However, there has been disagreement about its prescription since some people believe there is a significant danger of addiction. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has investigated this by administering the drug to mice. Like other drugs, it causes an increase in dopamine in their brains, but it also inhibits a specific receptor that precludes the progression to addiction. The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. They started by making a gel containing microtubules, which are stiff polymer filaments that act as guiding tracks for kinesin inside cells. Kinesin is propelled along the microtubule cables by ATP. They added a small polymer to the mix to encourage the microtubules to form bundles and create a moving network. Water droplets containing this gel moved continuously in oil emulsion and on flat surfaces, without the use of any external force....

For half a century biologists have studied the way that the lambda virus parks DNA in the chromosome of a host E. coli bacterium and later extracts it as a model reaction of genetic recombination. But for all that time, they could never produce an overall depiction of the protein-DNA machines that carry out the work. In a pair of back-to-back papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists produce those long-sought renderings and describe how they figured out what they should look like....

Research published today describes how another “luminous” galaxy was likely engulfed by the Large Magellanic Cloud some three to five billion years ago. ICRAR Masters student Benjamin Armstrong, the lead author on the study, said most stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud rotate clockwise around the center of the galaxy. But, unusually, some stars rotate anti-clockwise. “For a while, it was thought that these stars might have come from its companion galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud,” Mr....

Over 50 millennia, at least five major immigration waves have successively populated the Philippines, the most comprehensive survey of genetic variations in the country to date shows. This Uppsala University study, published in the scientific journal PNAS, comprises 2.3 million DNA markers from some 1,000 individuals. “Our findings suggest that instead of farming, climate change may have played a more important role in driving the mass movement of populations in various directions,” says Maximilian Larena, researcher at Uppsala University’s Department of Organismal Biology and first author of the study....

Scientists have discovered a unique enzyme responsible for the pungent characteristic smell we call body odor or BO. Researchers from the University of York have previously shown that only a few bacteria in your armpit are the real culprits behind BO. Now the same team, in collaboration with Unilever scientists, has gone a step further to discover a unique “BO enzyme” found only within these bacteria and responsible for the characteristic armpit odor....

Light to moderate drinking may preserve brain function in older age, according to a new study from the University of Georgia. The study examined the link between alcohol consumption and changes in cognitive function over time among middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. “We know there are some older people who believe that drinking a little wine everyday could maintain a good cognitive condition,” said lead author Ruiyuan Zhang, a doctoral student at UGA’s College of Public Health....

During the current pandemic, social distancing has been one tool used to reduce the spread of COVID-19. But data from a new study point to as much as a 27% increase in heart disease risk in postmenopausal women who experience both high levels of social isolation and loneliness. The findings of the prospective study, published in the February 2, 2022, online issue of JAMA Network Open, reveal that social isolation and loneliness independently increased cardiovascular disease risk by 8% and 5% respectively....

Even for the most Cartesian of minds, old grimoires often contain sought-after mysteries, such as the fragments of a lost astronomical treatise called the Hipparchus Star Catalogue. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus wrote it between 170 and 120 BC, making it the first documented effort to pinpoint the exact location of fixed stars by associating them with numerical coordinates. This text was previously only known through the works of Claudius Ptolemy, another ancient astronomer who compiled his own catalog about 400 years after Hipparchus....

Early in the Moon’s history an ocean of molten rock covered its entire surface. As that lunar magma ocean cooled over millions of years, it differentiated to form the Moon’s crust and mantle. But according to a new analysis by planetary scientists from Brown University, this wasn’t the last time the Moon’s surface was melted on a massive scale. The research, led by graduate student William Vaughan, shows that the impact event that formed the Orientale basin on the Moon’s western edge and far side produced a sea of melted rock 220 miles across and at least six miles deep....

Scientists have previously seen the explosive snap and realignment of tangled magnetic field lines on the Sun — a process known as magnetic reconnection — but never one that had been triggered by a nearby eruption. The observation, which confirms a decade-old theory, may help scientists understand a key mystery about the Sun’s atmosphere, better predict space weather, and may also lead to breakthroughs in the controlled fusion and lab plasma experiments....

A group of South Korean researchers has developed a new method to cause cell death in both living fish and lab bowel cancer cells using a magnetic field. This application of electro-magnetism triggers a death signal that leads to programmed cell death. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Materials. Treating cancer effectively is difficult, since most therapies don’t discriminate between cancer cells and healthy ones. There are many different approaches, all with varying degrees of success....

Thermal testing is important because it validates the design, operability, and workmanship quality of the controllers – critical components for providing power to X-57’s experimental electric motors. These complex systems have temperature-sensitive parts and must be able to withstand extreme conditions during flight. The cruise motor controllers convert energy stored in the aircraft’s lithium-ion batteries to power the aircraft’s motors, which drive the propellers. The controllers use silicon carbide transistors to deliver 98% efficiency during high-power take-off and cruise, meaning they do not generate excessive heat and can be cooled off by the air flowing through the motor....

“If you look across all the similar marine reptiles that lived in the age of dinosaurs, we’ve actually never found something articulated like this in the stomach,” says co-author Ryosuke Motani, a professor of paleobiology at the University of California, Davis. “Our ichthyosaur’s stomach contents weren’t etched by stomach acid, so it must have died quite soon after ingesting this food item. At first, we just didn’t believe it, but after spending several years visiting the dig site and looking at the same specimens, we finally were able to swallow what we were seeing....

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals. Scott X. Mao and colleagues did it. Their paper, “Formation of Monoatomic Metallic Glasses Through Ultrafast Liquid Quenching,” was recently published online in Nature, a leading science journal. Mao, William, Kepler Whiteford Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, says, “This is a fundamental issue explored by people in this field for a long time, but nobody could solve the problem....

A new computational analysis suggests that people under the age of 20 are about half as susceptible to COVID-19 infection as adults, and they are less likely to infect others. Itai Dattner of the University of Haifa, Israel, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. Earlier studies have found differences in symptoms and the clinical course of COVID-19 in children compared to adults. Others have reported that a lower proportion of children are diagnosed compared to older age groups....

Raja Chari was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class and reported for duty in August 2017. He has completed two years of training as an Astronaut Candidate. The Iowa native graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1999 with bachelor’s degrees in Astronautical Engineering and Engineering Science. He continued on to earn a master’s degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from the U....

Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity form the bedrock of the current understanding of physics — yet the two theories don’t seem to work together. Physical phenomena rely on the relationship of motion between the observed and the observer. Certain rules hold true across types of observed objects and those observing, but those rules tend to breakdown at the quantum level, where subatomic particles behave in strange ways....

The team’s morphing nozzle offers researchers new means for 3D printing “fiber-filled composites” — materials made up of short fibers that boost special properties over traditional 3D-printed parts, such as enhancing part strength or electrical conductivity. The challenge is that these properties are based on the directions or “orientations” of the short fibers, which has been difficult to control during the 3D printing process, until now. “When 3D printing with the morphing nozzle, the power lies on their side actuators, which can be inflated like a balloon to change the shape of the nozzle, and in turn, the orientations of the fibers,” said Ryan Sochol, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and director of the Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing (BAM) Laboratory at UMD’s A....

These stars don’t produce much visible light, but from their magnetic poles, they emit surprisingly bright beams of radio waves. If we’re lucky, as the star rotates, those beams will wash over the Earth and we observe ‘pulses’. While most pulsars spin around in about a second, there is a subclass of these stars that spin around in just a few thousandths of a second—they’re called ‘millisecond’ pulsars. Observing the pulses from these millisecond pulsars gives physicists clues to many questions, including testing General Relativity and understanding the densest states of matter....