On December 2, 2022, this natural-color satellite image of an ongoing eruption at Mauna Loa was acquired by the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9. At the time, lava from the Hawaiian volcano was moving north toward the Daniel K. Inouye Highway (Saddle Road). The image is overlaid with infrared data from OLI-2 showing the location of warm areas associated with lava. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U....

The next misery facing Australia is the chance that fires will soon merge creating mega-fires to fight in the already devastated areas. Rains should do nothing more than give residents a moment to regroup before the fires regain their former wrath. Even with the respite from the rain, the haze and smoke in the area remain in the hazardous range. NOAA-NASA captured this stunning satellite image of the areas affected by the fire and smoke on January 4, 2020....

Physician-scientists at The Texas Heart Institute announced today the results of the largest cell therapy trial to date in patients with chronic heart failure due to low ejection fraction. The therapy benefited patients by improving the heart’s pumping ability, as measured by ejection fraction, and reducing the risk of heart attack or stroke, especially in patients who have high levels of inflammation. Also, a strong signal was found in the reduction of cardiovascular death in patients treated with cells....

The Archean is a geological eon that lasted from 4 billion years to 2.5 billion years ago. It saw the emergence of the first life on Earth, but these microbes were anaerobic, meaning they did not breathe oxygen. In fact, during this time, Earth’s atmosphere did not contain any molecular oxygen. Instead, the atmosphere was rich with the likes of carbon and, particularly, sulfur. The sulfur in the Archean Earth’s atmosphere was emitted by volcanic activity, and through a process called mass-independent fractionation, sulfur’s various isotopes (sulfur atoms containing the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons) became enriched in a manner that does not correlate with their mass....

The nearest exoplanets to us provide the best opportunities for detailed study, including searching for evidence of life outside the Solar System. In research led by the University of Göttingen, the RedDots team of astronomers has detected a system of super-Earth planets orbiting the nearby star Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf star in the sky. Super-Earths are planets that have a mass higher than the Earth’s but substantially below those of our local ice giants, Uranus and Neptune....

The COVID-19 pandemic made it clear technological innovations were urgently needed to detect, treat, and prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A year and a half into this epidemic, waves of successive outbreaks and the dire need for new medical solutions — especially testing — continue to exist. In the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B, researchers from the University of Florida and Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University report a rapid and sensitive testing method for COVID-19 biomarkers....

I am an astrophysicist and am interested in a wide range of theoretical problems in astrophysics, from the formation of the very first galaxies to the gravitational interactions of black holes, stars, and even planets. Black holes are intriguing systems, and supermassive black holes and the dense stellar environments that surround them represent one of the most extreme places in our universe. The supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy, called Sgr A*, has a mass of about 4 million times that of our Sun....

A group of scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) under the direction of Professor Li Chunlai recently published their results in Nature Communications. In order to determine the mineral composition of lunar soil samples returned by CE-5, the study used both spectroscopic and x-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis techniques. “Near-side lunar soil samples we analyzed turned out to be primarily pyroxene,” said Prof. LI....

Now writing in Physical Review Letters, Cristian Rodriguez-Tinoco and a team of Université libre de Bruxelles’ (ULB) Faculty of Sciences led by Simone Napolitano shows that large molecules actually move faster in the proximity of rougher surfaces at the nanometric scale. Their experiments clearly demonstrate that the common belief that surface irregularities allow molecules to better stick on a surface is actually wrong. When the size of the surface roughness, that is the average distance between the tiny hills and valleys present on the surface of a material, is reduced to few nanometers (1 nm = one billionth of a meter), molecules of P4ClS, a type of polymer, start to move faster....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. The new inhibitor disarms IgE antibodies, which are pivotal players in acute allergies, by detaching the antibody from a molecule called FcR. Many allergens can set off IgE antibodies, resulting in allergic reactions within seconds. This new inhibitor destroys the complex that tethers IgE to the mast cells responsible for the reaction. The first time potential allergens enter the body, allergen-specific IgE antibodies are produced, which stay around long after the initial allergen is cleared from the body....

