These nanowires enable the bacteria to perform environmentally important functions such as cleaning up radioactive sites and generating electricity. Scientists have long known that Geobacter make conductive nanowires – 1/100,000 the width of a human hair – but to date no one had discovered what they are made of and why they are conductive. A new study by researchers at Yale, University of Virginia and the University of California at Irvine published April 4 in the journal Cell reveals a surprise: the protein nanowires have a core of metal-containing molecules called hemes....

According to a new study published in the inaugural issue of the journal Collective Intelligence, evolutionary forces may be contributing to collective tendencies to discriminate. Researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Peking University used a mathematical model of natural selection on behavior to examine the concept of “group selection,” in which evolutionary forces affect groups of individuals. Their model showed that in situations where technological changes challenge the dominance of one group and allow newly emerging groups to gain popularity, political polarization, bias, and discrimination can emerge....

When demonstrated using three video recordings from the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded, the system correctly estimated the shooter’s actual location — the north wing of the Mandalay Bay hotel. The estimate was based on three gunshots fired within the first minute of what would be a prolonged massacre. Alexander Hauptmann, research professor in CMU’s Language Technologies Institute, said the system, called Video Event Reconstruction and Analysis (VERA), won’t necessarily replace the commercial microphone arrays for locating shooters that public safety officials already use, although it may be a useful supplement for public safety when commercial arrays aren’t available....

A central question in biology is how entire organisms develop from single fertilized eggs. And although genetic research has revealed deep insights into this enigmatic subject in recent years, one particular aspect of development remained elusive. For an organism to develop a structured body, biomolecules need to move to specific sites inside the embryo, similar to building material on a construction site. A particularly important example for this distribution of material inside cells is the polarization of an embryo, which defines where the head and tail of a worm will grow....

María Altamirano, a researcher from the University of Malaga’s Department of Botany and Plant Physiology, is part of the scientific team collaborating on the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF)-led Seamounts Project. The project has uncovered a vast kelp forest on the top of a seamount at a depth of approximately 50 meters in the southern Galapagos Islands. The significance of the research, published in Marine Biology, lies in the discovery of a new species of kelp in the region and possibly in science....

A team led by researchers at Washington State University’s Paul G. Allen School for Global Health discovered spike proteins from the bat virus, known as Khosta-2, that can infect human cells and are resistant to both monoclonal antibodies and serum from SARS-CoV-2 vaccine recipients. Khosta-2 and SARS-CoV-2 are both coronaviruses that belong to the same subclass of coronaviruses known as sarbecoviruses. “Our research further demonstrates that sarbecoviruses circulating in wildlife outside of Asia – even in places like western Russia where the Khosta-2 virus was found – also pose a threat to global health and ongoing vaccine campaigns against SARS-CoV-2,” said Michael Letko, WSU virologist and corresponding author of the study published in the journal PLOS Pathogens....

How much do genes influence our body weight? Previous studies estimate that genetics play a role in about 20% of body weight for the general population. According to Nerea Deleyto-Seldas, a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), this means that lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise have a significant impact, but genetics also play a role. Nearly 100 genetic variants that moderately increase the likelihood of having a high BMI have been identified....

Satellites orbiting Earth have detected Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as luminous flashes of extremely energetic gamma-ray radiation that last from milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies billions of light-years away from Earth. A type of GRB called a short-duration GRB is produced when two neutron stars collide. These ultra-dense stars, which have the mass of our Sun compressed into a size smaller than a city, generate ripples in space-time called gravitational waves just before triggering a GRB in their final moments....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Biology Letters. Some scientists, including the authors, caution that the fossils could also represent a close relative to dinosaurs. The earliest dinosaurs were probably Eoraptor and Eodromaeus, which were true dinosaurs, and lived in what was Argentina 230 million years ago. In 2010, Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, discovered a close relative to dinosaurs in Tanzania’s Manda Beds, a geological formation dated between 242 million and 245 million years ago....

