For plants, sunlight can be a double-edged sword. They need it to drive photosynthesis, the process that allows them to store solar energy as sugar molecules, but too much sun can dehydrate and damage their leaves. A primary strategy that plants use to protect themselves from this kind of photodamage is to dissipate the extra light as heat. However, there has been much debate over the past several decades over how plants actually achieve this....

Cannabis Use Disorder: Another COVID Risk Factor Should doctors take particular care to talk to patients about the potential dangers of COVID-19 if those patients have a problematic relationship with pot? New research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests perhaps they should. Diabetes, obesity, and a history of smoking cigarettes are all considered risk factors for poorer COVID-19 outcomes. Warnings and tailored information are targeted to people with these conditions, and doctors are acutely aware of the elevated risks they pose....

Founded by Erik the Red around 985AD after his exile from Iceland (or so the Sagas tell us), Norse communities in Greenland thrived for centuries — even gaining a bishop — before vanishing in the 1400s, leaving only ruins. Latest research from the universities of Cambridge, Oslo, and Trondheim has found that, for hundreds of years, almost all ivory traded across Europe came from walruses hunted in seas only accessible via Norse settlements in south-western Greenland....

These cells faced a chemical conundrum. They needed particular ions from the soup in order to perform basic functions. But those charged ions would have disrupted the simple membranes that encapsulated the cells. A team of researchers at the University of Washington has solved this puzzle using only molecules that would have been present on the early Earth. Using cell-sized, fluid-filled compartments surrounded by membranes made of fatty acid molecules, the team discovered that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can stabilize membranes against magnesium ions....

Now researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel have uncovered new evidence that supports the existence of Israel’s united monarchy and indicates that the Kingdom extended beyond Jerusalem’s vicinity. The findings were recently published by Prof. Avraham Faust and Dr. Yair Sapir in the journal Radiocarbon. Over the past decade Prof. Avi Faust, of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, excavated a large residence of the type, known as a “four-room house,” which was destroyed in a massive conflagration in the 8th century BCE, during one of the Assyrian campaigns....

DNA in preserved museum specimens can allow scientists to explore the history of species and humanity’s impact on the ecosystem, but samples are typically preserved in formaldehyde which can damage DNA and make it very difficult to recover. Researchers have used a vortex fluidic device (VFD) to speed up DNA extraction from an American lobster preserved in formaldehyde — with the results providing a roadmap for exploring DNA from millions of valuable and even extinct species in museums worldwide....

Easily identifiable in satellite imagery, the Above Anvil Cirrus Plume, or AACP, looks like a plume of smoke emanating out from the top of what, in all likelihood, is a serious storm. “The plume pattern in the imagery instantly tells you without the need for radar or lightning observations or other information that these are the storms you really, really need to look out for,” said Kris Bedka, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia....

Because interstellar space is so cold and is primarily a vacuum, the water we detect from Earth is usually in the form of amorphous ice, meaning its atomic structure is not arranged neatly into a crystalline lattice like ice on Earth. How the transition between the crystalline and amorphous ice phases occurs on icy bodies like Europa or on Kuiper Belt Objects beyond Pluto, is difficult to study—unless you can mimic the cold, dark vacuum of outer space, under intense radiation, in a laboratory....

Researchers at UNSW Sydney have demonstrated the lowest noise level on record for a semiconductor quantum bit, or qubit. The research was published in Advanced Materials. For quantum computers to perform useful calculations, quantum information must be close to 100 percent accurate. Charge noise – caused by imperfections in the material environment that hosts qubits – interferes with quantum information encoded on qubits, impacting the accuracy of the information. “The level of charge noise in semiconductor qubits has been a critical obstacle to achieving the accuracy levels we need for large-scale error-corrected quantum computers,” says lead author Ludwik Kranz, a PhD student at UNSW’s Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) working with the Centre’s spin off company Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC)....

Cohen made her fourth expedition to Antarctica beginning November 26, 2017 to collect meteorites for the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, a Case Western Reserve University project supported by NASA, with logistical support provided through the U.S. Antarctic Program at the National Science Foundation, and curatorial support from the Smithsonian Institution and NASA’s Johnson Space Center. The space rocks come from all over the solar system, most of which are fragments from asteroid collisions but some were ejected from the surfaces of the Moon and Mars by asteroid or comet impacts....

