Now, a new clinical trial will test a treatment that targets this overactive immune response, says Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Bert Vogelstein. He and his team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are currently recruiting individuals for the trial, which includes patients ages 45 to 85 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who have COVID-19 but who aren’t on a ventilator or in the ICU. Their treatment, a common type of prescription drug called an alpha blocker, might break a cycle of hyperinflammation before it ramps up, their findings from mouse studies and a recent analysis of medical claims data suggest....

The researchers created a truly new bio-based material by gluing together wood cellulose fibers and the silk protein found in spider web threads. The result is a very firm and resilient material which could be used in the future as a possible replacement for plastic, as part of bio-based composites and in medical applications, surgical fibers, textile industry, and packaging. According to Aalto University Professor Markus Linder, nature offers great ingredients for developing new materials, such as firm and easily available cellulose and tough and flexible silk used in this research....

SDO’s goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems by determining how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured, and also how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance. This image of the Sun was taken on May 15, 2018, by SDO....

The astronomers, from Arizona State University (ASU), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, made the discovery with their Experiment to Detect the Global EoR (Epoch of Reionization) Signature (EDGES) project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They reported their findings in the March 1 issue of Nature. NSF’s Peter Kurczynski explains how a tiny, refrigerator-sized antenna was able to make the first detection of the universe’s original stars....

Ants react to social isolation in a similar way as do humans and other social mammals. A study by an Israeli-German research team has revealed alterations to the social and hygienic behavior of ants that had been isolated from their group. The research team was particularly surprised by the fact that immune and stress genes were downregulated in the brains of the isolated ants. “This makes the immune system less efficient, a phenomenon that is also apparent in socially isolating humans – notably at present during the COVID-19 crisis,” said Professor Susanne Foitzik, who headed up the study at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU)....

In February 2019, a rift spanning most of the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica appeared ready to spawn an iceberg about twice the size of New York City. The question among scientists was not if the growing rift would finish traversing the shelf and break, but when? Now, nearly four years later, it has done just that. According to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the break occurred late on January 22, 2023, and produced a new iceberg with an area of 1550 square kilometers (about 600 square miles)....

The Sun is located inside one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, roughly two-thirds of the way from the galactic center to the outer regions. Because we are inside the galaxy, obscuration by dust and the confusion of sources along our lines-of-sight make mapping the galaxy a difficult task. Astronomers think that the galaxy is a symmetric spiral, and about ten years ago CfA astronomers Tom Dame and Pat Thaddeus using millimeter observations of the gas carbon monoxide discovered symmetric components to the spiral arms deep in the inner galaxy that lent support to this model....

An international team led by the University of Leeds has determined the distance between the massive young star PDS 27 and its orbiting stellar companion to be just 30 astronomical units away, or 4.5 billion km. That is roughly the distance between our Sun and Neptune, making them the stellar companions with the closest proximity ever determined for young high-mass stars in a binary system – a star system with two stars in orbit around a center of mass....

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) astronomers report the discovery of a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years — the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole. The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B....

Astronomers have long sought strong evidence that Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is producing a jet of high-energy particles. Finally they have found it, in new results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. Previous studies, using a variety of telescopes, suggested there was a jet, but these reports — including the orientation of the suspected jets — often contradicted each other and were not considered definitive....

Astronomers at Durham University led an international team of experts to investigate how Uranus came to be tilted on its side and what consequences a giant impact would have had on the planet’s evolution. The team ran the first high-resolution computer simulations of different massive collisions with the ice giant to try to work out how the planet evolved. The research confirms a previous study that said Uranus’ tilted position was caused by a collision with a massive object – most likely a young proto-planet made of rock and ice – during the formation of the solar system about 4 billion years ago....

CfA astronomers Blakesley Burkhart and John Forbes and two colleagues have developed a new unified model for galaxy discs that explains these phenomena, and some others besides. The scientists show that the correlation of star formation rate with gas motion is not caused by these motions but rather is the result of the transport of material within the galaxy, which affects both. The model maintains a state of gas equilibrium and marginal gravitational stability by including in a galaxy the radial transport of gas towards its nucleus and also the turbulent feedback from star formation....

Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Since detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet’s atmosphere, this success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years....

Rural areas experience a higher rate of reported cases, as well as a higher rate during school months. A new study from Nationwide Children’s Hospital and the Central Ohio Poison Center found rates of suicide attempts by self-poisoning among youth and adolescents are higher in rural communities, higher during the academic school year, and involve common medications found in many households. The study, published online today (October 6, 2019) in Clinical Toxicology, expands on previous research that evaluated the incidence and outcomes from intentional suspected-suicide self-poisoning in children and young adults ages 10 to 24 years old from 2000-2018....

As we age, molecular damage accumulates and contributes to the development of aging-related frailty and serious diseases. These molecular processes are more intense in some people than in others, resulting in a condition commonly referred to as accelerated aging. Fortunately, it is possible to detect the increased pace of aging before its disastrous consequences manifest by using digital models of aging (aging clocks). These models can also be used to derive anti-aging therapies at individual and population levels....

Do you feel sleepy until you’ve had your morning coffee? Do you struggle with sleepiness during the workday? If you struggle with morning alertness, you’re not alone. However, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that waking up feeling refreshed is not just a matter of luck. The scientists found that paying attention to three factors – sleep, exercise, and breakfast – can help you start your day without feeling groggy....

In the HBO series “The Last of Us,” named after the popular video game of the same name, the flour supplies of the world are contaminated with a fungus called Cordyceps. When people eat pancakes or other foods made with that flour, the fungi grow inside their bodies and turn them into zombies. As a food scientist, I study the effect of processing on the quality and safety of fruits and vegetables, including the flour used to make pancakes....

Another example is articular cartilage, which exists where bones meet at the joints. This type of cartilage provides a cushioning material to protect the ends of bones and is tightly integrated with bone through a gradient region known as the osteochondral interface—osteo means related to bone, chondral related to cartilage. When articular cartilage is absent or damaged, debilitating pain results. Unlike some tissues, cartilage cannot regenerate. It lacks blood vessels to support such repair....

“We largely foresaw the problems and results of the ATA construction process, but we were still surprised by the results in the animal experiments, where the penis regained normal erection immediately after the use of ATA,” said Xuetao Shi, a researcher at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China, and an author of the study. “The greatest advantage of the ATA we report is that it achieves tissue-like functions by mimicking the microstructure of natural tissues,” he added....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. Freestyle rapping, in which a rapper improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics, is one of the highest prized skills in hip hop. Instead of watching performances in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues, had 12 rappers freestyle in a fMRI machine....