In its youth, our Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which the planets were born. The orbits of early formed planets were thought to be initially close-packed and circular, but gravitational interactions between the larger objects perturbed the arrangement and caused the baby giant planets to rapidly reshuffle, creating the configuration we see today. “We now know that there are thousands of planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy alone,” Clement said....

Ahead of Columbus Day, findings pose further questions of what the explorer really expected to find on his voyage. New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned ‘discovery.’ Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an “astonishing” discovery of an “exceptional” passage referring to an area we know today as North America....

The analyses of an international team of researchers led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, show that the genetic variation of Denisovans was extremely low, suggesting that although they were present in large parts of Asia, their population was never large for long periods of time. In addition, a comprehensive list documents the genetic changes that set apart modern humans from their archaic relatives....

The proportion of people aged over 65 on antidepressants has more than doubled in two decades — according to new research led by the University of East Anglia. Despite a rise in antidepressant use, there was little change in the number of older people diagnosed with depression. The findings are based on the Cognitive Function and Ageing Studies, conducted at two time points — between 1991 and 1993, and between 2008 and 2011....

Natural compounds found in apples and other fruits may help stimulate the production of new brain cells, which may have implications for learning and memory, according to a new study in mice published in Stem Cell Reports. Chemical substances found in plants, so-called phytonutrients, such as resveratrol in red grapes or epigallo-catechin-3-gallate (EGCG) in green tea, can have positive effects on different parts of the body including the brain. Researchers Tara Louise Walker, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia and Gerd Kempermann, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Dresden, Germany, and colleagues found that high concentrations of phytonutrients from apples stimulate the generation of new neurons, a process called neurogenesis....

Aspirin therapy can extend the life of colorectal cancer patients whose tumors carry a mutation in a key gene, but it has no effect on patients who lack the mutation, Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists report in the October 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. In a study involving more than 900 patients with colorectal cancer, the researchers found that, for patients whose tumors harbored a mutation in the gene PIK3CA, aspirin use produced a sharp jump in survival: five years after diagnosis, 97 percent of those taking aspirin were still alive, compared with 74 percent of those not using aspirin....

The massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is an ideal cosmic laboratory for all kinds of physical tests. Its extremely strong gravitational field influences the surrounding area and has an impact on the motion of stars passing by. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have now observed an effect that had been predicted by Albert Einstein with his general theory of relativity more than 100 years ago....

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space without a parent star. This is the most exciting free-floating planet candidate so far and the closest such object to the Solar System at a distance of about 100 light-years. Its comparative proximity, and the absence of a bright star very close to it, has allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail....

Using a technique called asteroseismology, the scientists were able to calculate the magnetic field strengths in the fusion-powered hearts of dozens of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun. “In the same way medical ultrasound uses sound waves to image the interior of the human body, asteroseismology uses sound waves generated by turbulence on the surface of stars to probe their inner properties,” says Caltech postdoctoral researcher Jim Fuller, who co-led a new study detailing the research....

Neutron stars are the densest objects in our universe, with a mass larger than that of our sun compacted into a relatively small sphere whose diameter is comparable to that of the city of Frankfurt. This is actually just a rough estimate, however. For more than 40 years, the determination of the size of neutron stars has been a holy grail in nuclear physics whose solution would provide important information on the fundamental behavior of matter at nuclear densities....

The origin of high-energy cosmic neutrinos observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, whose detector is buried deep in the Antarctic ice, is an enigma that has perplexed physicists and astronomers. A new model could help explain the unexpectedly large flux of some of these neutrinos inferred by recent neutrino and gamma-ray data. A paper by Penn State researchers describing the model, which points to the supermassive black holes found at the cores of active galaxies as the sources of these mysterious neutrinos, appears June 30, 2020 in the journal Physical Review Letters....

A self-administered ‘scratch-and-sniff’ test for COVID-19 may be around the corner, according to researchers at Penn State, the University of Florida, and Arizona State University. The team, which received $912,000 from the National Institutes of Health, will analyze two different smell tests with a goal of developing inexpensive, at-home tests to help identify new cases of COVID-19 and provide a warning sign of a community outbreak in time to thwart it....

You’d expect excessive athletic training to make the body tired, but can it make the brain tired too? A new study reported in the journal Current Biology on September 26 suggests that the answer is “yes.” When researchers imposed an excessive training load on triathletes, they showed a form of mental fatigue. This fatigue included reduced activity in a portion of the brain important for making decisions. The athletes also acted more impulsively, opting for immediate rewards instead of bigger ones that would take longer to achieve....

Early tetrapods (animals with four limbs) made the move from aquatic to terrestrial environments 320 million years ago, which resulted in the three main clades of vertebrates today: reptiles, birds (an offshoot of the reptilian tree), and mammals. All tetrapod brains possess a similar basal architecture established during early development because of common ancestry. It is unclear, however, how variations in this common “Bauplan” contributed to clade-specific characteristics. To answer this issue, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt created a molecular atlas of the dragon brain and compared it to one from mice....

Ultra-massive black holes are the heaviest entities in the cosmos, with some weighing in at millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Through simulations run on TACC’s Frontera supercomputer, astrophysicists have gained insight into the origin of these behemoth black holes, which formed around 11 billion years ago. “We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-masssive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,” said Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....

Every year, more than 200 million people are infected with malaria, and nearly 500,000 die from the disease. Existing drugs can treat the infection, but the parasite that causes the disease has evolved resistance to many of them. To help overcome that resistance, scientists are now searching for drugs that hit novel molecular targets within the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes malaria. An international team that includes MIT researchers has identified a potential new target: the acetyl-CoA synthetase, an enzyme that is necessary for the parasite’s survival....

The skin is a human being’s largest sensory organ, helping to distinguish between a pleasant contact, like a caress, and a negative sensation, like a pinch or a burn. Previous studies have shown that these sensations are carried to the brain by different types of sensory neurons that have nerve endings in the skin. Only a few of those neuron types have been identified, however, and most of those detect painful stimuli....

The research team studied the metabolism of mitochondria, specialized structures in cells that turn nutrients into energy. The investigators used a combination of techniques, including CRISPR gene editing and genetic sequencing studies, to examine the biochemistry and behavior of lymphocytes — immune cells that determine the body’s response to specific threats. They found that metabolism within the lymphocytes activates the immune cells to increase and perform a specific function. This previously unrecognized process is separate from cell changes that are due to genes....

The study was conducted at MIPT’s Laboratory of Biophysics of Excitable Systems in collaboration with the researchers from the Shumakov Federal Research Center of Transplantology and Artificial Organs and the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article was published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia. “Using three independent methods, we discovered that during their development on a nanofibrous scaffold, cardiomyocytes wrap the fibers on all sides creating a ‘sheath’ structure in the majority of cases,” explains Professor Konstantin Agladze, head of the Laboratory of Biophysics of Excitable Systems....

At 11:00 am ET today (November 1, 2021), the results will be released for research that studied Incidence of blood clot in brain after Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccination. What The Study Did: Resarchers compared post-Ad26.COV2.S (Johnson & Johnson/Janssen) vaccination cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST, a blood clot in the brain) rates with prepandemic rates to estimate postvaccination CVST risk. The rate of this rare adverse effect must be considered in the context of the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing COVID-19....