New research from Yale University shows that nearly one in five high school e-cigarette users also have used the device to vaporize cannabis or byproducts like hash oil. E-cigarettes not only vaporize nicotine, but they work with marijuana as well, American teenagers are discovering. Yale University researchers surveyed 3,847 Connecticut high school students by Yale University researchers and found nearly one in five e-cigarette users also have used the device to vaporize cannabis or byproducts like hash oil, according to a study published September 7 in the journal Pediatrics....

A star that pulsates on just one side has been discovered in the Milky Way about 1500 light-years from Earth. It is the first of its kind to be found and scientists expect to find many more similar systems as technology to listen inside the beating hearts of stars improves. “What first caught my attention was the fact it was a chemically peculiar star,” said co-author Dr. Simon Murphy from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney....

“Mental health and memory are central to nearly everything we do in our everyday lives,” says lead author Jeremy Manning. He is an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “Our study is trying to build a foundation for understanding how different intensities of physical exercise affect different aspects of mental and cognitive health.” For the study, the researchers enrolled 113 Fitbit users. They were asked to perform a series of memory tests, answer some questions about their mental health, and share their fitness data from the previous year....

Most of Stonehenge’s large boulders share origin in west woods, Wiltshire. Most of the hulking sandstone boulders — called sarsens — that make up the United Kingdom’s famous Stonehenge monument appear to share a common origin 25 kilometers away in West Woods, Wiltshire, according to an analysis of the stones’ chemical composition. The findings support the theory that the stones were brought to Stonehenge at around the same time, contradicting a previous suggestion that one large sarsen, the Heel Stone, originated in the immediate vicinity of the monument and was erected earlier than the others....

Including former graduate student Hiroki Yoneda, Senior Scientist Kazuo Makishima and Principal Investigator Tadayuki Takahashi at the Kavli IMPU, the team also suggest that the particle acceleration process known to occur within LS 5039 is caused by interactions between the dense stellar winds of its primary massive star, and ultra-strong magnetic fields of the rotating magnetar. Gamma-ray binaries are a system of massive, high-energy stars and compact stars. They were discovered only recently, in 2004, when observations of very-high-energy gamma-rays in the teraelectronvolt (TeV) band from large enough regions of the sky became possible....

This visualization of Lee Lincoln scarp is created from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographs and elevation mapping. The scarp is a low ridge or step about 80 meters high and running north-south through the western end of the Taurus-Littrow valley, the site of the Apollo 17 Moon landing. The scarp marks the location of a relatively young, low-angle thrust fault. The land west of the fault was forced up and over the eastern side as the lunar crust contracted....

Big theropod dinosaurs such as Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus ate pretty much everything – including each other, according to a new study called “High Frequencies of Theropod Bite Marks Provide Evidence for Feeding, Scavenging, and Possible Cannibalism in a Stressed Late Jurassic Ecosystem.” It was published in PLOS ONE on May 27, 2020. There were theropod bites on the large-bodied sauropods, whose gigantic bones dominate the assemblage, bites on the heavily armored Mymoorapelta, and lots of bites on theropods too, especially the common remains of Allosaurus....

Study of individual SARS-CoV-2-like particle degradation suggests a potential surge of COVID-19 infections in the winter. Winter is coming in the northern hemisphere on Monday, December 21, 2020, and public health officials are asking how the seasonal shift will impact the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19? A new study tested how temperatures and humidity affect the structure of individual SARS-Cov-2 virus-like particles on surfaces. They found that just moderate temperature increases broke down the virus’ structure, while humidity had very little impact....

To optimize their performance – and to prepare for next-generation facilities that will push these extremes further – scientists have devised a new tool that can measure how bright these beams are, even for pulses that last only femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) or attoseconds (quintillionths of a second). Comparing 1 attosecond to 1 second is like comparing 1 second to 31.7 billion years. This tool can also measure beam sizes to within a few tens of nanometers (billionths of a meter) – without disrupting experiments that rely on these beams....

