It is crucial to get a test result for a pathogen quickly, lest someone continue in their daily lives infecting others. And delays in testing have undoubtedly exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the most accurate COVID-19 test often takes 24 hours or longer to return results from a lab. At-home test kits offer results in minutes but are far less accurate or sensitive. Researchers at the University of Florida, however, have helped developed a COVID-19 testing device that can detect coronavirus infection in as little as 30 seconds as sensitively and accurately as a PCR, or polymerase chain reaction test, the gold standard of testing....

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used the Dust Removal Tool on its robotic arm to brush aside reddish, more-oxidized dust, revealing a gray patch of less-oxidized rock material at a target called “Bonanza King,” visible in this image from the rover’s Mast Camera (Mastcam). The Mastcam’s right-eye camera, which has a telephoto lens, took this image on August 17, 2014, during the 722nd Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars....

One of the most daunting challenges facing pharmaceutical scientists today are “undruggable proteins” – the approximately 80% of proteins involved in human disease that do not interact with current drugs. Yale researchers have identified a novel way to design drugs for these previously inaccessible proteins. The research was published on July 26 in the journal Chemistry & Biology. “There is enormous interest in molecules that can both traverse cell membranes and inhibit interactions between proteins,” said Alanna Schepartz, the Milton Harris ’29 Ph....

Detecting important biomarkers in lower concentrations will allow patients to be treated earlier for diseases such as some cancers and neurological disorders, which could increase the chance of survival rate. However, current methods of detection are often not sufficiently sensitive and require costly and time-consuming sample pre-treatment. Now, researchers from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London have come up with a system that is specific, flexible, and can detect single protein biomarkers directly in human serum (a pool of fluid separated from blood)....

“We introduce an innovative way of testing the standard model based on how much dwarf galaxies are disturbed by gravitational tides’ from nearby larger galaxies,” said Elena Asencio, a Ph.D. student at the University of Bonn and the lead author of the story. Tides occur when gravity from one body pulls on various areas of another body differently. These are comparable to tides on Earth, which form when the moon exerts a stronger pull on the side of the Earth that faces the moon....

The manufacture of nanomaterials is a popular area today, and like any other industry, it is wanted to be eco-friendly. Scientists work on the so-called green synthesis – environmentally-friendly methods for producing nanomaterials from plant extracts. However, many substances contained in natural materials are unstable and quickly enter into oxidation-reduction reactions with certain components of the environment. A stabilizer is a very important substance for newly synthesized nanoparticles which was one of the goals of the study conducted by the team of scientists....

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have captured the most detailed image ever taken of the Medusa Nebula. As the star at the heart of this nebula made its transition into retirement, it shed its outer layers into space, forming this colorful cloud. The image foreshadows the final fate of the Sun, which will eventually also become an object of this kind. This beautiful planetary nebula is named after a dreadful creature from Greek mythology — the Gorgon Medusa....

An astronomical team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg (MPIA) has gained new insights into a birthplace of stars. Using the ESA’s Herschel Space Telescope and evaluation techniques more commonly encountered in Hollywood film productions, the researchers produced a three-dimensional map of the dark cloud Barnard 68, a possible future birthplace for a low-mass star. Turning their attention to much more massive dark clouds, the researchers also managed to identify a previously unobserved precursor of young stars....

MediSCAPE, a high-speed 3D microscope designed by Columbia Engineers, can see real-time cellular detail in living tissues to guide surgery, speed up tissue analyses, and improve treatments. A Columbia Engineering team has developed a technology that could replace conventional biopsies and histology with real-time imaging within the living body. Described in a new paper published today (March 28, 2022) in Nature Biomedical Engineering, MediSCAPE is a high-speed 3D microscope capable of capturing images of tissue structures that could guide surgeons to navigate tumors and their boundaries without needing to remove tissues and wait for pathology results....

The emergence of spatial transcriptomics technologies has enabled scientists to examine gene expression within the context of tissue samples as a whole. However, new computational techniques are necessary to process this information and facilitate the identification and comprehension of these gene expression patterns. A research team led by Jian Ma, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, has developed a machine learning tool to fill this gap....

