NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings. These observations make Saturn’s rings the only location besides Earth, the moon, and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed....

Three cats infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 spread the virus to three other cats in a lab study published in The New England Journal of Medicine by a research team working in Tokyo, Japan, and Wisconsin, USA. The research team emphasizes that there is no evidence of the COVID-19 virus transmitting from cats to humans. Researchers state that it is much more likely that humans are giving the virus to their pets, rather than pets causing humans to become sick....

Chemical analysis of a black spot in a diary sheds new light on the destiny and tragic death of legendary Inuit polar expedition member Jørgen Brønlund in Northeast Greenland in 1907. Jørgen Brønlund was one of the participants in the legendary Mylius Erichsen’s Denmark Expedition to Greenland 1906-08. In 1907, he died in a small cave of hunger and frostbite, but before that, he made one last note in his diary: “Perished 79 Fjord after trying to return home over the ice sheet, in November Month I come here in waning moonlight and could not continue from Frost in the Feet and the Dark....

Graphene Nanoribbons might soon be much easier to produce. An international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. has succeeded in producing this versatile material for the first time directly on the surface of semiconductors. Until now, this was only possible on metal surfaces. The new approach also enables scientists to customize the properties of the nanoribbons....

Survey conducted in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland suggests that COVID-19 lockdown measures exacerbated chronic pain, particularly among women. COVID-19 lockdown measures appear to have had drastically different effects on men and women living with chronic pain, with women experiencing greater pain severity, according to new research being presented at Euroanaesthesia, the annual meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC), held online this year. The difference between women and men could be linked to the extra care responsibilities and emotional response generated by the pandemic, researchers say....

A new study published today (February 5, 2021) in the journal Science of the Total Environment provides the first evidence of a mechanism by which climate change could have played a direct role in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. The study has revealed large-scale changes in the type of vegetation in the southern Chinese Yunnan province, and adjacent regions in Myanmar and Laos, over the last century....

The research, led by Professor Pan Ding, analyzed the dissolution of CO2 in water and its potential effects on reducing the return of carbon from underground to the atmosphere. The vast majority of the Earth’s carbon is buried in its interior. That deep carbon influences the form and concentration of carbon near the surface, which can in turn impact global climate over geologic time. It is therefore important to assess how much carbon lies in deep reservoirs hundreds of kilometers underground....

When two Sun-like stars collide, the result can be a spectacular explosion and the formation of an entirely new star. One such event was seen from Earth in 1670. It appeared to observers as a bright, red “new star.” Though initially visible to the naked eye, this burst of cosmic light quickly faded and now requires powerful telescopes to see the remains of this merger: a dim central star surrounded by a halo of glowing material flowing away from it....

Up until now, robots equipped with movable arms have had limited connections with microfluidic systems that transport tiny quantities of liquid through delicate capillaries. These systems, known as microfluidics or lab-on-a-chip, were created by researchers to assist in laboratory analysis and typically rely on external pumps to circulate the liquid through the chips. However, automating such systems has been challenging, and the chips had to be custom-designed and manufactured for each individual application....

Online shopping was associated with lower spending on certain unhealthy, impulse-sensitive foods. When shopping online, participants surveyed spent more money, purchased more items, and spent less on candy and desserts than when they shopped in-store, according to a new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier. In recent years, online grocery shopping has grown exponentially. To describe the grocery shopping patterns of people who shopped both online and in-store and evaluate whether shoppers purchased fewer unhealthy, impulse-sensitive items online, 137 primary household shoppers in Maine who shopped at least once in-store and online (with curbside pickup) were studied for 5,573 total transactions from 2015-2017....

After measuring about 7000 samples, the team was able to identify a total of 37 substances that bind to the main protease (Mpro) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as the scientists report online today in the journal Science. Seven of these substances inhibit the activity of the protein and thus slow down the multiplication of the virus. Two of them do this so promisingly that they are currently under further investigation in preclinical studies....

Researchers suggest ways to address challenges associated with measuring direct and indirect deaths attributable to COVID-19 pandemic. Estimating deaths from COVID-19 based on death certificate data significantly underestimates the true mortality rate of the pandemic. Authors from Stanford University School of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School describe how methods used to assess death tolls from disasters and other pandemics can be used to provide a more accurate picture of COVID-19 death rates now and moving forward....

A multicenter collaboration tracking the spread and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Saudi Arabia has identified mutations in the virus’s N protein associated with increased viral loads in COVID-19 patients. The study provides insight into the function of this nucleocapsid protein, which could help develop drugs that reduce the impact of coronavirus infection. “The nucleocapsid (N) protein is the most abundant protein in all coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2,” explains KAUST research scientist Muhammad Shuaib....

Looking at Earth from the International Space Station, astronauts see big, white clouds spreading across the planet. They cannot distinguish a gray rain cloud from a puffy white cloud. While satellites can see through many clouds and estimate the liquid precipitation they hold, they can’t see the smaller ice particles that create enormous rain clouds. An experimental small satellite has filled this void and captured the first global picture of the small frozen particles inside clouds, normally called ice clouds....

Siberian jays are group-living birds within the corvid family that employ a wide repertoire of calls to warn each other of predators. Sporadically, however, birds use one of these calls to trick their neighboring conspecifics and gain access to their food. Researchers from the universities of Konstanz (Germany), Wageningen (Netherlands), and Zurich (Switzerland) have now examined how Siberian jays avoid being deceived by their neighbors. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that these birds have great trust in the warning calls from members of their own group, but mainly ignore such calls from conspecifics of neighboring territories....

The availability of fresh water is dwindling in many parts of the world, a problem that is expected to grow with populations. One promising source of potable water is the world’s virtually limitless supply of seawater, but so far desalination technology has been too expensive for widespread use. Now, MIT researchers have come up with a new approach using a different kind of filtration material: sheets of graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the element carbon, which they say can be far more efficient and possibly less expensive than existing desalination systems....

New research[1] launched at the 29th EADV Congress, EADV Virtual, has found that despite the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) lockdown restrictions, diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including gonorrhea, secondary syphilis, and mycoplasma genitalium (MG), have increased. The research, conducted in two main STI centers in Milan, Italy, compared the number of confirmed diagnoses of the most common STIs in patients with symptoms for the period March 15, 2020, to April 14, 2020, following social isolation measures (lockdown) adopted to control the epidemic, with the same period in 2019....

The research, which appears this week in Science, examined the electronic and magnetic behavior of a “strange metal” compound of ytterbium, rhodium, and silicon as it both neared and passed through a critical transition at the boundary between two well-studied quantum phases. The study at Rice University and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement’s role in bringing about quantum criticality, said study co-author Qimiao Si of Rice....

Published in the journal Cell Reports, the study suggests that this innate immune specificity is driven by the nervous system and identifies a neuronal protein as a critical link in the process. Based on an animal model, these findings hold early promise for the treatment of conditions such as sepsis, arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease, in which the innate immune system attacks the body and causes uncontrolled inflammation. They could also provide the basis for finetuning an experimental treatment that harnesses the nervous system to fight infection....

Researchers Hone In on What Makes Screams Distinctive Screams are prompted by a variety of emotions — from joyful surprise to abject terror. No matter what sparks them, however, human screams share distinctive acoustic parameters that listeners are attuned to, suggests a new study published by the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. “Screams require a lot of vocal force and cause the vocal folds to vibrate in a chaotic, inconsistent way,” says senior author Harold Gouzoules, a professor of psychology at Emory University....