Estimated at about 350 m across – equivalent to the length of three football fields – Apophis has been in and out of the headlines for years as astronomers have tried to pinpoint its precise orbit and the possibility of any future impact. Soon after its detection in 2004, astronomers predicted two impact possibilities in 2029 and 2036, but additional observations of the near-Earth object (NEO) thankfully ruled these out....

Teens with higher levels of optimism, happiness, self-esteem, belongingness, and feeling loved and wanted have a better chance of achieving good cardiometabolic health in their 20s and 30s, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Earlier research has shown that mental well-being components like optimism and happiness can positively impact cardiometabolic health in the long term. While previous studies mainly focused on older adults, this new study takes a closer look at the impact earlier in life and includes a more comprehensive measurement of cardiometabolic health that includes blood sugar and inflammation indicators....

To explore Fermi’s Gamma-ray Constellations, visit:https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/ The new constellations include a few characters from modern myths. Among them are the Little Prince, the time-warping TARDIS from “Doctor Who,” Godzilla and his heat ray, the antimatter-powered U.S.S. Enterprise from “Star Trek: The Original Series” and the Hulk, the product of a gamma-ray experiment gone awry. “Developing these unofficial constellations was a fun way to highlight a decade of Fermi’s accomplishments,” said Julie McEnery, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

When scientists, including Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, first discovered the phenomenon of entanglement in the 1930s, they were perplexed. Disturbingly, entanglement required two separated particles to remain connected without being in direct contact. In fact, Einstein famously called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” because the particles seemed to be communicating faster than the speed of light. To explain the bizarre implications of entanglement, Einstein, along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (EPR), argued that “hidden variables” should be added to quantum mechanics....

However, scientists think that in an earlier time, Venus may have been more like Earth, a world with water oceans that was potentially habitable for life, perhaps for billions of years. They hypothesize something caused a “runaway greenhouse” effect in Venus’ atmosphere, cranking up the temperature and vaporizing its oceans. NASA’s DAVINCI+ mission is set to explore Venus to determine if it was habitable and understand how these similar worlds ended up with such different fates....

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have come across an unexpected potential use for fluoxetine – commonly known as Prozac – which shows promise as an antiviral agent. The discovery could provide another tool in treating human enteroviruses that sicken and kill people in the U.S. and around the world. Human enteroviruses are members of a genus containing more than 100 distinct RNA viruses responsible for various life threatening infections, such as poliomyelitis and encephalitis....

Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe. With ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan raising concerns about the possibility of nuclear conflict, even as neither country is likely to initiate without significant provocation, researchers have evaluated both the direct fatalities and global climate anomalies that would result if nuclear war did break out. The researchers evaluated this scenario for the year 2025. Fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people if Pakistan attacked urban targets in 2025 with 150-kiloton nuclear weapons and if India attacked with 100-kiloton nuclear weapons....

Engineering faculty and students at the University of Colorado Boulder have produced the first experimental results showing that atomically thin graphene membranes with tiny pores can effectively and efficiently separate gas molecules through size-selective sieving. The findings are a significant step toward the realization of more energy-efficient membranes for natural gas production and for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plant exhaust pipes. Mechanical engineering professors Scott Bunch and John Pellegrino co-authored a paper in Nature Nanotechnology with graduate students Steven Koenig and Luda Wang detailing the experiments....

A new study led by the Canadian Museum of Nature shows that wolves may have survived by adapting their diet over thousands of years — from a primary reliance on horses during the Pleistocene, to caribou and moose today. The results are published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The research team, led by museum paleontologist Dr. Danielle Fraser and student Zoe Landry, analyzed evidence preserved in teeth and bones from skulls of both ancient (50,000 to 26,000 years ago) and modern gray wolves....

Developing alloys that can withstand high temperatures without corroding is a key challenge for many fields, such as renewable and sustainable energy technologies like concentrated solar power and solid oxide fuel cells, as well as aviation, materials processing and petrochemistry. At high temperatures, alloys can react violently with their environment, quickly causing the materials to fail by corrosion. To protect against this, all high-temperature alloys are designed to form a protective oxide scale, usually consisting of aluminum oxide or chromium oxide....