The FDA’s September 22, 2021, decision to not extend boosters to the general population – at least not yet – was a direct rebuke to the Biden administration’s announcement in August that booster shots would be rolled out to all eligible Americans beginning in late September. Biden’s pledge had been widely criticized for getting out in front of the science and the regulatory process. The FDA instead limited its authorization of the third Pfizer dose to people 65 and older, people ages 18-64 at high risk of severe COVID-19 due to pre-existing conditions, and individuals with frequent risk of exposure to the coronavirus through their work, such as health care workers and teachers....

The University of Sydney is testing a novel DNA-based COVID-19 vaccine with the goal of being administered using a needle-free system. The University of Sydney is announcing the commencement of an extended Phase 1 Human Trial in Australia, evaluating a COVID-19 gene-based vaccine developed by BioNet and Technovalia and delivered via a needle-free system. Under a $3million grant from the Australian Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Coronavirus Research Response, Associate Professor Nicholas Wood from the University of Sydney, Australia and will lead a team to evaluate the vaccine candidate for the first time in humans....

Isolation, extreme weather, and the possible arrival of humans may have killed off the holocene herbivores just 4,000 years ago. The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean; they died out 4,000 years ago within a very short time. An international research team from the Universities of Helsinki and Tübingen and the Russian Academy of Sciences has now reconstructed the scenario that could have led to the mammoths’ extinction....

Ruhr University Bochum cosmologists headed by Professor Hendrik Hildebrandt have gained new insights into the density and structure of matter in the Universe. Several years ago, Hildebrandt had already been involved in a research consortium that had pointed out discrepancies in the data between different groups. The values determined for matter density and structure differed depending on the measurement method. A new analysis, which included additional infrared data, made the differences stand out even more....

BxC is a family of ceramic materials known as “boron carbide.” The “official” or canonical member (in scientific language, stoichiometric) is B4C. This is a very hard black solid, which remains stable at very high temperatures. The family is big: from B4C to B14C. Depending on the proportion of B (boron) and C (carbon), its physical properties change. B6C is a member of the family (phase B6C) with 6 boron atoms to each one of carbon and theoretically it had been deemed that it would be ultra-resistant....

Crocodylians are the 27 species of crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials that live all over Earth today, except for in Europe and Antarctica. There are some smaller species, but these top predators are usually big, at least 2 meters long. They also share a general shape and look – for instance, how easily can you tell an alligator and a crocodile apart? The fossil record of crocodylians is much richer, though, with many different forms and body sizes and extraordinary ecological diversity....

This makes them an interesting subject for researchers like Melina Hale, Ph.D., William Rainey Harper Professor of Organismal Biology and Vice Provost at the University of Chicago, who want to understand how alternative nervous system structures can perform the same functions as those in humans, such as sensing limb movement and controlling movement. In a recent study published in Current Biology, Hale and her colleagues discovered a new and surprising feature of the octopus nervous system: a structure that allows the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the octopus sense its arm movement, to connect arms on opposite sides of the animal....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This relic, with its coiled stalk and large, horseshoe-shaped nucleus is reminiscent of the modern-day Vorticella, a genus of protozoa. Vorticella have stalked, inverted bell-shaped ciliates that are placed among the peritrichs. Each cell has a separate stack anchored onto the substrate that contains a myoneme, a contractile fibril. Once stimulated, it shortens, causing the stalk to coil like a spring....

Scientists have developed protein fragments – called peptides – that fit snugly into a groove on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that it would normally use to access a host cell. These peptides effectively trick the virus into “shaking hands” with a replica rather than with the actual protein on a cell’s surface that lets the virus in. Previous research has determined that the novel coronavirus binds to a receptor protein on a target cell’s surface called ACE2....

Researchers have pinpointed a catalytic trigger for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease – when the fundamental structure of a protein molecule changes to cause a chain reaction that leads to the death of neurons in the brain. For the first time, scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry have been able to map in detail the pathway that generates “aberrant” forms of proteins that are at the root of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s....