Such coronavirus-like nanoparticles, developed by nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego, would serve as something called a positive control for COVID-19 tests. Positive controls are samples that always test positive. They are run and analyzed right alongside patient samples to verify that COVID-19 tests are working consistently and as intended. The positive controls developed at UC San Diego offer several advantages over the ones currently used in COVID-19 testing: they do not need to be kept cold; they are easy to manufacture; they can be included in the entire testing process from start to finish, just like a patient sample; and because they are not actual virus samples from COVID-19 patients, they do not pose a risk of infection to the people running the tests....

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has recently funded both DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) in a new project related to quantum information science. The Argonne team will bring to the project its expertise in coupling superconducting and magnetic systems. The UIUC team will contribute its world-class capabilities for developing new magnetic materials for quantum systems. “Quantum information science promises new and different ways in which scientists can process and manipulate information for sensing, data transfer, and computing,” said Valentine Novosad, a senior scientist in Argonne’s Materials Science division....

Researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) — a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne hospital — were able to test blood samples at four different time points in an otherwise healthy woman in her 40s, who presented with COVID-19 and had mild-to-moderate symptoms requiring hospital admission. Published in Nature Medicine is a detailed report of how the patient’s immune system responded to the virus....

The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has produced an intricate view of the remains of a star that died in a stellar explosion a millennium ago. This new view provides further proof that the cosmic dust which lies throughout our Galaxy is created when massive stars reach the end of their lives. The study, “A Cool Dust Factory in the Crab Nebula: A Herschel Study of the Filaments,” led by Dr....

Although Pine Island Glacier is one of the most intensively and extensively investigated glacier systems in Antarctica, different model projections of future mass loss give conflicting results; some suggest mass loss could dramatically increase over the next few decades, resulting in a rapidly growing contribution to sea level, while others indicate a more moderate response. Identifying which is the more likely behavior is important for understanding the future sea-level rise and how this vulnerable part of Antarctica is going to evolve over the coming decades....

Mars has lost much of its original atmosphere, but what’s left remains quite active, recent findings from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity indicate. Rover team members reported diverse findings today at the European Geosciences Union 2013 General Assembly, in Vienna. Evidence has strengthened this month that Mars lost much of its original atmosphere by a process of gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere. Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample last week using a process that concentrates selected gases....

“This connects us with the mineral identifications from orbit, which can now help guide our investigations as we climb the slope and test hypotheses derived from the orbital mapping,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Curiosity collected the powder by drilling into a rock outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp in late September. The robotic arm delivered a pinch of the sample to the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument inside the rover....

In the recent past, space missions dedicated to the study of astrophysical signals in the high-energy spectrum revealed a series of enigmatic excesses not predicted by the theoretical models. In order to find an explanation for these anomalies, many solutions have been proposed. The most exciting hypothesis invokes the contribution of the elusive dark matter, the mysterious form of matter 4 times more abundant than ordinary one and of which we have so far detected only its gravitational effects....

In the below video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity. The DARPA Robotics Challenge will test these and other capabilities in a series of tasks that will simulate conditions in a dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environment....

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected the physical health of millions of Americans, but it’s also taken a toll on the country’s mental health. A new study by researchers at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City finds that depression remained common during the pandemic and worsened for some patients leading to increased visits to the emergency department for treatment of anxiety and chest pain. Researchers found that nearly 40 percent of patients studied reported new or continuing symptoms of depression during the first year of the pandemic....

Identical twins with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience large differences in symptom severity even though they share the same DNA, according to an analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that identifying the causes of this variability may inform the treatment of ASD-related symptoms. The study was conducted by John Constantino, M.D., of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and colleagues. Funding was provided by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)....

The results were publishedrecently in the journal Advanced Materials. Carnegie Mellon’s collaborators included the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and the UPMC. The testing platform identifies the presence of two of the virus’ antibodies, spike S1 protein and receptor binding domain (RBD), in a very small drop of blood (about 5 microliters). Antibody concentrations can be extremely low and still detected below one picomolar (0.15 nanograms per milliliter). This detection happens through an electrochemical reaction within a handheld microfluidic device which sends results almost immediately to a simple interface on a smart phone....

