As cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in parts of the United States, the number of people seeking treatment is threatening to overwhelm many hospitals, forcing some facilities to ration their care and reserve ventilators, hospital beds, and other limited medical resources for the sickest patients. Having a handle on local hospitals’ capacity and resource availability could help balance the load of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization across a region, for instance allowing an EMT to send a patient to a facility where they are more likely to be treated quickly....

Prosthetic valves are designed to mimic a real, healthy heart valve in helping to circulate blood through the body. However, many of them have issues such as leakage around the valve, and engineers working to improve these designs must test them repeatedly, first in simple benchtop simulators, then in animal subjects, before reaching human trials — an arduous and expensive process. Now engineers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a bionic “heart” that offers a more realistic model for testing out artificial valves and other cardiac devices....

In early February, Kerri Cahoy packed up her family and caravanned with students from her lab, driving eight hours south of Boston to Wallops Island, Virginia. There, the group watched a backpack-sized spacecraft launch into space aboard an Antares rocket. Inside the small probe, named DeMi, was a deformable mirror payload that Cahoy and her students designed, along with a miniature telescope and laser test source. DeMi’s mirror corrects the positioning of either the test laser or a star seen by the telescope....

Canada broke its temperature record for a third consecutive day: recording a whopping 49.6°C on 29 June in Lytton, a village northeast of Vancouver, in British Columbia. Portland, Oregon, also broke its all-time temperature record for three days in a row. The extent of the heatwave can be seen in this map, which shows the land surface temperature of parts of Canada and the US on 29 June. The data show that surface temperatures in Vancouver and Portland reached 43°C, and Calgary recorded 45°C....

For the study, published today (July 15, 2021) in the Lancet’s EClinicalMedicine, patient researchers who connected through the Body Politic online COVID-19 support group created a web-based survey designed to characterize the symptom profile and time course in patients with confirmed or suspected long COVID, along with the impact on daily life, work, and return to health. With responses from 3,762 eligible participants from 56 countries, the researchers identified a total of 203 symptoms in 10 organ systems; of these, 66 symptoms were tracked for seven months....

The study uses a new method based on a combination of cosmic voids – large expanding bubbles of space containing very few galaxies – and the faint imprint of sound waves in the very early Universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), that can be seen in the distribution of galaxies. This provides a precise ruler to measure the direct effects of dark energy driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe....

Dr. John E. Parker was working at a West Virginia hospital in 2015 when a 31-year-old female patient was admitted with acute respiratory problems. A team of doctors ultimately suspected that her mysterious case of lipoid pneumonia might be related to vaping and weren’t sure they had seen anything like it before. They were intrigued enough to present the case report — a type of medical paper on unusual or provocative patient findings....

A University of Glasgow-led international team of researchers including those from Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) found the solar wind, comprised of charged particles from the Sun largely made of hydrogen ions, created water on the surface of dust grains carried on asteroids that smashed into the Earth during the early days of the Solar System. SSTC Director, John Curtin Distinguished Professor Phil Bland said the Earth was very water-rich compared to other rocky planets in the Solar System, with oceans covering more than 70 percent of its surface, and scientists had long puzzled over the exact source of it all....

Most metals — from the steel used to build bridges and skyscrapers to the copper and gold used to form wires in microchips — are made of crystals: orderly arrays of molecules forming a perfectly repeating pattern. In many cases, including the examples above, the material is made of tiny crystals packed closely together, rather than one large crystal. Indeed, for many purposes, making the crystals as small as possible provides significant advantages in performance, but such materials are often unstable: The crystals tend to merge and grow larger if subjected to heat or stress....

The European Service Module is powering Orion to the Moon and back, providing electricity, propulsion, keeping electronics and the crew module at the right temperature. On the next Artemis missions, it will also provide water and air for astronauts. Artemis I is an uncrewed mission that is being used to demonstrate and test the Orion spacecraft’s capabilities. It also affords mission control the opportunity to get used to flying Orion and operating the European Service Module....

The ground systems, umbilical retracts on the mobile launcher, software, and ignition overpressure and sound suppression system from the water deluge system, which sprays water to dampen the acoustic shock and protect the deck of the mobile launcher from the flames of the engines, all supported the launch as expected throughout the countdown and as the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket imparted 8.8 million pounds of thrust onto the structure while leaving Earth....

The Wallops Incident Response Team completed today an initial assessment of Wallops Island, Virginia, following the catastrophic failure of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket shortly after liftoff at 6:22 p.m. EDT Tuesday, October 28, from Pad 0A of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. “I want to praise the launch team, range safety, all of our emergency responders and those who provided mutual aid and support on a highly-professional response that ensured the safety of our most important resource – our people,” said Bill Wrobel, Wallops director....

A 2010 study using measurements taking by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite reported that glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau were shedding about 50 gigatonnes of ice per year. These results were refuted two years later by a research group using the same data but varied the interpretation to show that the ice loss was only a tenth of that amount. A new study of the Himalayan glaciers using NASA’s ICESat indicates that these glaciers were losing on average 12 gigatonnes of ice a year between 2003 and 2008....

NASA’s “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign invited people around the world to submit their names to ride aboard the agency’s next rover to the Red Planet. Some 10,932,295 people did just that. The names were stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 semi-finalists in NASA’s “Name the Rover” contest. The chips were then attached to an aluminum plate on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 16....

The launch countdown will begin at 1:24 a.m. on Monday, November 14. Artemis I is the first integrated flight test of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, an uncrewed Orion spacecraft, and the ground systems at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SLS is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle with unprecedented power and capabilities that provides the foundation for human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. Orion is NASA’s new human spacecraft for deep-space missions that will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain astronauts during their missions and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities....

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has imaged the planet Mercury passing in front of the sun, visible as a faint darkening that moves across the face of the sun. This is the first transit of the sun by a planet observed from any planet other than Earth, and also the first imaging of Mercury from Mars. Mercury fills only about one-sixth of one pixel as seen from such great distance, so the darkening does not have a distinct shape, but its position follows Mercury’s expected path based on orbital calculations....

Named after visionary Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci, the DAVINCI mission Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging will be the first probe to enter the Venus atmosphere since NASA’s Pioneer Venus in 1978 and USSR’s Vega in 1985. It is scheduled to launch in the late 2020s. Now, in a recently published paper, NASA scientists and engineers give new details about the agency’s Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) mission, which will descend through the layered Venus atmosphere to the surface of the planet in mid-2031....

In many locations erosion has created scarps and troughs that expose this layering. The tan colored layers are the dusty water ice of the polar layered deposits; however a section of bluish layers are is visible below them. These bluish layers contain sand-sized rock fragments that likely formed a large polar dunefield before the overlying dusty ice was deposited. The lack of a polar ice cap in this past epoch attests to the variability of the Martian climate, which undergoes larger changes over time than that of the Earth....

“Mud cracks are the most likely scenario here,” said Curiosity science team member Nathan Stein. He is a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California, who led the investigation of a site called “Old Soaker,” on lower Mount Sharp, Mars. If this interpretation holds up, these would be the first mud cracks — technically called desiccation cracks — confirmed by the Curiosity mission. They would be evidence that the ancient era when these sediments were deposited included some drying after wetter conditions....

NGC 346, one of the most dynamic star-forming regions in nearby galaxies, is full of mystery. Now, it is less mysterious with new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NCG 346 is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy close to our Milky Way. The SMC contains lower concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, which astronomers call metals, compared to the Milky Way. Since dust grains in space are composed mostly of metals, scientists expected there would be low amounts of dust, and that it would be hard to detect....