The idea of food addiction is a very controversial topic among scientists. Researchers from Aarhus University have delved into this topic and examined what happens in the brains of pigs when they drink sugar water. The conclusion is clear: sugar influences brain reward circuitry in ways similar to those observed when addictive drugs are consumed. The results have just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Anyone who has desperately searched their kitchen cabinets for a piece of forgotten chocolate knows that the desire for palatable food can be hard to control....

A mysterious protein produced by a wide spectrum of living things is crucial in regulating the immune response to the most common form of pneumonia, a new Yale School of Medicine study shows. The study appears online in Cell Host & Microbe and in the July 19 print issue. The protein — present in the blood of every human being – is crucial to a successful immune system response to the bacteria and also seems to prevent that response from damaging the host, according to the researchers....

At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive black hole twist and warp the fabric of space itself. Yet new research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that planets still can form in this cosmic maelstrom....

A newly published study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health reveals that exposure to common household chemicals during pregnancy is linked to a drop in children’s IQ scores. Children exposed during pregnancy to elevated levels of two common chemicals found in the home—di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP) and di-isobutyl phthalate (DiBP)—had an IQ score, on average, more than six points lower than children exposed at lower levels, according to researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health....

Some common drugs can help and others hinder immune responses. The largest clinical review of immune responses to paracetamol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and opioid analgesics, with a focus on infectious diseases, has provided insights into unintended impacts of these commonly used medicines. The findings highlight the potential for some of these medicines to join the fight against old and new infectious diseases. Although research into these drugs has focused on their effects on pain and fever management, until now, their impact on the treatment of infectious diseases specifically was unclear....

Brain scans showed a correlation between shrunken gray matter volumes in the “social brain” regions, responsible for social cognition, and a decreased ability to trust, which is linked to an increased vulnerability to depression. This finding could assist in the early detection of depression. The study’s findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. “Our question was: Can we use social personality information to predict the development of mental disorders, such as depression?...

A coronavirus is keeping the world in suspense. SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious and can cause severe pneumonia with respiratory distress (COVID-19). Scientists are doing research in order to prevent the viruses from multiplying. A team from the University of Lübeck has now found a promising approach. Using the high-intensity X-ray light from the Berlin synchrotron source BESSY II, they have decoded the three-dimensional architecture of the main protease of SARS-CoV-2....

The COVID-19 epidemic, and the lockdowns enforced in many countries, have imposed high costs on the population: a combined health and socio-economic crisis, with the world economy shrank by 4.3 percent in 2020 and 130 million people who will starve due to the global economic crisis. Vaccine strategic distribution plans have generally followed the World Health Organizations guidelines. In many European countries, priority has been given to the population according to multiple risk criteria related to age, work, and health vulnerability....

Data point to rise in anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, suicidal thoughts. As the COVID-19 pandemic stretches into its third year, countless people have experienced varying degrees of uncertainty, isolation, and mental health challenges. However, those who have had COVID-19 have a significantly higher chance of experiencing mental health problems, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System....

New study shows that posts revealing concern for ‘pneumonia’ circulated very early, suggesting social media can be an effective tool for epidemiological surveillance. Even before public announcements of the first cases of COVID-19 in Europe were made, at the end of January 2020, signals that something strange was happening were already circulating on social media. A new study of researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, published in Scientific Reports, has identified tracks of increasing concern about pneumonia cases on posts published on Twitter in seven countries, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020....

You mightn’t think that the life of a dung beetle, a creature who eats poop every day of its short life, could get any worse, but you’d be wrong. Dung beetles, also known as rollers, pretty much live in manure. They can be found in a variety of environments-deserts, prairies, forests-and they subsist on poop. Dung beetles provide a highly useful service to the environment and to us. How? By simply living their lives, these valuable insects conduct “ecosystem services” that are important to agriculture, such as redistributing nutrients in the soil, controlling pests, and reducing greenhouse gasses....

Applying and evaporating a few drops of a liquid such as acetone to the CNTs is an easy, cost-effective method to more tightly pack them together and increase their stiffness, but until now, there was no way to forecast the geometry of these CNT cells. MIT researchers have now developed a systematic method to predict the two-dimensional patterns CNT arrays form after they are packed together, or densified, by evaporating drops of either acetone or ethanol....

Today, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars, using the beam from a science instrument to interrogate a fist-size rock called “Coronation.” The mission’s Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, hit the fist-sized rock with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second. The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma....

The panorama includes umber skies, darkened by a fading global dust storm. It also includes a rare view by the Mast Camera of the rover itself, revealing a thin layer of dust on Curiosity’s deck. In the foreground is the rover’s most recent drill target, named “Stoer” after a town in Scotland near where important discoveries about early life on Earth were made in lakebed sediments. The new drill sample delighted Curiosity’s science team, because the rover’s last two drill attempts were thwarted by unexpectedly hard rocks....

Cygnus also is delivering a new mounting bracket that astronauts will attach to the starboard side of the station’s truss assembly during a spacewalk planned for November 15. The mounting bracket will enable the installation of one of the next pairs of new solar arrays. Cygnus will remain at the space station until late January before it departs for a destructive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. NASA astronaut Nicole Mann, with NASA astronaut Josh Cassada acting as backup, captured Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft using the International Space Station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm at 5:20 a....

In its updated guidance at the start of 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said loosely woven cloth masks offer the least protection against COVID-19, and N95 and KN95 masks offer the most protection. Still, after more than two years since the pandemic began, there is not a full understanding of mask characteristics for the most optimal protection. In Physics of Fluids, published by AIP Publishing, researchers at Florida State University and Johns Hopkins University use principal component analysis (PCA) along with fluid dynamics simulation models to show the crucial importance of proper fit for all types of masks and how face shape influences the most ideal fit....

The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3....

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), installed on an Arizona mountaintop, was quickly moving through its testing stages and making headway toward the start of its 5-year observing run as project participants from around the world traveled to attend a DESI collaboration meeting in Tucson, Arizona, in early March. But as cases of COVID-19 were mounting in the U.S. and other nations around the world, collaboration leaders acted quickly to pull the plug on the in-person meeting – planned from March 9-13, 2020 – and to transition to an online meeting....

In the latest breakthrough in DARPA’s THz Electronics program quest for transistor-based electronics that will enable electronic capabilities at THz frequencies, DARPA researchers have created the world’s first solid state receiver to demonstrate gain at 0.85 terahertz (THz). This represents progress toward the second major technical milestone on the way to 1.03 THz integrated circuits. Previous milestones included demonstrations at 0.67 THz. Operating at these high frequencies enables a host of DoD electronics capabilities such as advanced communication and sensor systems....

Last year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic oscillation or QPO, is a characteristic feature of the accretion disks that often surround the most compact objects in the universe — white dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes....