The more variation in wake-up time and sleep time, the worse mood and more chance of depression symptoms in study of first-year medical residents. An irregular sleep schedule can increase a person’s risk of depression over the long term as much as getting fewer hours of sleep overall, or staying up late most nights, a new study suggests. Even when it comes to just their mood the next day, people whose waking time varies from day to day may find themselves in as much of a foul mood as those who stayed up extra late the night before, or got up extra early that morning, the study shows....

ITER’s mission is to prove energy from hydrogen fusion can be created and controlled on earth. Fusion energy is carbon-free, safe, and economic. The materials to power society with hydrogen fusion for millions of years are readily abundant. Despite the challenges of COVID-19, ITER is almost 75 percent built. For the past 15 months, massive first-of-a-kind components have begun to arrive in France from three continents. When assembled together, they will make up the ITER Tokamak, a “sun on earth” to demonstrate fusion at industrial scale....

The image was taken on October 24, 2017 at 11:11 a.m. PDT (2:11 p.m. EDT), as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of minus 52.96 degrees. The spatial scale in this image is 13.86 miles/pixel (22.3 kilometers/pixel). Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager....

A Brown University study provides new evidence that the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa may have plate tectonics similar to those on Earth. The presence of plate tectonic activity could have important implications for the possibility of life in the ocean thought to exist beneath the moon’s surface. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, uses computer modeling to show that subduction — when a tectonic plate slides underneath another and sinks deep into a planet’s interior — is physically possible in Europa’s ice shell....

A personal, handheld device emitting high-intensity ultraviolet light to disinfect areas by killing the novel coronavirus is now feasible, according to researchers at Penn State, the University of Minnesota, and two Japanese universities. There are two commonly employed methods to sanitize and disinfect areas from bacteria and viruses — chemicals or ultraviolet radiation exposure. The UV radiation is in the 200 to 300 nanometer range and known to destroy the virus, making the virus incapable of reproducing and infecting....

This week, physicists working at the LHC shared more data from their Higgs projects. The LHC can’t observe the Higgs directly, but scientists can count up the number of particles that detectors observe and tease out of those that may have existed momentarily before the Higgs decayed. Any deviation in these expected numbers would indicate something happening beyond the Standard Model. The results presented at the Hadron Collider Physics symposium in Kyoto, Japan, have all been within the Standard Model....

An alum and several researchers at UCF have used nanotechnology to develop the cleaning agent, which protects against seven viruses for up to seven days. UCF researchers have developed a nanoparticle-based disinfectant that can continuously kill viruses on a surface for up to seven days – a discovery that could be a powerful weapon against COVID-19 and other emerging pathogenic viruses. The findings, by a multidisciplinary team of the university’s virus and engineering experts and the leader of an Orlando technology firm, were published this week in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society....

The long-standing enigma of why so many patients suffering with high blood pressure (known as hypertension) also have diabetes (high blood sugar) has finally been cracked by an international team led by the universities of Bristol, UK, and Auckland, New Zealand. The important new discovery has shown that a small protein cell glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) couples the body’s control of blood sugar and blood pressure. Professor Julian Paton, a senior author, and Director of Manaaki Mãnawa – The Centre for Heart Research at the University of Auckland, said: “We’ve known for a long time that hypertension and diabetes are inextricably linked and have finally discovered the reason, which will now inform new treatment strategies....

Kainji Lake was created in 1968 by the construction of the Kainji Dam and covers an area of around 1300 sq km with a mean depth of 12 m. Water from the Niger River, the third-longest river in Africa, enters the lake in the north. The grey-colored waters here mix with the striking, yellow-colored waters of Kainji Lake, creating a distinct sediment plume moving southwards. The emerald-green streaks are vegetation and algae floating on the surface of the lake....

One such microprotein is the 54-amino acid microprotein called PIGBOS, which Salk scientists recently showed contributes to mitigating cell stress. The work, published on October 25, 2019, in the journal Nature Communications, indicates that PIGBOS could be a target for human disease. “This study is exciting because cell stress is important in a number of different diseases, including cancer and neurodegeneration,” says Salk Professor Alan Saghatelian, co-corresponding author of the study....

