Breast cancer screening with mammography has been shown to improve prognosis and reduce mortality by detecting disease at an earlier, more treatable stage. However, many cancers are missed on screening mammography, and suspicious findings often turn out to be benign. An earlier study from Radiology found that, on average, only 10% of women recalled from screening for additional diagnostic workup based on suspicious findings are ultimately found to have cancer....

The team discovered ribose and other bio-essential sugars including arabinose and xylose in two different meteorites that are rich in carbon, NWA 801 (type CR2) and Murchison (type CM2). Ribose is a crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid). In much of modern life, RNA serves as a messenger molecule, copying genetic instructions from the DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid) and delivering them to molecular factories within the cell called ribosomes that read the RNA to build specific proteins needed to carry out life processes....

In the following days, the people who crossed the physician’s path left the hotel and went home to Vietnam, Singapore, Canada and Ireland. They spread SARS all over the world. Within a month, health authorities in 14 countries had identified more than 1,300 cases of SARS. Within 5 months, SARS had caused 8,098 illnesses, and 774 deaths in 26 countries. SARS had been brewing for months in China, and managed to escape....

New test by ARU professor could cut false negatives and deliver faster results. Results of a unique test developed by a world-renowned expert, which targets three viral genes to increase reliability and could cut COVID-19 detection time to 20 minutes, have been peer reviewed and published in the journal Scientific Reports. Stephen Bustin, Professor of Molecular Medicine at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and a leading expert in quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which is widely used to detect infectious SARS-CoV-2 in cells, has developed the assay, called Cov2-ID, with colleagues at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford....

Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites’ bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It’s big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years. “We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it,” said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the UK Met Office, say that large-magnitude eruptions will have greater effects as the climate continues to warm. However, the cooling effects of small- and medium-sized eruptions could shrink by as much as 75%. Since these smaller eruptions are far more frequent, further research is needed to determine whether the net effect will be additional warming or cooling. Where and when a volcano erupts is not something that we can control, but as the atmosphere warms due to climate change, the plumes of ash and gas emitted by large, but infrequent, volcanic eruptions will rise ever higher....

The research led by Tamara Taggart, Ph.D., MPH, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, discovered that strong social bonds between men may increase, rather than decrease, marijuana use, contrary to what was previously thought, and that men who believe in more traditional masculine gender roles—like men are supposed to be strong, successful, and not complain or show worry—are more likely to turn away from marijuana....

Gullies are relatively common features in the steep slopes of crater walls, possibly formed by dry debris flows, movement of carbon dioxide frost, or perhaps the melting of ground ice. This example shows a section of crater wall from the rocky crater rim at the far left of the image, down to the dark dusty dunes on the crater floor in the bottom right. (North is to the left.) The rock of the crater walls shows up deep orange, and the sandy deposits on the crater floor and the base of the crater walls appear blue....

Kerberos appears to be smaller than scientists expected and has a highly-reflective surface, counter to predictions prior to the Pluto flyby in July. “Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us,” said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The new data, downlinked from the New Horizons spacecraft on October 20, show that Kerberos appears to have a double-lobed shape, with the larger lobe approximately 5 miles (8 kilometers) across and the smaller lobe approximately 3 miles (5 kilometers) across....

The hunt is on for dark matter. There are many theories as to what manner of thing it might turn out to be, but many physicists believe dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. What this means is that it does not interact easily with ordinary matter. We know this to be true because it hasn’t been seen directly yet. But it must also have at least some mass as its presence can be inferred by its gravitational attraction....

A new map of the universe displays the span of the entire known cosmos for the first time with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Compiled from data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map was created by astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. It allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies....

Army research looks at pearls for clues on enhancing lightweight armor for soldiers. Round, smooth and iridescent, pearls are among the world’s most exquisite jewels; now, these gems are inspiring a U.S. Army research project to improve military armor. By mimicking the outer coating of pearls (nacre, or as it’s more commonly known, mother of pearl), researchers at University at Buffalo, funded by the Army Research Office (ARO), created a lightweight plastic that is 14 times stronger and eight times lighter (less dense) than steel and ideal for absorbing the impact of bullets and other projectiles....

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are those that last for a few seconds up to several minutes, unlike the more common gamma-ray bursts that last for under a few seconds. The long-duration bursts are suspected of being sustained by the rotational energy of a spinning compact object left behind from a supernova. Superluminous supernovae seem to be associated with these kinds of long-duration bursts, lending support to the idea that they too are powered by a spinning remnant....

This newly released NASA image shows an area on the surface of Mars (approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size) with frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. At this time of year, only south-facing slopes retain the frost, while the north-facing slopes have melted. Gullies are not the only active geologic process going on here. A small crater is visible at the bottom of the slope. The image was acquired on November 30, 2014, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, one of six instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter....

Stars are born in dense, cool clouds of molecular gas and dust. When the local density is high enough, the matter can gravitationally collapse to form a new star, a so-called young stellar object (YSO). In its early phases, a thick envelope dominates the infrared emission from the YSO, hiding what is going on within, but eventually the envelope flattens out into a warm circumstellar accretion disk. The disk emits more infrared than does the young star, and that excess radiation can be used to distinguish young stars from more mature stars whose disks and envelopes have disappeared....

Planck refines our knowledge of the Universe’s composition and evolutionNew maps provide excellent evidence for our standard model of cosmologyPlanck dates Universe at 13.82 billion years oldAnomalies suggest that Universe may be different on scales larger than those we can directly observeMost accurate values yet for the ingredients of the Universe, with normal matter contributing just 4.9% of the mass/energy density of the Universe and dark matter making up 26.8% – nearly a fifth more than the previous estimate....

The technique uses 3D structural models to project how novel combinations of molecular blocks might work together to achieve the desired effect. The advancement, which focuses on a relatively small number of protein substructures rather than the infinite number of atomic-level combinations, could ease the development of new medications and materials. “When you design a building, you don’t necessarily need to understand how grains of sand interact with each other within one brick,” said Gevorg Grigoryan, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth and senior researcher on the study....

Magnetic material’s flow inside a planet creates a global magnetic field. In Mercury, and in Earth, liquid metal currents in the planetary cores induce the planets’ magnetic fields. These fields vary in shape, size, angle, and strength from planet to planet, but are all important for protecting planets from solar particles. “>y=−20L0y=−20L0) of the plasmoid-unstable CS. Bottom shows the stack plot of the out-of-plane vector potential component Ax along the midplane of the CS y = −20 L0, which is also a proxy of the evolution of the reconnection electric field Ex....

Research conducted at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont in Montreal has revealed how stressors of daily life, such as obesity, can alter the immune system and cause harm to the eye as it ages. “We wanted to know why some people with a genetic predisposition develop AMD while others are spared,” said University of Montreal ophthalmology professor Przemyslaw (Mike) Sapieha, who led the study with his postdoctoral fellow Dr. Masayuki Hata. “Although considerable effort has been invested in understanding the genes responsible for AMD, variations, and mutations in susceptibility genes only increase the risk of developing the disease, but do not cause it,” Sapieha explained....

For the first time, scientists have shown that infection by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, changes the functioning of host cell RNA. The researchers, from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil, arrived at this conclusion by analyzing 13 datasets obtained during four studies of viral, human, and animal cell RNA. The most recent study, reported in an article published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, examined the epitranscriptome of Vero cells (derived from monkeys) and human Calu-3 cells by direct RNA sequencing....