The discovery of the first dog coronavirus found to have crossed over to infecting people underscores the treacherous nature of coronaviruses and the need for monitoring animal viruses as a way to identify and predict possible threats to public health, researchers say. “At this point, we don’t see any reasons to expect another pandemic from this virus, but I can’t say that’s never going to be a concern in the future,” said Anastasia Vlasova, an assistant professor at The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES)....

The abc conjecture was first proposed by David Masser in 1988 and Joseph Oesterle in 1985. It’s an integer analog to the Mason–Stothers theorem for polynomials. It states that a, b, and c, having no common factors and satisfying a + b = c. If d denotes the product of the distinct prime factors of abc, the conjecture states that d is rarely much smaller than c. If proven true, the abc conjecture could with one stroke solve many famous Diophantine problems, including Fermat’s Last Theorem (which states that an+bn=cn has no integer solutions if n>2)....

The study, published today in the Journal of Nutrition, found that people who consumed a nitrate-rich diet, predominantly from vegetables, had significantly better muscle function of their lower limbs. Poor muscle function is linked to greater risk of falls and fractures and is considered a key indicator of general health and wellbeing. Researchers examined data from 3,759 Australians taking part in Melbourne’s Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute AusDiab study over a 12-year period....

Though many people with autism spectrum disorders also experience unusual gastrointestinal inflammation, scientists have not established how those conditions might be linked. Now MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers, working with mouse models, may have found the connection: When a mother experiences an infection during pregnancy and her immune system produces elevated levels of the molecule Interleukin-17a (IL-17a), this can not only alter brain development in her fetus, but also alter her microbiome such that after birth the newborn’s immune system can become primed for future inflammatory attacks....

Stanford researchers, in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have designed a robotic platform that could take space exploration to new heights. The mission proposed for the platform involves a mother spacecraft deploying one or several spiked, roughly spherical rovers to the Martian moon Phobos. Measuring about half a meter wide, each rover would hop, tumble, and bound across the cratered, lopsided moon, relaying information about its origins, as well as its soil and other surface materials....

Wearable devices and smartphone applications that are fitness-related have demonstrated the ability to increase physical activity. However, the extent of their impact and the most effective components have yet to be studied and established. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Tsukuba, published in Nutrients, evaluated the efficacy of utilizing web-based applications in promoting weight loss and implementing lifestyle changes in overweight and obese individuals. To examine the said effectiveness of web-based applications, researchers performed a systematic review wherein 1466 articles from 2 medical publication databases were retrieved and carefully selected....

Yet more than 3,500 years ago, clam gardens—intertidal rock-walled terraces built by Indigenous communities—boosted clam production. Researchers say these findings have significant implications for how we manage clam populations today. The study, published on October 14, 2019, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is co-authored by SFU archaeologists Ginevra Toniello and Dana Lepofsky, SFU biologists Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky and Anne Salomon, and biologist Kirsten Rowell from the University of Colorado....

Study outlines key immunological factors underlying COVID-19 disease progression and proposes a range of drugs that may be repurposed to treat the disease. Due to the devastating worldwide impact of COVID-19, the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there has been unprecedented efforts by clinicians and researchers from around the world to quickly develop safe and effective treatments and vaccines. Given that COVID-19 is a complex new disease with no existing vaccine or specific treatment, much effort is being made to investigate the repurposing of approved and available drugs, as well as those under development....

Using a laser to place individual rubidium atoms near the surface of a lattice of light, scientists at MIT and Harvard University have developed a new method for connecting particles — one that could help in the development of powerful quantum computing systems. The new technique, described in a paper published today in the journal Nature, allows researchers to couple a lone atom of rubidium, a metal, with a single photon, or light particle....

What’s more, the researchers have used the same idea to control the flow of heat in one direction. The discovery offers new possibilities for enhancing electronic devices that use acoustic resonators. The findings, from the lab of Yale’s Jack Harris, are published in the April 4 online edition of the journal Nature. “This is an experiment in which we make a one-way route for sound waves,” said Harris, a Yale physics professor and the study’s principal investigator....

