“It’s easy to look at shallow habitats like coral reefs, which are very diverse and exciting, and assume that they’ve always been that way,” said Miller, who completed the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oklahoma. “These results really challenge that assumption, and help us understand how fish species have adapted to major changes to the climate....

Numerous studies have shown health benefits of time-restricted eating including increase in life span in laboratory studies. This has made practices like intermittent fasting a hot topic in the wellness industry. However, exactly how it affects the body on the molecular level, and how those changes interact across multiple organ systems, has not been well understood. Now, Salk scientists show in mice how time-restricted eating influences gene expression across more than 22 regions of the body and brain....

With a new computational approach, SISSA researchers have been able to make the fascinating calculation. Moreover, according to their work, around 1% of the overall ordinary (baryonic) matter is locked up in stellar mass black holes. How many black holes are out there in the Universe? This is one of the most relevant and pressing questions in modern astrophysics and cosmology. The intriguing issue has recently been addressed by the SISSA Ph....

“The infection rate onboard the vessel was about four times higher than what can be seen on land in the worst infected areas of China. A probable cause is how close people stay to one another onboard a vessel,” says Joacim Rocklöv, Professor of epidemiology at Umeå University and principal author of the article. After a person traveling with the cruise ship Diamond Princess disembarked in Hong Kong and was tested positive for the coronavirus, Japanese authorities decided to disallow the 3,700 passengers on board to leave the ship when it reached Yokohama....

Over the next 12 years, NASA’s Lucy mission will visit eight asteroids — including seven Trojans — to help answer big questions about planet formation and the origins of our solar system. It will take the spacecraft about three and a half years to reach its first destination. What might Lucy find? Like all the planets, asteroids exist in the heliosphere, the vast bubble of space defined by the reaches of our Sun’s wind....

New research identifies a reason why older adults are substantially more susceptible to infectious diseases than younger people, a critical societal concern highlighted most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was led by scientists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), The findings of the study also pave the path for new potential therapeutic targets to regenerate the immune system in older adults, lowering their risk of infectious disease....

NGC 1559 has massive spiral arms chock-full of star formation and is receding from us at a speed of about 1300 km/s. The galaxy contains the mass of around ten billion Suns — while this may sound like a lot, that is almost 100 times less massive than the Milky Way. Although NGC 1559 appears to sit near one of our nearest neighbors in the sky — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), this is just a trick of perspective....

In this cosmic snapshot, the spectacularly symmetrical wings of Hen 2-437 show up in a magnificent icy blue hue. Hen 2-437 is a planetary nebula, one of around 3000 such objects known to reside within the Milky Way. Located within the faint northern constellation of Vulpecula (The Fox), Hen 2-437 was first identified in 1946 by Rudolph Minkowski, who later also discovered the famous and equally beautiful M2-9 (otherwise known as the Twin Jet Nebula)....

The Wide Field Camera 3 observations in this image are from a vast collection of Hubble measurements examining nearby galaxies which contain two fascinating astronomical phenomena — Cepheid variables and cataclysmic supernova explosions. Whilst these two phenomena may appear to be unrelated — one is a peculiar class of pulsating stars and the other is the explosion caused by the catastrophic final throes of a massive star’s life — they are both used by astronomers for a very particular purpose: measuring the vast distances to astronomical objects....

The survey, published in the November 9, 2018, issue of The Astrophysical Journal, will allow astronomers to use the globular cluster field to map the distribution of matter and dark matter in the Coma galaxy cluster, which holds over 1,000 galaxies that are packed together. Because globular clusters are much smaller than entire galaxies — and much more abundant — they are a much better tracer of how the fabric of space is distorted by the Coma cluster’s gravity....

Despite the clarity of this Hubble image, the two objects in the picture above can be confusing for observers. J 900’s nearby companion, a faint star in the constellation of Gemini, often causes problems for observers because it is so close to the nebula — when observation conditions are bad, this star seems to merge into J 900, giving it an elongated appearance. Hubble’s position above the Earth’s atmosphere means that this is not an issue for the space telescope....

A single shot of one of the currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines may be sufficient to provide immunity to individuals who have previously been infected by the virus, thus eliminating the need for a second dose and helping to stretch severely limited vaccine supplies, a study from Mount Sinai has found. Such a change in public health policy could also spare these individuals the unnecessary side effects of a second dose of vaccine, which researchers found to be significantly greater in individuals with pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19....

A comprehensive review in Nature Reviews Immunology concludes that evidence is mounting in clinical trials and other studies that the composition and function of individuals’ gut microbiota are “crucial factors” in affecting immune responses to vaccinations. “Never before has the need been greater for robust and long-lasting immunity from our vaccination programs, particularly in low and middle-income countries, and for populations at increased risk of infectious diseases such as infants or the elderly,” says lead researcher Flinders University Professor David Lynn, an EMBL Australia Group Leader based at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI)....

A nova is a sudden, short-lived brightening of an otherwise inconspicuous star. It occurs when a stream of hydrogen from a companion star flows onto the surface of a white dwarf, a compact stellar cinder not much larger than Earth. NASA’s Fermi and NuSTAR space telescopes, together with the Canadian BRITE-Toronto satellite and several ground-based facilities, studied the nova. “Thanks to an especially bright nova and a lucky break, we were able to gather the best-ever visible and gamma-ray observations of a nova to date,” said Elias Aydi, an astronomer at Michigan State University in East Lansing who led an international team from 40 institutions....

The SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infects lung cells and is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The viral spike protein mediates entry of the virus into host cells and harbors an unusual activation sequence. The Infection Biology Unit of the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research has now shown that this sequence is cleaved by the cellular enzyme furin and that the cleavage is important for the infection of lung cells....

New findings offer insight into recovery after inflammation caused by a wide range of injuries or acute illnesses.Scientists defined common healthy trajectories based on how quickly white blood cell and platelet counts should return to normal after an inflammatory response.The results could help clinicians recognize — and intervene — more quickly when the recovery process is not going well.The team’s ultimate goal is to establish personalized trajectories for healthy recovery from a wide range of medical and surgical conditions that can be tailored to individual patients and used in a clinical setting....

Early on in the pandemic, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) might just go away, since historically some pandemic viruses have simply disappeared. For instance, SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the first SARS pandemic in 2003, spread to 29 countries and regions, infecting more than 8,000 people from November 2002 to July 2003. But thanks to quick and effective public health interventions, SARS-CoV hasn’t been observed in humans in almost 20 years and is now considered extinct....

In the last several years, 3D printing with plastics has advanced rapidly. Now, a team of researchers have shown that it may soon be as easy and practical to use metals with 3D printing. Led by Jan Schroers, Yale professor of mechanical engineering & materials science, the research team used a new approach to 3D print objects from metallic glass – a relatively new material stronger than even the best metals, but with the pliability of plastic....

There are currently 861 exoplanets (planets around other stars) according to the official exoplanet encyclopedia website. This list includes only the objects that have been confirmed as exoplanets; most of them have many of their physical parameters reasonably well determined, for example, their masses and orbits. Many more objects have been spotted as potential, or “candidate,” exoplanets, but additional observations and analyses are needed to verify their reality as exoplanets....

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets. Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun....