New research indicates that viruses are using information from their environment to “decide” when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has important implications for antiviral drug development. Led by the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the study was recently published in Frontiers in Microbiology. A virus’s ability to sense its environment, including elements produced by its host, adds “another layer of complexity to the viral-host interaction,” says Ivan Erill....

The study, published today (January 17, 2020) in Scientific Reports, uses a rat model and human placental cells to show that maternal exposure to THC during pregnancy has a measurable impact on both the development of the organs of the fetus and the gene expression that is essential to placental function. The researchers demonstrated in a rat model that regular exposure to a low dose of THC that mimics the daily use of cannabis during pregnancy led to a reduction in birth weight of 8 percent and decreased brain and liver growth by more than 20 percent....

A simple urine test under development for prostate cancer detection can now use urine samples collected at home — according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. Scientists pioneered the test which diagnoses aggressive prostate cancer and predicts whether patients will require treatment up to five years earlier than standard clinical methods. Their latest study shows how the ‘PUR’ test (Prostate Urine Risk) could be performed on samples collected at home, so men don’t have to come into the clinic to provide a urine sample — or have to undergo an uncomfortable rectal examination....

Solar Orbiter is getting ready for the first of many gravity assist flybys of Venus on December 27, to start bringing it closer to the Sun and tilting its orbit in order to observe our star from different perspectives. Just as the majority of us will remain safely at home under various COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures during what is traditionally a holiday period, the flyby – a routine event in the world of flying spacecraft – will also be monitored by the spacecraft operations managers remotely as well....

UQ researchers set a world record for the conversion of solar energy to electricity via the use of tiny nanoparticles called ‘quantum dots’, which pass electrons between one another and generate electrical current when exposed to solar energy in a solar cell device. The development represents a significant step towards making the technology commercially viable and supporting global renewable energy targets. Professor Lianzhou Wang, who led the breakthrough, said conventional solar technologies used rigid, expensive materials....

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most powerful available to astronomers, but sometimes it too needs a helping hand. This comes in the form of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which makes galaxy clusters act as natural lenses, amplifying the light coming from very distant galaxies. Abell 68, pictured here in infrared light, is one of these galaxy clusters, and it greatly boosts the power of Hubble, extending the telescope’s ability to observe distant and faint objects....

NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) was installed in the station’s U.S. science lab in late May and is now producing clouds of ultracold atoms known as Bose-Einstein condensates. These “BECs” reach temperatures just above absolute zero, the point at which atoms should theoretically stop moving entirely. This is the first time BECs have ever been produced in orbit. CAL is a multiuser facility dedicated to the study of fundamental laws of nature using ultracold quantum gases in microgravity....

The Crew Dragon arrived at the station’s Harmony port, docking at 10:16 a.m. EDT while the spacecraft were flying about 262 miles above the northern border of China and Mongolia. Following soft capture, 12 hooks were closed to complete a hard capture at 10:27 a.m. Teams now will begin conducting standard leak checks and pressurization between the spacecraft in preparation for hatch opening scheduled for approximately 12:45 p.m. NASA Television and the agency’s website are continuing to provide live continuous coverage of the agency’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission....

Most countries introduced school closures during the spring of 2020 despite substantial uncertainty regarding the effectiveness in containing SARS-CoV-2. In Sweden, upper-secondary schools moved online while lower-secondary schools remained open. A comparison of parents with children in the final year of lower-secondary and first year of upper-secondary school shows that keeping the former open had limited consequences for the overall transmission of the virus. However, the infection rate doubled among lower-secondary teachers relative to upper-secondary ones....

The findings are published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. “Because spouses’ emotions and intellectual activities influence each other in daily life, we expected that spouses’ mental and cognitive health would also be related over time. And this is what we found,” said Joan Monin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. Because previous epidemiological studies have found that spouses share many health behaviors and health conditions in late life, Monin and her co-authors were interested in whether spouses’ cognitive impairment and depressive symptoms were also related....

