The Moss rule, which describes a trade-off between a material’s optical absorption and how it refracts light, has been broken by Gururaj Naik, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, and Applied Physics Graduate Program alumna Chloe Doiron. He did this by developing a method to manipulate light at the nanoscale that breaks the Moss rule. It seems to be more of a guideline than a rule since a handful of “super-Mossian” semiconductors do exist....

New toolbox for solid-state physics In their search for novel materials for future quantum technologies, one area that scientists from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter – at the two universities in Würzburg and Dresden are concentrating on is topological insulators, which enable the lossless conduction of electrical current and robust information storage. The first experimental realization of this materials class took place in Würzburg in 2007, prompting a worldwide research boom in solid-state physics that continues to this day....

TB Vaccine Linked to Lower Risk of Contracting COVID-19 A widely used tuberculosis vaccine is associated with reduced likelihood of contracting COVID-19 (coronavirus), according to a new study by Cedars-Sinai. The findings raise the possibility that a vaccine already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may help prevent coronavirus infections or reduce severity of the disease. The vaccine, known as Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), was developed between1908 and 1921 and is administered to more than 100 million children around the world every year....

XT2 is located in a galaxy about 6.6 billion light-years from Earth. The source is located in the Chandra Deep Field South (CDF-S), a small patch of sky in the Fornax constellation. The CDF-S is the deepest X-ray image ever taken, containing almost 12 weeks of Chandra observing time. The wider field of view shows an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope of a portion of the CDF-S field, while the inset shows a Chandra image focusing only on XT2....

“Stellar winds are the fast-flowing material—composed of protons, electrons, and metal atoms—ejected from stars,” said Pragati Pradhan, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and the lead author of the paper. “This material enriches the star’s surroundings with metals, kinetic energy, and ionizing radiation. It is the source material for star formation. Until the last decade, it was thought that stellar winds were homogenous, but these Chandra data provide direct evidence that stellar winds are populated with dense clumps....

Caitlin Wells, a research scientist at Colorado State University, conducted the research as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis. This study is the culmination of two decades of research spearheaded by scientists from University of California, Davis; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; University of Texas, El Paso; Wright State University; Oregon State University; and the state of Hawaii’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife. The results from the study offer hope for existing conservation efforts with the koloa and other endangered birds around the world....

Even if the climate cools, study finds, glaciers will continue to shrink. Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking. The finding, published today, August 13, in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland’s glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers....

EPFL’s Laboratory of Quantum Materials (QMAT), headed by Philip Moll, has been working on a specific group of unconventional superconductors known as heavy fermion materials. The QMAT scientists, as part of a broad international collaboration between EPFL, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Cornell University, made a surprising discovery about one of these materials, CeIrIn5. CeIrIn5 is a metal that superconducts at a very low temperature, only 0....

As insurance companies start charging members for hospital-related costs again, analysis of 2020 data shows what they might owe. Americans who get seriously ill from COVID-19 in 2021 might have to pay thousands of dollars in bills from their hospitals, doctors, and ambulance companies, a new study suggests. The new University of Michigan analysis, published in JAMA Network Open, has implications for both policymakers and people who haven’t yet gotten vaccinated, as well as people with underlying conditions that put them at risk of a severe breakthrough case of COVID-19....

How Is COVID-19 Affecting the Global Economic Order? Scenarios for the Global Monetary System Supply chains collapse, companies are facing bankruptcy, and mass unemployment ensues. COVID-19 has triggered a global financial crisis and is forcing states to develop rescue packages on a scale not seen before. In addition, the crisis has called into question the US dollar’s hegemony and could redefine the global monetary system. A team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) has developed four scenarios that show how political decisions will shape the post-Corona world....

A study released in JAMA Network Open by investigators at Providence, one of the largest health systems in the United States, and the University of Chicago, found that the level of protection granted by a prior symptomatic COVID-19 infection among unvaccinated individuals was on par with the level of protection provided by mRNA vaccines, with natural immunity providing a longer window of protection than mRNA vaccines. The study was conducted before the emergence of the highly transmissible omicron variant in the United States....

