Last Friday, September 7, Florence was a sheared tropical storm but on Saturday vertical shear lessened and Florence started to get better organized. Today, September 10 Hurricane Florence was rapidly strengthening and became a major hurricane. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) said “Interests in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states should monitor the progress of Florence. Storm Surge and Hurricane watches could be issued for portions of these areas by Tuesday morning....

The researchers found there are far more trees spread across semi-arid regions of Africa than previously thought, but that they also store less carbon than some models have predicted. In the new study, the team estimated roughly 0.84 petagrams of carbon are locked up in African drylands; a petagram is 1 billion metric tons. Having an accurate tree carbon estimate is essential for climate change projections, which are influenced by how long trees and other vegetation store carbon....

Methane emissions have been rising sharply since 2006. Different research teams have produced viable estimates for two known sources of the increase: emissions from the oil and gas industry, and microbial production in wet tropical environments like marshes and rice paddies. But when these estimates were added to estimates of other sources, the sum was considerably more than the observed increase. In fact, each new estimate was large enough to explain the whole increase by itself....

Major smashups between rocky bodies shaped our solar system. Observations of a similar crash give clues about how frequent these events are around other stars. Most of the rocky planets and satellites in our solar system, including Earth and the Moon, were formed or shaped by massive collisions early in the solar system’s history. By smashing together, rocky bodies can accumulate more material, increasing in size, or they can break apart into multiple smaller bodies....

Francesco Massaro at the University of Turin in Italy and Raffaele D’Abrusco at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, show for the first time that the mid-infrared colors of blazars in WISE data correlate to an equivalent measurement of their gamma-ray output. “This connection links two vastly different forms of light over an energy range spanning a factor of 10 billion,” said Massaro. “Ultimately, it will help us decipher how supermassive black holes in these galaxies manage to convert the matter around them into vast amounts of energy....

“Not all babies born to mothers infected with COVID show neurodevelopmental differences, but our data shows that their risk is increased in comparison to those not exposed to COVID in the womb. We need a bigger study to confirm the exact extent of the difference, ” said Project Leader Dr. Rosa Ayesa Arriola. When compared to babies from non-infected mothers, researchers found that infants born to mothers who had been infected show greater difficulties in relaxing and adapting their bodies when they are being held....

A team of researchers led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron macromolecular crystallography to investigate the different states of three glaucoma drugs as they interact with the targeted enzyme, human carbonic anhydrase II (hCA II). “Our goal was to observe differences in the presentation of three clinically used glaucoma drugs while they are bound to the hCA II enzyme,” said Andrey Kovalevsky, an instrument scientist at ORNL and a senior co-author of the study....

“Heart disease is one of the biggest killers of our cats. It’s very common but often undiagnosed, as many cats don’t reveal symptoms,” said Dr. Elizabeth Rozanski, veterinary researcher, clinician, and associate professor at Cummings School. “This method is something small animal practitioners can add to their yearly physical exams as cats get older to catch heart disease earlier.” Some studies indicate that up to 20% of cats die from heart disease every year....

An explanation for the eruption has eluded astrophysicists. They can’t take a time machine back to the mid-1800s to observe the outburst with modern technology. However, astronomers can use nature’s own “time machine,” courtesy of the fact that light travels at a finite speed through space. Rather than heading straight toward Earth, some of the light from the outburst rebounded or “echoed” off of interstellar dust, and is just now arriving at Earth....

CelluAir, a start-up managed by Australian commercialization company Innovyz, signed a license agreement and a shareholders’ agreement with QUT on Friday. CelluAir will begin an accelerated six-week scope of work to scale up the technology to bring it to market as soon as possible. CelluAir will be a joint venture between QUT and Innovyz. Innovyz is known for having incubated many advanced manufacturing start-ups from research including listing Amaero (3DA) from Monash University, and Titomic (TTT) from CSIRO on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2019 and 2017 respectively....