University of California Riverside-led research has applications in ultrafast and spin-based nanoscale devices. A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discovery could help miniaturize the detection equipment on microchips and enhance sensitivity. Terahertz is a unit of electromagnetic wave frequency: One gigahertz equals 1 billion hertz; 1 terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz. The higher the frequency, the faster the transmission of information....

Currently, most diagnostic tests for COVID-19 rely on a technique called real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which amplifies SARS-CoV-2 RNA from patient swabs so that tiny amounts of the virus can be detected. However, the method takes at least 3 hours, including a step to prepare the viral RNA for analysis. Edmond Changkyun Park, Seung Il Kim and colleagues wanted to develop a faster diagnostic test that could analyze patient samples directly from a tube of buffer containing the swabs, without any sample preparation steps....

Ni­tro­gen is an es­sen­tial com­pon­ent of life. For ex­ample, it is re­quired for the pro­duc­tion of pro­teins. Boran Kartal, head of the Microbial Physiology group at the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy in Bre­men, stud­ies ni­tro­gen-cyc­ling mi­croor­gan­isms, which con­trol the bioavail­ab­il­ity of this vi­tal re­source. A par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing part of the ni­tro­gen cycle is the anam­mox pro­cess, short for an­aer­obic am­monium ox­id­a­tion. Here, ni­trite or nitric ox­ide and am­monium are con­ver­ted dir­ectly into dinitro­gen gas....

Astronomers estimate that once the Sun began to shine it took the Earth another 50-100 million years to grow to its present size, as the solar system evolved. But how did the Earth get started? Planets form out of disks of material that circle newborn stars, and scientists are unsure just when and how planets develop from these disks. Although the vast majority of very young stars show indirect evidence for such circumstellar disks, in only a few cases have disks been imaged directly or studied in any detail because their sizes on the sky are so small (much smaller than the atmospherically blurred sizes of the stars themselves), and in most situations they are fainter than their parent stars....

To control an epidemic, authorities will often impose varying degrees of lockdown. In a paper in the journal Chaos, by AIP Publishing, scientists have discovered, using mathematics and computer simulations, why dividing a large population into multiple subpopulations that do not intermix can help contain outbreaks without imposing contact restrictions within those local communities. “The key idea is that, at low infection numbers, fluctuations can alter the course of the epidemics significantly, even if you expect an exponential increase in infection numbers on average,” said author Ramin Golestanian....

The identity of the skeletal remains of a member of the 1845 Franklin expedition has been confirmed using DNA and genealogical analyses by a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo, Lakehead University, and Trent University. This is the first member of the ill-fated expedition to be positively identified through DNA. DNA extracted from tooth and bone samples recovered in 2013 were confirmed to be the remains of Warrant Officer John Gregory, engineer aboard HMS Erebus....

A second booster shot is equivalent to a fourth dose for people who received a Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA series or a third dose for those who received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine. In Israel, people in these same vulnerable categories began receiving fourth doses in January 2022. The U.K. recently began administering a fourth dose for people 75 years and older and coined it a “spring booster....

The study team looked at hepatitis B and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, two liver diseases that impact billions of people globally, to discover what drives their progression. Their surprising discovery—that liver cells are incapable of undergoing an inflammatory type of cell death known as “necroptosis”—resolves key unresolved questions in the field and will direct the development of new therapeutic interventions. At a glance WEHI researchers have for the first time revealed that an important type of liver cells cannot undergo necroptosis, eliminating this type of cell death as a driver of common liver diseasesThe surprise findings define the role and relevance of necroptosis in non-cancerous liver diseases, which affect billions of people worldwideThe results will help to inform new strategies for the development of treatments for these liver diseasesThe findings, published in the journal Gastroenterology, offer clarity on the heavily debated role of necroptosis in the progression of liver pathologies and provide fundamental insights to guide future pre-clinical and clinical studies in a new direction....