That’s the thinking behind technology developed by a group of scientists at Purdue University, who have taken inspiration from the kitchen and the ocean to create strong glues. The team’s work is published in the October 8, 2019, edition of Advanced Sustainable Systems. “Adhesives are used in almost every consumer product that we touch each day,” said Gudrun Schmidt, an associate professor of practice in Purdue’s College of Science, who helped lead the research team....

Over the weekend, 884 pounds (401 kilograms) of hydrazine monopropellant were loaded into the descent stage’s four fuel tanks. As the aeroshell containing the descent stage and rover enter the Martian atmosphere on February 18, 2021, the propellant will be pressure-fed through 120 feet (37 meters) of stainless steel and titanium tubing into eight Mars landing engines. The engines’ job: to slow the spacecraft, which will be traveling at about 180 mph (80 meters per second) when it’s 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) in altitude, to 1....

According to a new study, 340,000 extra people turned out to vote in the 2010 US congressional elections because of a single-election day Facebook message. Researchers ran an experiment involving 61 million users of the social network. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. It’s the first study of its kind to actually demonstrate how the online world can significantly affect the real world on a large scale....

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft successfully entered Mars’ orbit at 10:24 p.m. EDT Sunday, September 21, where it now will prepare to study the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere as never done before. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars. “As the first orbiter dedicated to studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, MAVEN will greatly improve our understanding of the history of the Martian atmosphere, how the climate has changed over time, and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability of the planet,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden....

Men who consume colorful fruits and vegetables on a regular basis are less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer (PC), according to new research by University of South Australia scientists. A rainbow of foods rich in certain micronutrients helps to prevent prostate cancer (PC) as well as speed up recovery among men who undergo radiation treatment for the disease. The findings, from two studies published in the journal Cancers, highlight the importance of a Mediterranean or Asian diet that includes these foods....

There are hundreds of weight-loss supplements like green tea extract, chitosan, guar gum and conjugated linoleic acid, and an estimated 34% of Americans who are trying to lose weight have used one. For the study, scientists completed a comprehensive review of 315 existing clinical trials of weight loss supplements and therapies, and most of the studies showed the supplements did not produce weight loss among users. “Our findings are important for clinicians, researchers, and industry alike as they suggest the need for rigorous evaluation of products for weight loss,” said corresponding author John Batsis, MD, associate professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, and in the Department of Nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health....

We know proper indoor ventilation is key to reducing the spread of COVID-19. Now, a study by MIT researchers finds that indoor relative humidity may also influence the transmission of the virus. Relative humidity is the amount of moisture in the air compared to the total moisture the air can hold at a given temperature before saturating and forming condensation. In a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface on November 16, the MIT team reports that maintaining an indoor relative humidity between 40 and 60 percent is associated with relatively lower rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths, while indoor conditions outside this range are associated with worse COVID-19 outcomes....

But in the quantum world, the behavior of individual atoms is governed by the eerie principle that a particle’s location is a probability. An atom, for instance, has a certain chance of being in one location and another chance of being at another location, at the same exact time. Due to these quantum effects, a variety of phenomena should happen when particles interact. However, it is difficult to see such purely quantum mechanical behavior of interacting particles among the deafening noise of the classical universe....

Magnetic reconnection has remained a bit of a mystery to scientists. They know it exists and have documented the effects that the energy explosions can have—sparking auroras and possibly wreaking havoc on power grids in the case of extremely large events—but they haven’t completely understood the details. In a study published in the journal Science, the scientists outline the first views of the critical details of how this energy conversion process works in the Earth’s magnetotail....

The virus responsible for E. coli infection has a secret weapon: teamwork. Always scrappy in its bid for survival, the virus alights on an unassuming host cell and grips the surface with the business end of its tubular tail. Then, the proteins in the tail contract in unison, flattening its structure like a stepped-on spring and reeling the virus’s body in for the critical strike. Thanks to the proteins’ teamwork, the tail can flex and flatten with ease....