According to theory, the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter — the latter consisting of “antiparticles” that are essentially mirror images of matter, only bearing charges opposite to those of protons, electrons, neutrons, and other particle counterparts. And yet, we live in a decidedly material universe, made mostly of galaxies, stars, planets, and everything we see around us — and very little antimatter. Physicists posit that some process must have tilted the balance in favor of matter during the first moments following the Big Bang....

Animals inhabiting environments with highly variable environments play a similar lottery with regard to their Darwinian fitness, which is a measure of their ability to transmit their genes. In a recent study led by the University of Michigan, researchers discovered that red squirrels that took chances with reproduction outperformed those who didn’t, even if it cost them in the short term. Natural selection favors female squirrels that have large litters in years when food is abundant because they contribute lots of babies to the gene pool, said Lauren Petrullo, lead author and National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in biopsychology at the University of Michigan....

At this alarming time, when the COVID-19 pandemic is on everyone’s mind, a new special issue in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Population and Economics by Lomonosov Moscow State University (Faculty of Economics) provides a platform for discussion on the impact of the pandemic on the population and economics, both in Russia and worldwide by opening a special issue. An introductory overview for the issue is provided by its Editor-in-Chief, Irina E....

Infections with multi-drug resistant E. coli, which is also known as ESBL (extended spectrum beta-lactamase), have been assumed to be a hospital phenomenon. A recent analysis presented at The Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) surveyed records from five hospitals across the USA (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, and Iowa) and identified 291 cases of ESBL E. coli infections over 12 months, but also found that 107 patients (37%) had acquired infections before they entered a hospital....

But in new experiments by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, the opposite happens: When a pattern called a charge density wave in a certain material is hit with a fast laser pulse, a whole new charge density wave is created — a highly ordered state, instead of the expected disorder. The surprising finding could help to reveal unseen properties in materials of all kinds. The discovery is being reported today (November 11, 2019) in the journal Nature Physics, in a paper by MIT professors Nuh Gedik and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, postdoc Anshul Kogar, graduate student Alfred Zong, and 17 others at MIT, Harvard University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and Argonne National Laboratory....

In one study, a team headed by Mark Zondlo, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, looked at an area around western Pennsylvania rich with natural gas wells and found that a small number of these wells are “superemitters” of methane. The other study came from the research group of Denise Mauzerall, a Princeton professor jointly appointed in civil and environmental engineering and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs....

Electrical engineers at Duke University have devised a fully print-in-place technique for electronics that is gentle enough to work on delicate surfaces including paper and human skin. The advance could enable technologies such as high-adhesion, embedded electronic tattoos and bandages tricked out with patient-specific biosensors. The techniques are described in a series of papers published online on July 9, 2019, in the journal Nanoscale and on October 3, 2019, in the journal ACS Nano....

Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets — planets that orbit stars beyond our sun — and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets’ makeup....

Astronomers using observations from NASA’s Kepler and Swift missions discovered a batch of 18 of these rapidly spinning stars by detecting X-rays they produce at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the Sun. These rare stars were found as part of an X-ray survey of the original Kepler field of view, a patch of the sky comprising parts of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. From May 2009 to May 2013, Kepler measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars in this region to detect the regular dimming from planets passing in front of their host stars....

The outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space similar to tsunamis on Earth, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars reside. Quasars are the brilliant, compact cores of distant galaxies that can shine 1,000 times brighter than their host galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars. Their central engines are supermassive black holes that are engorged with infalling dust, gas, and stars, said Arav, a professor in the Department of Physics, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science....

US Defense contractor Raytheon recently successfully tested the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) over the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The test involved the radar’s ability to track multiple fast and high speed vessels, potentially giving ship commanders situational awareness of all threats that he or she might face. The JLENS system is made up of two aerostats that float 10,000 feet high, providing radar and communication capabilities to see over-the-horizon threats, which puts them within range of new weapons systems....