Special plastic Goudriaan had a special plastic manufactured especially for these experiments with a distinct form of carbon (13C) in it. When she fed that plastic to bacteria after pretreatment with “sunlight” — a UV lamp — in a bottle of simulated seawater, she saw that special version of carbon appear as CO2 above the water. “The treatment with UV light was necessary because we already know that sunlight partially breaks down plastic into bite-sized chunks for bacteria,” the researcher explains....

Think Declining Mental Sharpness “Just Comes With Age”? Think Again, Says a Prestigious NIH-Funded Conference We’ve long thought cognitive decline was just “characteristic of aging,” but researchers convened by the American Geriatrics Society funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggest there’s nothing “just characteristic” of connections between age and cognition. Declining mental sharpness “just comes with age,” right? Not so fast, say geriatrics researchers and clinicians gathered at a prestigious 2018 conference hosted by the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) with support from the National Institute on Aging (NIA)....

Fluoridated DDT swiftly kills disease-carrying mosquitoes, which may lower its environmental impact. A new study published today (October 11, 2019) in the Journal of the American Chemical Society explores the chemistry as well as the complicated and alarming history of DFDT, a fast-acting insecticide. “We set out to study the growth of crystals in a little-known insecticide and uncovered its surprising history, including the impact of World War II on the choice of DDT—and not DFDT—as a primary insecticide in the 20th century,” said Bart Kahr, professor of chemistry at New York University and one of the study’s senior authors....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. So far, biotechnologists have only been able to make simple forms out of DNA, like tubes, boxes, and triangles. The process has been laborious and time-consuming, and there has been no nanoscale machinery available yet. The new technique uses short strands of DNA to hold a longer, folded strand in place at certain points. Until now, scientists had to assemble the shape by heating the DNA and allowing it to cool over a week....

Researchers at the University of Rochester — including Michael Dyonisius, a graduate student in the lab of Vasilii Petrenko, professor of earth and environmental sciences — and their collaborators studied methane emissions from a period in Earth’s history partly analogous to the warming of Earth today. Their research, published in Science, indicates that even if methane is released from these large natural stores in response to warming, very little actually reaches the atmosphere....

Researchers from the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health, the State University of New York at Albany, and Albany Medical Center conducted untargeted as well as targeted analyses of 38 liquid samples reportedly used by the first ten cases of EVALI in New York State to identify potential culprits for the serious lung disease epidemic. Two of the samples were nicotine-containing liquids, while the rest were illicit cannabinoid liquids....

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science. A team of UC San Diego researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence computing devices that mimic brain functions, an achievement that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown....

A cosmological wall is a flattened arrangement of galaxies found surrounding other galaxies, characterized by particularly empty regions called ‘voids’ on either side of it. These voids seem to squash the galaxies together into a pancake-like shape to make the flattened arrangement. This wall environment, in this case, called the Local Sheet, influences how The Milky Way and nearby galaxies rotate around their axes, in a more organized way than if we were in a random place in the Universe, without a wall....

The SLAC-built Large Area Telescope (LAT), the main instrument of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has been studying the gamma-ray sky for almost four years. During that time, the LAT has identified hundreds of gamma-ray sources, including pulsars and active galactic nuclei. It has shown that the Crab Nebula isn’t the steady emitter of gamma rays it’s long been thought to be. The LAT has cataloged lightning in the Earth’s atmosphere and flares on the sun....

Modern astronomical observations reveal that the universe is expanding and appears to be accelerating. The power driving the expansion of the universe is called dark energy by astronomers. Dark energy is still a mystery and accounts for about 68% of the substance of the universe. Large-scale redshift measurements of galaxies can describe the 3D distribution of the matter and reveal the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the universe....

Twin NASA probes orbiting Earth’s moon have generated the highest-resolution gravity field map of any celestial body. The new map, created by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, is allowing scientists to learn about the moon’s internal structure and composition in unprecedented detail. Data from the two washing machine-sized spacecraft also will provide a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved....

The invader they are trying to stop is COVID-19. For many of Mexico’s Indigenous people, poor and ignored by state and federal governments, the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is one that rests primarily with themselves, said Jeffrey Cohen, a professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University. That means they must take steps like limiting access to their villages. “Most of these communities only have one road in and out,” Cohen said....

Long Covid sufferers have experienced a wider set of symptoms than previously thought, new research has found. These symptoms include hair loss and sexual dysfunction. A new study found that patients with a primary care record of infection with the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus) reported 62 symptoms much more frequently 12 weeks after initial infection than those who hadn’t contracted the virus. The report was published in the journal Nature Medicine on July 25, 2022....

“They can carry 60, 70 or 80 percent of their body weight flying, which would be a huge load for us just walking around,” said researcher Susan Gagliardi, a research associate in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. “We were curious to see how they do it and how much it costs them to carry food and supplies back to the hive.” Gagliardi and Stacey Combes, associate professors in the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, measured the energy expended by bumblebees flying in a specially designed chamber (an emptied snowglobe)....

Reduces dispersal of airborne viral droplets from nose and mouth, but 3 layers preferable. Home-made cloth face masks likely need a minimum of two layers, and preferably three, to prevent the dispersal of viral droplets from the nose and mouth that are associated with the spread of COVID-19, indicates a video case study published online in the journal Thorax. Viral droplets are generated during coughing, sneezing, or speaking. And face masks are thought to protect healthy people from inhaling infectious droplets as well as reducing the spread from those who are already infected....

Hormone drugs that reduce androgen levels may help disarm the coronavirus spike protein used to infect cells and stop the progression of severe COVID-19 disease, suggests a new preclinical study from researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania and published online in Cell Press’s iScience. Researchers show how two receptors — known as ACE2 and TMPRSS2 — are regulated by the androgen hormone and used by SARS-CoV-2 to gain entry into host cells....

Video Transcript: What if I told you that chemists are working on something right now, that could be as big of an industry as the internet, and just as profitable in 50 years? Elon Musk is offering $100 million, the largest incentive prize ever, to whoever can come up with a successful carbon removal method. And a hundred million bucks is nothing compared to what this industry is going to be in 50 years....

While the use of face masks in public has been widely recommended by public health officials during the current COVID-19 pandemic, there are relatively few specific guidelines pertaining to mask materials and designs. A study from Florida Atlantic University, in the Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, looks to better understand which types are best for controlling respiratory droplets that could contain viruses. Siddhartha Verma and his team experimented with different choices in material and design to determine how well face masks block droplets as they exit the mouth....

The findings help explain why astronomers have detected few circumbinary planets — which orbit stars that in turn orbit each other — despite observing thousands of short-term binary stars, or ones with orbital periods of 10 days or less. It also means that such binary star systems are a poor place to aim future ground- and space-based telescopes to look for habitable planets and life beyond Earth. There are several different types of binary stars, such as visual and spectroscopic binaries, named for the ways astronomers are able to observe them....

Lucky for us, it seems as if the Stingray nebula, Hen 3-1357, was destined to stand out from the crowd since its beginnings. It was dubbed the youngest known planetary nebula in 1998 after Hubble caught a rare peek at the central star’s final stages of life. Now, twenty years after its first snapshot, the Stingray nebula is capturing the attention of astronomers again for a very different reason. Images from 2016 show a nebula that has drastically faded over the last two decades....