About 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, which interferes with their daily life, social interactions, and ability to work. MIT Professor Fan Wang wants to develop new ways to help relieve that pain, by studying and potentially modifying the brain’s own pain control mechanisms. Her recent work has identified an “off switch” for pain, located in the brain’s amygdala. She hopes that finding ways to control this switch could lead to new treatments for chronic pain....

A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19. Last year, Stanley Qi, an assistant professor in the departments of bioengineering, and chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and his team had begun working on a technique called PAC-MAN – or Prophylactic Antiviral CRISPR in human cells – that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to fight influenza....

Four vertebrate fossils enabled the scientists to declare the finding of a new genus and species. These were: three trunk vertebrae and the atlas — the first and, in the case of the salamander, the only cervical vertebra. Since the atlas is a highly specialized vertebra, providing for attachment and rotation movements of the skull, it has a rather complex structure, the scientists explain. It is therefore most suitable for describing a new species as it provides much information for analysis....

The Volgatitan belongs to the group of sauropods – giant herbivorous dinosaurs with a long neck and tail, who lived on Earth about 200 to 65 million years ago. Weighing around 17 tons, the ancient reptile from the banks of the Volga was not the largest among its relatives. The scientists described it from seven caudal vertebrae. The bones belonged to an adult dinosaur which is manifested by neural arches (parts of the vertebrae protecting the nerves and blood vessels), which completely merged with the bodies of the vertebrae....

The author of the study, Dr. Tanai Cardona, says the research can help to solve the controversy around when organisms started producing oxygen – something that was vital to the evolution of life on earth. It also suggests that the microorganisms we previously believed to be the first to produce oxygen – cyanobacteria – evolved later, and that simpler bacteria produced oxygen first. “My results mean that the process that sustains almost all life on earth today may have been doing so for a lot longer than we think,” said Dr....

In a scientific first, a team led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) has detected neutrinos created by a particle collider. The discovery promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the subatomic particles, which were first spotted in 1956 and play a key role in the process that makes stars burn. The work could also shed light on cosmic neutrinos that travel large distances and collide with the Earth, providing a window on distant parts of the universe....

A team of researchers led by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville conducted the measurement in a beam test facility at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory using a replica of the Spallation Neutron Source’s linear accelerator, or linac. The details are published in the journal Physical Review Letters. “Our goal is to better understand the physics of the beam so that we can improve how accelerators operate,” said Sarah Cousineau, group leader in ORNL’s Research Accelerator Division and UT joint faculty professor....

When people imagine outer space, they often envision it as a perfect vacuum. In fact, this impression is wrong because the vacuum is filled with charged particles. In the depths of space, the density of charged particles becomes so low that they rarely collide with each other. Instead of collisions, the forces related to the electric and magnetic fields filling space, control the motion of charged particles. This lack of collisions occurs throughout space, except for very near to celestial objects, such as stars, moons, or planets....

NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has traversed the orbit of Neptune. This is its last major crossing en route to becoming the first probe to make a close encounter with distant Pluto on July 14, 2015. The sophisticated piano-sized spacecraft, which launched in January 2006, reached Neptune’s orbit – nearly 2.75 billion miles from Earth – in a record eight years and eight months. New Horizons’ milestone matches precisely the 25th anniversary of the historic encounter of NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune on August 25, 1989....

The Orion Nebula reveals many of its hidden secrets in a dramatic image taken by ESO’s VISTA survey telescope. The telescope’s huge field of view can show the full splendor of the whole nebula and VISTA’s infrared vision also allows it to peer deeply into dusty regions that are normally hidden and expose the curious behavior of the very active young stars buried there. VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy — is the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory....

A smartphone-read ultrasensitive and quantitative saliva test for COVID-19. Offering an ultrasensitive yet accessible approach to COVID-19 testing, a portable saliva-based smartphone platform provides results within 15 minutes without the resource-intensive laboratory tests the current gold standard requires, according to a new study. The approach was tested in 12 people infected with COVID-19 and 6 healthy controls. Bo Ning and colleagues demonstrate that this technique, which pairs a fluorescence microscope readout device with a smartphone to determine viral load from a CRISPR/Cas12a assay, works as effectively as the well-established quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) method....