The research carried out at the UPV/EHU was developed in an experimental model that allows different stages of Parkinson’s disease to be reproduced. The results showed that the changes caused by the condition were not homogeneous in the different parts of the brain affected. “The impairment is correlated with the specific anatomic distribution of the dopaminergic neurons and their terminals,” pointed out the researcher Catalina Requejo. In other words, those areas of the black substance in which the dopaminergic neurons have more connections with regions that remain whole were found to be less affected....

By combining NASA Ames supercomputer simulations with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, this visualization provides a new perspective of what is happening in and around the center of the Milky Way. It shows the effects of dozens of massive stellar giants with fierce winds blowing off their surfaces in the region a few light years away from the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short)....

The researchers note today (January 17, 2022) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that “All three of these scenarios are unconventional, unlike processes common on Earth.” Carbon has two stable isotopes, 12 and 13. By looking at the amounts of each in a substance, researchers can determine specifics about the carbon cycle that occurred, even if it happened a very long time ago. “The amounts of carbon 12 and carbon 13 in our solar system are the amounts that existed at the formation of the solar system,” said Christopher H....

The investigational vaccine known as mRNA-1273 protected mice from infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to research published today in Nature. Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the biotechnology company Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with collaborators from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, and the University of Texas at Austin conducted the preclinical research....

A new study from an international group of scientists finds we are releasing more of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide into the atmosphere than previously thought. Most of us know nitrous oxide as “laughing gas,” used for its anesthetic effects. But nitrous oxide (N2O) is actually the third most important long-lived greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. Nitrous oxide is also one of the main stratospheric ozone-depleting substances — and we are releasing more of it into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study published yesterday (November 18, 2019) in Nature Climate Change....

Scientists in China have made advancements in the use of layered double hydroxides to improve oxygen evolution reaction (OER) energy utilization, toward the goal of efficient hydrogen generation for renewable energy. The researchers, from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, recently published their work in the journal Energy Material Advances. “With the rising demand and consumption of fossil fuels, energy shortage and environmental pollution are becoming severe and unignorable,” said the corresponding author Mingfei Shao, professor with the State Key Laboratory of Chemical Resource Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing....

The patient experienced facial palsy after each dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The case of a patient who experienced two facial palsies – one after the first and another after the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – strongly suggests that Bell’s palsy (facial nerve palsy of unknown cause) is linked to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, doctors write in the journal BMJ Case Reports. They describe the first case to be reported in the medical literature of two separate unilateral facial nerve palsies, where muscles on one side of the face become weak or paralysed, occurring shortly after each dose of a COVID-19 vaccine....

Elaborate feathered hats—sometimes festooned with whole birds—were fashionable in the Victorian era. At the height of the trend, certain plume feathers were worth more than their weight in gold. As a result, hunters killed millions of birds every year, pushing some species to the brink of extinction. The Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s Atlantic coast—seen here in a Landsat 8 image—was prime hunting ground. Because it straddles temperate and subtropical climate zones, the shallow estuary was (and still is) among the most biodiverse in the United States....

Allergists encourage patients to complete their vaccination series. Second COVID-19 mRNA vaccine dose found safe following allergic reactions to first dose. In a multi-hospital analysis of individuals who experienced an allergic reaction to their first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, all patients who went on to receive a second dose tolerated it without complications. The research, which was led by allergists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is published in JAMA Internal Medicine, indicates that a first dose reaction to COVID-19 vaccination should not keep people from getting a second dose....

People who have recovered from COVID-19, and their close contacts, could hold the key to understanding how immunity to the disease develops, how long it lasts, and what happens when immunity is lost. The COVID PROFILE study, led by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, will use blood samples from people in Victoria to look in detail at immune responses to COVID-19, to reveal how people are protected – and how long people are protected – from future COVID-19 infection....