journal, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).[1] “The results indicate that accumulating vigorous activity in short bouts across the week can help us live longer,” said study author Dr....

With approval from the National Science Board, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Director will advance the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to the final design stage. This action permits the NSF Director to include funds for LSST construction in a future budget request. To be located in Chile, the LSST is a proposed 8-meter wide-field survey telescope that will survey the entire sky approximately twice per week, delivering a large and comprehensive data set that will transform astronomical research....

The findings will help in the design of future space missions that have the goal of taking pictures of planets similar to Earth, called exo-Earths. “Kepler told us how common Earth-like planets are,” said Phil Hinz, the principal investigator of the LBTI project at the University of Arizona, Tucson, referring to NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission, which has identified more than 4,000 planetary candidates around stars. “Now we want to find out just how dusty and obscured planetary environments are, and how difficult the planets will be to image....

The study, published in Menopause, distilled interviews with dozens of women about their lack of desire for sex into several major themes — including sexual dysfunction in their partners. “If a woman is having sexual problems, what’s going on with her partner may be contributing. Sex doesn’t occur in a vacuum,” said lead author Holly Thomas, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of medicine at Pitt. Up to 40% of women over age 60 have low libido, and about 10% of them report feeling bothered by it....

The new approach is based on the use of tiny magnetic particles enclosed within a tiny hollow bubble of lipids (fatty molecules) filled with water, known as a liposome. The drug of choice is encapsulated within these bubbles, and can be released by applying a magnetic field to heat up the particles, allowing the drug to escape from the liposome and into the surrounding tissue. The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper by MIT postdoc Siyuan Rao, Associate Professor Polina Anikeeva, and 14 others at MIT, Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich....

“The MAVEN mission tells us that Mars lost substantial amounts of its atmosphere over time, changing the planet’s habitability,” said David Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We can use Mars, a planet that we know a lot about, as a laboratory for studying rocky planets outside our solar system, which we don’t know much about yet....

Research from the School of Biosciences has led to the development of the MeshCODE theory, a revolutionary new theory for understanding brain and memory function. This discovery may be the beginning of a new understanding of brain function and in treating brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In a paper published by Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, Dr. Ben Goult describes how his new theory views the brain as an organic supercomputer running a complex binary code with neuronal cells working as a mechanical computer....

The new values improve upon earlier predictions by reducing the amount of uncertainty. That’s especially important for the rate of solar mass loss, because it’s related to the stability of G, the gravitational constant. Although G is considered a fixed number, whether it’s really constant is still a fundamental question in physics. “Mercury is the perfect test object for these experiments because it is so sensitive to the gravitational effect and activity of the Sun,” said Antonio Genova, the lead author of the study published in Nature Communications and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

Astronaut Ron Garan, Expedition 28 flight engineer, tweeted this image from the International Space Station in August, 2011 with the following caption: “What a `Shooting Star’ looks like from space, taken yesterday during Perseid Meteor Shower.” A special camera to record meteor showers will launch to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Dragon cargo craft, currently scheduled to launch on June 28, 2015, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida....

Two MIT professors have proposed a new approach to estimating the risks of exposure to COVID-19 under different indoor settings. The guideline they developed suggests a limit for exposure time, based on the number of people, the size of the space, the kinds of activity, whether masks are worn, and the ventilation and filtration rates. Their model offers a detailed, physics-based guideline for policymakers, businesses, schools, and individuals trying to gauge their own risks....

That work was envisioned as the first step toward a system that can originate recipes for materials that have been described only theoretically. Now, in a paper in the journal npj Computational Materials, the same three materials scientists, with a colleague in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), take a further step in that direction, with a new artificial-intelligence system that can recognize higher-level patterns that are consistent across recipes....

In recent years, new strains of bacteria have emerged that resist even the most powerful antibiotics. Each year, these superbugs, including drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis and staphylococcus, infect more than 2 million people nationwide, and kill at least 23,000. Despite the urgent need for new treatments, scientists have discovered very few new classes of antibiotics in the past decade. MIT engineers have now turned a powerful new weapon on these superbugs....

The study, published today in Nature Climate Change, estimates that by meeting its greenhouse gas-reduction goals, China would simultaneously improve its air quality, which would avoid a significant number of deaths due to air pollution, across every province. Fewer deaths from air pollution means a benefit for society that can be quantified — a $339 billion savings in 2030 that the researchers estimate could be about four times what it would cost China to meet its climate goals....

Monkeys can overcome their aversion to animated monkeys through a more realistic avatar, according to research recently published in eNeuro. Humans feel more comfortable toward life-like humanoid robots, but if a robot gets too life-like, it can become creepy. This “uncanny valley” effect plagues monkeys, too, which becomes a problem when scientists use animated monkey faces to study social behavior. However, monkeys overcome the uncanny valley when presented with a sufficiently realistic monkey avatar created using movie industry animation technology....

Evidence of this “mega-earthquake” will be presented at the upcoming GSA Connects meeting in Denver this Sunday, October 9, by Hermann Bermúdez, a PhD student in the Environmental Science and Management program at Montclair State University. Earlier this year, with support from a GSA Graduate Student Research Grant, Bermúdez visited outcrops of the infamous Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event boundary in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi to collect data. This supplemented his previous work in Colombia and Mexico documenting evidence of the catastrophic impact....

Patricia Weisensee, assistant professor of mechanical engineering & materials science in the McKelvey School of Engineering, initially planned to establish a pattern on a surface that would both repel liquid, similar to the lotus leaf, or pin droplets, similar to the rose petal, to influence wetting during droplet impact, such as during rain. Like the lotus leaf, when water impacts a repellant or superhydrophobic surface, droplets easily rebound, similar to rain on treated windshields....

Named AT 2022cmc, the signal was discovered earlier this year by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California. Findings published today (November 30) in Nature Astronomy, suggest that it is likely from a jet of matter, streaking out from a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. The team, including researchers from MIT and the University of Birmingham, believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star, releasing a huge amount of energy in the process....