Although the spreading SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus usually causes only mild respiratory symptoms, the COVID-19 disease progresses so severely in around five percent of those affected that acute respiratory distress can occur. “The mortality rate in these cases is high,” says Dr. Thomas Wiesmann, who attended the patient along with the intensive care team in the Department of Anesthesia and Intensive Care at Marburg University Hospital. The patient is a 65-year-old woman without pre-existing conditions who was admitted to the hospital for progressive shortness of breath and fever....

New research published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine indicates that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, produces microRNAs that can have impacts on infected cells. MicroRNAs are genetic molecules that prevent the production of particular proteins by binding to and destroying messenger RNAs that code for those proteins. Investigators found that the virus’ microRNAs affect individuals’ respiratory system, immune response, and vitamin D pathways. Understanding these impacts could provide new insights related to SARS-CoV-2 infection, pathogenesis, and treatment....

Face shields worn alone are not effective against COVID-19 sneezes. Do face shields provide enough protection to the wearers against COVID-19 if they don’t also wear a mask? Spoiler alert: no. But researchers at Fukuoka University in Japan are working to create face shields safe enough to be worn alone. The researchers originally set out to explore whether surgical masks and face shields used as preventive measures are effective, as well as to determine if the stress of wearing a N95 surgical mask for long periods could be reduced....

A CSIRO radio telescope has detected the raw material for making the first stars in galaxies that formed when the Universe was just three billion years old — less than a quarter of its current age. This opens the way to studying how these early galaxies make their first stars. The telescope is CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope near Narrabri, NSW. “It one of very few telescopes in the world that can do such difficult work, because it is both extremely sensitive and can receive radio waves of the right wavelengths,” says CSIRO astronomer Professor Ron Ekers....

In February 2020, a trio of bio-imaging experts were sitting amiably around a dinner table at a scientific conference in Washington, D.C., when the conversation shifted to what was then a worrying viral epidemic in China. Without foreseeing the global disaster to come, they wondered aloud how they might contribute. Nearly a year and a half later, those three scientists and their many collaborators across three national laboratories have published a comprehensive study in Biophysical Journal that – alongside other recent, complementary studies of coronavirus proteins and genetics – represents the first step toward developing treatments for that viral infection, now seared into the global consciousness as COVID-19....

Unlike any other organ, our brains contain extremely densely packed networks of membranous cables that are used by our about 86 billion nerve cells for communication amongst each other. Since each nerve cell in the main part of mammalian brains, the so-called cerebral cortex, communicates with about 1,000 other nerve cells via synapses placed along these cables over long distances, one expects a total of about 5 million kilometers (3....

Golf ball-size clods of weathered crude oil originating from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe could remain buried in sandy Gulf Coast beaches for decades, according to a new study by ecologists at Florida State University. In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, FSU Professor of Oceanography Markus Huettel and graduate student Ioana Bociu revealed that these large clumps of oil and sand — called sediment-oil-agglomerates — take at least 30 years to decompose....

According to the researchers, these drugs may effectively prevent dementia in high-risk individuals with mild to moderate type 2 diabetes, and it may now be worthwhile to give them priority in future clinical trials to determine whether they can be repurposed. Researchers have begun to investigate whether diabetes drugs could potentially help prevent or cure dementia since type 2 diabetes and dementia share several physiological patterns. However, the results have been inconsistent thus far....

Current obesity rates in adults in the United States could be the result of dietary changes that took place decades ago, according to a new study published by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “While most public health studies focus on current behaviors and diets, we took a novel approach and looked at how the diets we consumed in our childhood affect obesity levels now that we are adults,” said Alex Bentley, head of UT’s Department of Anthropology and lead researcher of the study, which was published in Economics and Human Biology....