But before you start feeling too guilty for your gluttony, consider this: It might not be entirely your fault. Now, new research in mice shows that specific gut bacteria may suppress binge eating behavior. Oreos and other desserts are examples of so-called “palatable foods”—food consumed for hedonistic pleasure, not simply out of hunger or nutritional need. Humans are not alone in enjoying this kind of hedonism: Mice like to eat dessert, too....

The majority of today’s antidepressants target the serotonin transporter (SERT). These drugs, however, are limited. SERT-targeted antidepressants not only take up to 4 weeks to take effect, but they may also have serious side effects, including suicide, and only a percentage of individuals who take them recover from depression following treatment. While ketamine has been considered as an alternative, its potentially addictive properties as well as the danger of schizophrenia have aroused concerns....

For human cells to form and move normally during development, a network of protein filaments, known as the actin cytoskeleton, must organize the cell’s shape from within. To help rearrange this network, another protein known as filamin must bind and crosslink actin in the cell. When this process fails due to genetic mutations in filamin, a number of developmental diseases can arise. A Yale-led team of researchers recently defined the binding mechanism between filamin and actin and described how disease mutations disrupt this important interaction....

The new research does not take sides as to whether the liquid water exists. Instead, the authors suggest recent magmatic activity – the formation of a magma chamber within the past few hundred thousand years – must have occurred underneath the surface of Mars for there to be enough heat to produce liquid water underneath the kilometer-and-a-half thick ice cap. On the flip side, the study’s authors argue that if there was no recent magmatic activity underneath the surface of Mars, then there is not likely liquid water underneath the ice cap....

But the light-sensitive cells in the developing retina — the thin sheet of brain-like tissue at the back of the eye — were thought to be simple on-off switches, presumably there to set up the 24-hour, day-night rhythms parents hope their baby will follow. University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now found evidence that these simple cells actually talk to one another as part of an interconnected network that gives the retina more light sensitivity than once thought, and that may enhance the influence of light on behavior and brain development in unsuspected ways....

The prevalence of asthma and obesity—as both separate and coexisting conditions—has grown considerably in the U.S. in recent years. Obesity is a major risk factor for asthma, in part because of the systemic and localized inflammation of the airways that occurs in people with a high body mass index. People with obesity “also manifest a higher risk of severe asthma, decreased disease control, and decreased response to corticosteroid therapy,” explained the bicoastal team of scientists who conducted the research....

One of the key concepts in physics, and science overall, is the notion of a “field” that can describe the spatial distribution of a physical quantity. For instance, a weather map shows the distributions of temperature and pressure (these are known as scalar fields), as well as the wind speed and direction (known as a vector field). Almost everyone wears a vector field on their head — every hair has an origin and an end, just like a vector....

Titan is attracting much interest because of its unique atmosphere with a number of organic molecules that form a pre-biotic environment. Takahiro Iino, a scientist at the University of Tokyo, and his team used ALMA to reveal the chemical processes in Titan’s atmosphere. They found faint but firm signals of acetonitrile (CH3CN) and its rare isotopomer CH3C15N in the ALMA data. “We found that the abundance of 14N in acetonitrile is higher than those in other nitrogen-bearing species such as HCN and HC3N,” says Iino....

NASA’s Webb Catches Fiery Hourglass as New Star Forms Once-hidden features of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527 have been revealed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, providing insight into the beginnings of a new star. Because these blazing clouds within the Taurus star-forming region are only visible in infrared light, they are an ideal target for Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Within the “neck” of this hourglass shape is the protostar itself, hidden from view....

The method, which they tested in the East Indian Ocean and where they uncovered a decadal warming trend that exceeds previous estimates, has great promise to expand our ability to observe the rates and patterns of ocean warming and its effects on climate change, the study’s authors show. While monitoring ocean warming is crucial to understanding and predicting future climate change, it remains a challenging phenomenon to quantify and is limited by a relatively small number of single-point measurements that sample a fraction of the vast and fathomless depths....