Updated results from the CORONADO study, analyzing the outcomes of patients with diabetes admitted to hospital with COVID-19, shows that one in five patients die within 28 days while around half are discharged. The study is published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]), and is by Professor Bertrand Cariou and Professor Samy Hadjadj, diabetologists at l’institut du thorax, University Hospital Nantes, INSERM, CNRS, and University of Nantes, France, and colleagues....

Use of a novel electrolyte could allow advanced metal electrodes and higher voltages, boosting capacity and cycle life. Lithium-ion batteries have made possible the lightweight electronic devices whose portability we now take for granted, as well as the rapid expansion of electric vehicle production. But researchers around the world are continuing to push limits to achieve ever-greater energy densities — the amount of energy that can be stored in a given mass of material — in order to improve the performance of existing devices and potentially enable new applications such as long-range drones and robots....

Organic photovoltaics are considered to be a promising alternative to silicon-based conventional films, being more environmentally friendly and cheap to produce. Ultrathin flexible solar cells are particularly attractive, as they could provide large power per weight and be used in a variety of useful applications such as powering wearable electronics and as sensors and actuators in soft robotics. However, ultrathin organic films tend to be relatively efficient, typically having an energy conversion ratio of around 10 to 12 percent, significantly lower than the ratio in silicon cells, which can be as high as 25 percent, or of rigid organic cells, which can be up to around 17 percent....

The value of using soap and clean, hot water to prevent the spread of disease-causing bacteria was discovered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harvard Medical School’s eighth dean, and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian-born physician, more than a century ago. But it was only in the last 15 years that scientists identified how our homes also contain a remarkable unseen realm, a moving, growing, thriving, changing, diverse microbial ecosystem that lives on our skin, in our bodies, and everywhere around us....

The research team, made up of scientists from Queen Mary University of London, the University of Manchester, Cardiff University, and Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, found significantly higher levels of a protein called factor H-related protein 4 (FHR-4) in the blood of AMD patients. Further investigation, using eye tissue donated for medical research, showed the presence of the FHR-4 protein within the macula — the specific region of the eye affected by the disease....

As shown with the current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, respiratory diseases can quickly spread around the world. While it can be important to understand how diseases spread globally, local spread is most often the main driver of novel infections of respiratory diseases such as SARS-CoV-2 or influenza. In the absence of deep knowledge about the important drivers of the local spread of SARS-CoV-2, governments around the world have resorted to closing down societies to reduce the burden of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)....

The Japanese art of origami (from ori, folding, and kami, paper) transforms flat sheets of paper into complex sculptures. Variations include kirigami (from kiri, to cut), a version of origami that allows materials to be cut and reconnected using tape or glue. But while both art forms are a source of ideas for science, architecture, and design, each has fundamental limitations. The flat folds required by origami result in an unlockable overall structure, while kirigami creations can’t be unfolded back into their original, flattened states because of the adhesive....

The idea of MoND was inspired by galactic rotation. Most of the visible matter in a galaxy is clustered in the middle, so you’d expect that stars closer to the center would have faster orbital speeds than stars farther away, similar to the planets of our solar system. We observe that stars in a galaxy all rotate at about the same speed. The rotation curve is essentially flat rather than dropping off....

More than half the children saw at least a 75% decrease in signs of eczema, highly significant reductions in itching, and better sleep after a 16-week course of dupilumab, a medication that targets a critical immune pathway in allergies. This is the first large, random, placebo-controlled study of a monoclonal antibody for any skin condition, including eczema, in children as young as six months. The research, which included 31 sites throughout Europe and North America, was recently published in the journal The Lancet....

The researchers, led by Srikanth Singamaneni, the Lilyan & E. Lisle Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Anushree Seth, a former postdoctoral fellow in Singamaneni’s lab, developed the FluoroDOT assay. The study was recently published in Cell Reports Methods. The highly sensitive assay is able to see and measure proteins secreted by a single cell in about 30 minutes. Together with scientists from other universities and the Washington University School of Medicine, they discovered that the FluoroDOT assay is versatile, affordable, adaptable to any laboratory setting, and has the potential to provide a more comprehensive picture of these proteins than the currently commonly used assays....