DNA preserved in calcified bacteria on the teeth of ancient human skeletons has shed light on the health consequences of the evolving diet and behavior from the Stone Age to the modern day. The ancient genetic record reveals the negative changes in oral bacteria brought about by the dietary shifts as humans became farmers, and later with the introduction of food manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution. An international team, led by the University of Adelaide’s Australian Center for Ancient DNA (ACAD) where the research was performed, has published the results in Nature Genetics on February 17....

The California Department of Water Resources today released a new NASA report showing land in the San Joaquin Valley is sinking faster than ever before, nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) per month in some locations. The report, Progress Report: Subsidence in the Central Valley, California, prepared for DWR by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is available at: http://water.ca.gov/groundwater/docs/NASA_REPORT.pdf “Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows – up to 100 feet (30 meters) lower than previous records,” said Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin....

Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips. The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers....

In a Health & Social Care in the Community study published today (October 8, 2019) of 10,105 older adults in China examined in 2011, 2013, and 2015, living in neighborhoods with a higher level of neighborhood social participation was related to lower rates of depression. A higher level of neighborhood social participation is related to more time spent on physical activities and a greater frequency of interaction with neighbors and with their own children....

The new system relies on nuclear spins—the angular momentum of an atom’s nucleus—oscillating collectively as a spin wave. This collective oscillation effectively chains up several atoms to store information. The work, which is described in a paper published on February 16, 2022, in the journal Nature, utilizes a quantum bit (or qubit) made from an ion of ytterbium (Yb), a rare earth element also used in lasers. The team, led by Andrei Faraon (BS ’04), professor of applied physics and electrical engineering, embedded the ion in a transparent crystal of yttrium orthovanadate (YVO4) and manipulated its quantum states via a combination of optical and microwave fields....

N2O is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a half-life of 114 years in the atmosphere and global warming potential 300 times greater than carbon dioxide. It is also the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted in the 21st century. As an abundant chemical feedstock, the use of N2O as a sustainable oxidant in synthetic organic chemistry is an attractive prospect, liberating environmentally benign dinitrogen (N2). Such reactions are encumbered by the robust triatomic formulation of this gas, typically requiring forcing reaction conditions that are energy intensive and undesirable from a remediation perspective....

This is the conclusion of a study that for the first time estimates the cost of a green transition not in dollars, but in greenhouse gases. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The message is that it is going to take energy to rebuild the global energy system, and we need to account for that,” said lead author Corey Lesk, who did the research as a Ph....

Though it sounds like something straight out of science fiction, controlling the speed of light has in fact been a long-standing challenge for physicists. In a study recently published in Communications Physics, researchers from Osaka University generated light bullets with highly controllable velocities. According to Albert Einstein’s principle of relativity, the speed of light is constant and cannot be exceeded; however, it is possible to control the group velocity of optical pulses....

Research led by scientists at the University of Bristol has shed new light on how the kidneys of the one-humped Arabian camel play an important role in helping it to cope with extremes. In a new paper published today (June 23, 2021) in the journal Communications Biology, they have studied the response of the camel’s kidneys to dehydration and rapid rehydration stresses. Camelus dromedarius is the most important livestock animal in the arid and semi-arid regions of North and East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Iran, and continues to provide basic needs to millions of people....

This find is a huge leap back in time compared to the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the Universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us....

Respiratory droplets are the most prominent source of transmission for COVID-19, however, alternative routes may exist given the discovery of small numbers of viable viruses in urine and stool samples. Public restrooms are especially cause for concern for transmitting COVID-19 because they are relatively confined, experience heavy foot traffic and may not have adequate ventilation. A team of scientists from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science once again put physics of fluids to the test to investigate droplets generated from flushing a toilet and a urinal in a public restroom under normal ventilation conditions....

Study warrants a re-evaluation of current vaccine trial protocols for SARS-CoV-2, other diseases. A dosing error made during an AstraZeneca-University of Oxford COVID-19 vaccine trial has led to a new dosage finding in mice, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. During the AstraZeneca-Oxford trial, some human participants erroneously received a half dose of their first shot, followed by a full dose for their second shot. Paradoxically, the trial showed that volunteers who got a lower dose of the first shot were better protected against COVID-19 than those who received two full doses....

The researchers discovered significant variances between areas on opposite sides of the Ji-Paraná River, one side of which had suffered more deforestation than the other side, located within the Jaru Biological Reserve protected area. They measured spatial variation of albedo (or the fraction of the incident sunlight that the surface reflects), net radiation (or the total energy, derived from sunlight, that’s available at the surface), soil and sensible heat fluxes (or how much heat is transferred from the surface to the atmosphere), and evapotranspiration (the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere by evaporation from the soil and by transpiration from plants)....

Published in the journal Brain, the research team identified one rare and sometimes fatal inflammatory condition, known as ADEM, which appears to be increasing in prevalence due to the pandemic. Some patients in the study did not experience severe respiratory symptoms, and the neurological disorder was the first and main presentation of COVID-19. Joint senior author Dr. Michael Zandi (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) said: “We identified a higher than expected number of people with neurological conditions such as brain inflammation, which did not always correlate with the severity of respiratory symptoms....

Having a faulty gene linked to dementia doubles the risk of developing severe COVID-19, according to a large-scale study. Researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine analyzed data from the UK Biobank, and found high risk of severe COVID-19 infection among European ancestry participants who carry two faulty copies of the APOE gene (termed e4e4). One in 36 people of European ancestry have two faulty copies of this gene, and this is known to increase risks of Alzheimer’s disease up to 14-fold* and also increases risks of heart disease....

Using hard-to-obtain samples of human brain tissue, MIT neuroscientists have now discovered that human dendrites have different electrical properties from those of other species. Their studies reveal that electrical signals weaken more as they flow along human dendrites, resulting in a higher degree of electrical compartmentalization, meaning that small sections of dendrites can behave independently from the rest of the neuron. These differences may contribute to the enhanced computing power of the human brain, the researchers say....

Five countries signed the convention to create ESO on October 5, 1962. Now, six decades later and supported by 16 Member States and strategic partners, ESO brings together scientists and engineers from around the world to develop and operate advanced ground-based observatories in Chile that enable breakthrough astronomical discoveries. On the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary, they released this remarkable new image of the Cone Nebula, captured earlier this year with one of ESO’s telescopes and selected by ESO staff....

“Our method makes it possible to control the edges — atom by atom — in a way that is both easy and scalable, using only mild heating together with abundant, environmentally friendly chemicals, such as hydrogen peroxide,” says Battulga Munkhbat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology, and first author of the paper. Materials as thin as just a single atomic layer are known as two-dimensional, or 2D, materials....

A research team led by professors from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physics and Astronomy has announced the discovery of a new electronic state of matter. Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, a research associate professor are coauthors of the paper “Pascal conductance series in ballistic one-dimensional LaAIO3/SrTiO3 channels.” The research focuses on measurements in one-dimensional conducting systems where electrons are found to travel without scattering in groups of two or more at a time, rather than individually....

Stromatolites, layered organo-sedimentary structures that reflect complex interactions between microbial communities and their environment, have long been regarded as crucial macrofossils for detecting life in ancient sedimentary rocks; however, the biological origin of ancient stromatolites has been extensively disputed. A paper recently published in the journal Geology of the Geological Society of America (GSA) combines a variety of advanced two- and three-dimensional analytical techniques to determine the biological origins of Earth’s earliest stromatolites from the 3....