A study to be published online on Friday, October 4, 2019, in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that deep brain stimulation (DBS) of an area in the brain called the subcallosal cingulate (SCC) provides a robust antidepressant effect that is sustained over a long period of time in patients with treatment-resistant depression—the most severely depressed patients who have not responded to other treatments. The long-term data presented in this study, conducted at Emory University and led by Helen S....

“Vitamin D is important to the function of the immune system and vitamin D supplements have previously been shown to lower the risk of viral respiratory tract infections,” said David Meltzer, MD, PhD, Chief of Hospital Medicine at UChicago Medicine and lead author of the study. “Our statistical analysis suggests this may be true for the COVID-19 infection.” The research team looked at 489 UChicago Medicine patients whose vitamin D level was measured within a year before being tested for COVID-19....

The payloads launched aboard the Space Test Program Satellite-6 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida as part of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Test Program 3 mission. LCRD will demonstrate NASA’s first two-way laser relay communications system, sending and receiving data over invisible infrared lasers, which can enable data rates 10 to 100 times greater than radio frequency systems traditionally used by spacecraft....

A joint research team from Google Inc., NASA Ames Research Center, and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated that a quantum computer can outperform a classical computer at certain tasks, a feat known as quantum supremacy. Quantum computers use the laws of quantum mechanics and units known as qubits to greatly increase the threshold at which information can be transmitted and processed. Whereas traditional “bits” have a value of either 0 or 1, qubits are encoded with values of both 0 and 1, or any combination thereof, allowing for a vast number of possibilities for storing data....

A European Union-backed high-performance computing platform has tested the impact of known molecules against the genomic structure of coronavirus and identified an already-registered generic medication’s efficacy. There are a significant number of studies focusing on potential treatments for COVID-19, including existing drugs that are being trialed. Some progress has been made, too. A private-public consortium funded by the EXSCALATE4CoV project has announced promising results for the fight against the coronavirus....

Superconductors offer enormous technical and economic promise for applications such as high-speed hovertrains, MRI machines, efficient power lines, quantum computing, and other technologies. However, their usefulness is limited since superconductivity requires extremely low temperatures. It is highly challenging to integrate them with modern technology because of this demanding and costly requirement. The electrical resistance of a superconductor has a specific critical temperature beyond which it drops suddenly to zero, unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance declines gradually as temperature is reduced, even down to near absolute zero....

Their research, which was recently published in the journal Cell, shows how the researchers connected the dots on a conundrum that was initially presented three decades ago with a little bit of luck. “We were doing live fluorescence imaging experiments that were unrelated to this study, and when we added a salt solution to the cells, the internal cytoplasmic material rapidly turned into a fluorescent lava lamp,” said Daniel Shiwarski, Ph....

This almost cloud-free image was captured on January 23, 2020, at 02:20 GMT (10:20 local time) by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, and shows the island, in the center of the image, completely covered in a thick layer of ash. This optical image has also been processed using the mission’s short-wave infrared band to show the ongoing activity in the crater, visible in bright red. Ash blown by strong winds can be seen in Agoncillo, visible southwest of the Taal volcano....

Astronomers have observed that nearly once a day, the black hole emits a brief burst of light before settling down. It’s yet unclear what causes these flare-ups, and scientists have been trying to characterize these periodic bursts in order to better understand how supermassive black holes evolve. The scientists published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal. In this new study, the NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory was used to detect the brightest flare ever observed from Sagittarius A+....

Renewable energy generation also causes grid frequency fluctuations because the wind does not always blow at the same speed and clouds constantly alter the feed-in from photovoltaic systems. A frequent suggestion for integrating renewable energy generators into the power grid involves breaking the grid down into small autonomous cells known as microgrids. This would allow a community with a combined heat and power unit and its own wind and photovoltaic generators, for example, to operate its energy systems in an autonomous manner....