The smart insole, Bonbouton’s first product, can be inserted into a sneaker or dress shoe to passively monitor the foot health of a person living with diabetes. The data are then sent to a companion app that can be accessed by the patient and shared with their healthcare provider, who can determine if intervention or treatment is needed. “I was inspired by two things—a desire to help those with diabetes and a desire to commercialize the technology,” said Bonbouton Founder and CEO Linh Le, who developed and patented the core graphene technology while pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering at Stevens....

The research team, led by James M. De Buizer, SOFIA senior scientist, and Jonathan Tan at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, and the University of Virginia, has published observations of eight extremely massive and young stars located within our Milky Way Galaxy. SOFIA’s powerful camera, the Faint Object infraRed Camera for the SOFIA Telescope, known as FORCAST, allowed the team to probe warm, dusty regions that are heated by light from luminous, massive stars that are still forming....

Many neurodevelopmental disorders share similar symptoms, such as learning disabilities or attention deficits. A new study from MIT has uncovered a common neural mechanism for a type of cognitive impairment seen in some people with autism and schizophrenia, even though the genetic variations that produce the impairments are different for each condition. In a study of mice, the researchers found that certain genes that are mutated or missing in some people with those disorders cause similar dysfunctions in a neural circuit in the thalamus....

Stars are formed by gravitational contraction of gaseous clouds. The densest parts of the clouds, called molecular cloud cores, are the very sites of star formation and mainly located along the Milky Way. The Taurus Molecular Cloud is one of the active star-forming regions and many telescopes have been pointed at the cloud. Previous observations show that some cores are actually stellar eggs before the birth of stars, but others already have infant stars inside....

While many people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus experience relatively mild symptoms, some patients mount an excessive inflammatory response that can damage the lungs and cause acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), leading to low blood oxygen levels and, potentially, patient death. An early indicator of severe COVID-19 is an increased number of circulating neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. Neutrophils can catch and kill invading microbes by unwinding their DNA and extruding it from the cell to form sticky webs known as neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs)....

All planets, including the ones in our Solar System, are born in disks of gas and dust around stars, so-called protoplanetary disks. Thanks to ALMA we have stunning high-resolution images of many of these planet factories, showing dusty disks with multiple rings and gaps that hint at the presence of emerging planets. The most famous examples of these are HL Tau and TW Hydrae. But disks are not necessarily as neatly arranged as these initial dust observations suggest....

Call it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA’s Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself in this way anywhere in the solar system....

Cassini orbited Saturn and its moons from 2004 to 2017. The mission ended when the spacecraft was intentionally plunged into the planet’s atmosphere, but new discoveries are still being made with the data. During the mission lifetime, Cassini flew by Enceladus 147 times, with 23 close encounters of the icy moon. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) collected data that can be used to reveal information on the temperature and composition of the surface, as well as the sizes and crystallinity of ice grains....

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was part of an international team that recently discovered a relatively unpopulated region of the main asteroid belt, where the few asteroids present are likely pristine relics from early in solar system history. The team used a new search technique that also identified the oldest known asteroid family, which extends throughout the inner region of the main asteroid belt. The main belt contains vast numbers of irregularly shaped asteroids, also known as planetesimals, orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter....

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a mysterious place. Not only is it thousands of light-years away, it’s also cloaked in so much dust that most stars within are rendered invisible. Harvard researchers are proposing a new way to clear the fog and spot stars hiding there. They suggest looking for radio waves coming from supersonic stars. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the galactic center, and a lot we want to learn,” says lead author Idan Ginsburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)....

Chlamydia and related bacteria, collectively called ‘Chlamydiae’, and all studied members of this group depend on interactions with other organisms to survive. Chlamydiae specifically interact with organisms such as animals, plants and fungi, and including microscopic organisms like amoeba, algae, and plankton. Chlamydiae spend a large part of their lives inside the cells of their hosts, humans, but also of koala bears. Most knowledge about Chlamydiae is based on studies of pathogenic lineages in the lab....

The latest prototype of the rover, known as Moon Gravitation Representative Unit 3, or MGRU3, has the same wheel design and base size as the rover that will go to the Moon. It also has the flight design motors, gearboxes, and joints, as well as the newest version of the flight software. This test was the third mobility assessment conducted by VIPER at SLOPE to collect critical data on the software mobility controls, the onboard navigation system, and mobility performance over hazards and on loose soil....

However, a newly published study by Dr. Jose Valdez from Aarhus University and Kapil Mandrekar from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, shows how aquarium hobbyists can play an important role in freshwater fish conservation by filling in the gaps left by the scientific community and conservation organizations. Dedicated hobbyists Aquarium keeping is one of the most popular hobbies in the world, with millions of fish owners participating in this activity worldwide....

Throughout the 1990s, researchers looking into cannabis for its health effects began to unravel a mystery that culminated in the discovery of a whole new system in the body. Called the Endocannabinoid System (ECS), this vast network of transmitters, receptors, and enzymes can be thought of as a sort of “house manager” that keeps many of the other systems in your body in a healthy state of balance.[1] What’s unique about your ECS is that it contains chemical agents called cannabinoids....

In a newly published study, a team of theoretical physicists from Cambridge, University College London and the University of Gdansk detail a generalized form of teleportation that allows for a wide variety of potential applications in quantum physics. For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of ‘entanglement’ may hold the key to eventual teleportation of information....

Titan was revealed on Monday by ORNL, a Tennessee lab run by the Department of Energy, and it is a Cray supercomputer made up of nearly 19,000 processing units stitched together with 710 terabytes of memory. It can perform 20 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 20 petaflops. That’s enough to beat Sequoia, an IBM system at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, which was benchmarked at 16 petaflops. Titan is part of a new trend in supercomputing, using graphics processing chips to do some calculations....

Roughly 40 percent of the chemical industry’s energy used goes into separating and purifying chemicals in heat-intensive processes, such as distillation and crystallization. Using porous membranes to separate molecules from liquids could dramatically reduce that energy consumption. But most conventional membranes are not robust enough to withstand the sort of solvents used in industry, and alternative ceramic membranes tend to be very expensive. The KAUST team turned instead to recycled poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET)....

The brain has billions of neurons, arranged in complex circuits that allow us to perceive the world, control our movements and make decisions. Deciphering those circuits is critical to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. MIT neuroscientists have now taken a major step toward that goal. In a new paper appearing in the August 8 issue of Nature, they report that two major classes of brain cells repress neural activity in specific mathematical ways: One type subtracts from overall activation, while the other divides it....

During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Aggelos Tsaligopoulos, from the University of the Aegean, will describe how quiet could be measured in the hopes of better understanding its impact on people. The session, “Towards a new understanding of the concept of quietness,” will take place Wednesday, June 9, at 11:20 a.m. Eastern U.S. Tsaligopoulos said there is a dualism between noise and quiet, meaning quietness so far is viewed as a contradiction and as the lack of something, even if that something is noise....

When you say “fungi,” most people think of mushrooms, the fleshy fruiting bodies above the ground or food source, but most fungi do not actually produce mushrooms. Furthermore, of the estimated 3 to 13 million fungal species on Earth, many are microscopic in size, and therefore invisible to the naked eye. Fungi live in a wide range of environments including in soils, inside the tissues of leaves in rainforests, and in deep oceans....