Roughly half of Earth’s ice-free land remains without significant human influence, according to a study from a team of international researchers led by the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis. The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, compared four recent global maps of the conversion of natural lands to anthropogenic land uses to reach its conclusions. The more impacted half of Earth’s lands includes cities, croplands, and places intensively ranched or mined....

For the first time, scientists have seen stony coral cells engulf dinoflagellates — single-celled, photosynthetic algae that are crucial for keeping coral aliveThe researchers used a cell line called IVB5, which contains endoderm-like cells cultured from the stony coral, Acropora tenuisAround 40% of coral cells incorporated the algae in around 30 minutes and remained healthy for one monthThe research is a step towards understanding the partnership between coral and dinoflagellates and could shed light on how coral bleaching occurs...

The Impact Radioisotopes are becoming increasingly critical tools for therapeutic medicine. If researchers have access to more radioisotopes, they can boost the odds of developing therapies for a wide range of cancers. To date, treatments largely rely on beta-emitting isotopes to destroy malignant cells. Alpha particles, emitted by alpha-emitting isotopes, are far more destructive to cells than beta particles. In addition, alpha particles have a short range in the body, so they do much less damage to the surrounding healthy tissue....

Since industrialization began 100 years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has steadily grown, and this is thought to be the primary cause of global warming. In contrast to the brisk warming of the late 20th century, the observed global mean atmospheric temperature stabilized throughout the first decade of the 21st century. This phenomenon, also known as the “atmospheric warming slowdown” or “global warming hiatus,” has received a lot of attention from scientists throughout the world since it appears to refute the hypothesis that global warming is caused by humans....

A new study published today, September 26, 2019, in The American Journal of Human Genetics has identified 44 genes linked to age-related hearing loss giving a much clearer understanding of how the condition develops and potential treatments. In the study, researchers from King’s College London and UCL analyzed the genetic data from over 250,000 participants of the UK Biobank aged 40-69 years to see which genes were associated with people who had reported having or not having hearing problems on a questionnaire....

The researchers published their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters. This technique entails in taking a short hop before a big one, and could allow spring-based robots to reduce their power demands by as much as a factor of ten. This formula was discovered by analyzing nearly 20,000 jumps made by a robot in the lab under a wide range of conditions. In stutter jumps, the mass is moved at lower frequency to get off the ground....

The COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized the world’s scientific community like no other recent crisis, including many researchers using the most modern data science and artificial intelligence approaches. At the University of Chicago, public health experts, computer scientists, economists and policy analysts have launched projects using computational tools to better detect, diagnose, treat and prevent the spread of the deadly virus. This summer, three of these projects received seed funding from the C3....

Soon after researchers in South Africa reported the original version of the omicron variant (B.1.1.529) on November 24, 2021, many scientists – including me – speculated that if omicron’s numerous mutations made it either more transmissible or better at immune evasion than the preceding delta variant, omicron could become the dominant variant around the world. Indeed, the omicron variant did become dominant early in 2022, and several sublineages, or subvariants, of omicron have since emerged....

The Christmas holiday season is a time for joy, celebration, and, of course, food. With so many temptations around every corner, it’s also the time when your healthy lifestyle can go out the window. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for you to stay in shape while still enjoying all your favorite foods. Here are some tips to help you enjoy this festive season to the fullest without putting on weight....

Toxic chemicals wreak havoc on cells, damaging DNA and other critical molecules. A new study from researchers at MIT and the University at Albany reveals how a molecular emergency-response system shifts the cell into damage-control mode and helps it survive such attacks by rapidly producing proteins that counteract the harm. Peter Dedon, a professor of biological engineering at MIT, and colleagues had previously shown that cells treated with poisons such as arsenic alter their chemical modification of molecules known as transfer RNA (tRNA), which deliver protein building blocks within a cell....