The study was published online on September 16, 2019, in the journal Optics Express. Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual engineered features, which together produce properties not found in nature through their structure rather than their chemistry. In this case, the terahertz metamaterial is built up from a two-by-two grid of silicon cylinders resembling a short, square Lego. Adjusting the height, radius, and spacing of each of the four cylinders changes the frequencies of light the metamaterial interacts with....

Study also finds tax breaks for general business investment have slightly negative effect on innovation. Here’s some good news for U.S. states trying to spur an economic recovery in the years ahead: The R&D tax credit has a significant effect on entrepreneurship, according to a new study led by an MIT professor. Moreover, the study finds a striking contrast between two types of tax credits. While the R&D tax credit fuels high-quality new-firm growth, the state-level investment tax credit, which supports general business needs, actually has a slightly negative economic effect on that kind of innovative activity....

According to the report, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022,” published in the journal BioScience, 16 of the 35 planetary vital indicators used by the authors to measure climate change are at record extremes. The authors of the report present new data showing an increase in the frequency of extreme heat events, an increase in the loss of worldwide forest cover due to fires, and an increase in the incidence of the mosquito-borne dengue virus....

Significantly fewer gut bugs linked to neurotransmitter activity. Children with autism seem to have a distinctive and underdeveloped range and volume of gut bacteria (microbiome) that isn’t related to their diet, suggests a small study published online in the journal Gut. They have significantly fewer bacteria linked to neurotransmitter activity and 5 species of bacteria that aren’t typically found in the guts of children without the condition, suggesting that there may be a characteristic microbial profile for autism, which may pave the way for treatment early on, say the researchers....

In this mouse study, males proved much more susceptible to a condition called sepsis than females. However, the scientists also found that the female disease-defense system is hardly perfect; their system changes with age to become nearly as harmful as the males’. Those are the key findings in a study that was published on July 19, 2021, in Nature Aging. The study has important implications for studying disease and cures, especially for sepsis, a condition in which the body’s defense system turns harmful to itself....

A new study from MIT sheds light on how these events, known as vaso-occlusive pain crises, arise. The findings also represent a step toward being able to predict when such a crisis might occur. “These painful crises are very much unpredictable. In a sense, we understand why they happen, but we don’t have a good way to predict them yet,” says Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and one of the senior authors of the study....

Activity on the Sun, known as space weather, can affect systems on Earth. Magnetic eruptions on the Sun can impact air travel, disrupt satellite communications and bring down power grids, causing long-lasting blackouts and disabling technologies such as GPS. The first images from NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope show a close-up view of the Sun’s surface, which can provide important detail for scientists. The images show a pattern of turbulent “boiling” plasma that covers the entire Sun....

We live in a galaxy known as the Milky Way – a vast conglomeration of 300 billion stars, planets whizzing around them, and clouds of gas and dust floating in between. Although it has long been known that the Milky Way and its orbiting companion the Andromeda Galaxy are the dominant members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group, which is about 3 million light years across, much less was known about our immediate neighborhood in the universe....

Venus may have been a temperate planet hosting liquid water for 2-3 billion years, until a dramatic transformation starting over 700 million years ago resurfaced around 80% of the planet. A study presented today at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 by Michael Way of The Goddard Institute for Space Science gives a new view of Venus’s climatic history and may have implications for the habitability of exoplanets in similar orbits....

The traditional drug discovery starts with the testing of thousands of small molecules in order to get to just a few lead-like molecules and only about one in ten of these molecules pass clinical trials in human patients.Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a form of AI imagination and are commonly used to generate images with specific propertiesSince the seminal publication by Insilico Medicine team in 2016 GANs are being explored for the generation of novel molecular structures with specified propertiesFor over 3 years scientists worldwide are developing the theoretical base for GANs and other machine learning techniques to substantially accelerate and improve the drug discovery processIn the Nature Biotechnology paper titled “Deep learning enables rapid identification of potent DDR1 kinase inhibitors” for the first time the generative reinforcement learning technology was used to generate novel small molecules for a protein target that were validated in vitro and in vivo in just 46 days...