Algal blooms are currently choking up several rivers in South Korea. Environmentalists blame The Four Major Rivers Restoration Project, which was completed last October at a cost of 22 trillion won (US$19+ billion), for this. The algal bloom covers the Han, Geum, Nakdong, and Yeongsan rivers. The project built 16 dams and dredged up 520 million cubic meters of mud from the river beds to make flood prevention simpler. The dams have turned part of the rivers into standing water, which is an ideal breeding ground for the cyanobacteria making up algal blooms....

Researchers have discovered a system of ridges spread across the nearside of the Moon topped with freshly exposed boulders. The ridges could be evidence of active lunar tectonic processes, the researchers say, possibly the echo of a long-ago impact that nearly tore the Moon apart. “There’s this assumption that the Moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case,” said Peter Schultz, a professor in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and co-author of the research, which is published in the journal Geology....

That wear and tear, called allostatic load, refers to the cumulative effects of stress over time. “As a response to external stressors, your body releases a stress hormone called cortisol, and then once the stress is over, these levels should go back down,” says Dr. Justin Xavier Moore, an epidemiologist at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center. “However, if you have chronic, ongoing psychosocial stressors, that never allow you to ‘come down,’ then that can cause wear and tear on your body at a biological level....

Colon cancer survivors whose diet is heavy in complex sugars and carbohydrate-rich foods are far more likely to have a recurrence of the disease than are patients who eat a better balance of foods, indicates a new study by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The connection is especially strong in patients who are overweight or obese, the authors write. More than 1,000 patients with advanced (stage III) colon cancer participated in the study, one of the first to examine how diet can affect the chances that the disease will recur....

Scientists have used the Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope to create the most-extensive map of neutral hydrogen gas in the early universe. This cloud appears widely spread out across 160 million light-years in and around a structure called the proto-supercluster. It is the largest structure in the distant universe, and existed some 11.5 billion years ago. Such a huge gas cloud is extremely valuable for studying large-scale structure formation and the evolution of galaxies from gas in the early universe, and merits further investigation....

One thing that makes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, elusive to the immune system is that it is covered in sugars called glycans. Once SARS-CoV-2 infects someone’s body, it becomes covered in that person’s unique glycans, making it difficult for the immune system to recognize the virus as something it needs to fight. Those glycans also play an important role in activating the virus. Terra Sztain-Pedone, a graduate student, and colleagues in the labs of Rommie Amaro at the University of California, San Diego and Lillian Chong at the University of Pittsburgh, studied exactly how the glycans activate SARS-CoV-2....

Jack Mayo is a student of the Top Master Programme in Nanoscience at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen. Last year, he received an email, circulated by one of the program’s supervisors, with a list of summer internships that were offered by the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in San Sebastián, Spain. One project caught his eye. ‘This was a theoretical project related to condensed matter, but it also had some clear technological relevance....

Electromagnetic radiation from stars at the end of their ‘giant branch’ phase — lasting just a few million years before they collapse into white dwarfs — would be strong enough to spin even distant asteroids at high speed until they tear themselves apart again and again. As a result, even our own asteroid belt will be easily pulverized by our Sun billions of years from now. The new study from the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, analyses the number of successive break-up events and how quickly this cascade occurs....

Stampede2, Bridges simulations show weak spots in virus nucleocapsid. In the midst of a global pandemic with COVID-19, it’s hard to appreciate how lucky those outside of Africa have been to avoid the deadly Ebola virus disease. It incapacitates its victims soon after infection with massive vomiting or diarrhea, leading to death from fluid loss in about 50 percent of the afflicted. The Ebola virus transmits only through bodily fluids, marking a key difference from the COVID-19 virus and one that has helped contain Ebola’s spread....

The findings were made through the “Randomized Embedded Multifactorial Adaptive Platform-Community Acquired Pneumonia” (REMAP-CAP) trial and are reported today in JAMA as part of a four-article package. The World Health Organization is updating its COVID-19 treatment guidance as a result. REMAP-CAP is one of seven randomized control trials to test corticosteroids — a class of drug that lowers inflammation and modulates immune system activity — for treating COVID-19 in critically ill patients....

An exploding star observed in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler held a greater fraction of heavy elements than the sun, according to an analysis of X-ray observations from the Japan-led Suzaku satellite. The findings will help astronomers better understand the diversity of type Ia supernovae, an important class of stellar explosion used in probing the distant universe. “The composition of the star, its environment, and the mechanism of the explosion may vary considerably among type Ia supernovae,” said Sangwook Park, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Most flu vaccines consist of hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the two proteins covering the surface of the virus. In order to produce these molecules, the three predominant influenza strains are cultured in fertilized chicken eggs or in cell cultures. The virus is then harvested and broken up so that these two proteins can be purified. It’s hard to predict how well a given strain will grow in both mediums and producing enough virus for millions of vaccine doses can take many months....

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Fall 2021 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person August 22-26, and on-demand content will be available August 30-September 30. The meeting features more than 7,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics. “In the body, antimicrobial peptides such as LL-37 help keep viruses, bacteria, fungi, cancer cells and even parasites under control,” says Annelise Barron, Ph....

The work is the result of the AIMES (Analysis, Integration, and Modelling of the Earth System) project, linked to the Future Earth international initiative, which brings together scientists and researchers who study sustainability. Degradation is different from deforestation, where the forest is removed altogether and a new land use, such as agriculture, is established in its place. Although highly degraded forests can lose almost all of the trees, the land use itself does not change....

“Our model offers a simple answer to an important, yet still unsolved, scientific question,” says Fabrizio Nicastro, INAF researcher and PI of the work. “Why do many viral respiratory epidemics, such as influenza, develop cyclically during autumn and winter only in the temperate regions of the globe’s northern and southern hemispheres, while they seem to be present at all times – albeit with lower prevalence compared to the seasonal cycles in the temperate regions – in the equatorial belt?...

Navigating the lunar landscape… And a view to look forward to… A few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA! NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 Launches to the Space Station A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched to the International Space Station on March 2nd on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission. The crew, including NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, will conduct research and technology demonstrations on the space station to benefit life on Earth and future Artemis human exploration missions to the Moon and eventually to Mars....

In a paper published today (October 30, 2019) in Nature, a group of scientists used air trapped in the bubbles in ice as old as 2 million years to measure levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. The group was led by John Higgins and Yuzhen Yan of Princeton University and Andrei Kurbatov of the University of Maine, and included Ed Brook at Oregon State University and Jeff Severinghaus at the University of California, San Diego....

Scientists from the University of Tsukuba in Japan have shown how adding a tiny resonator structure to an ultrafast electron pulse detector reduced the intensity of terahertz radiation required to characterize the pulse duration. To study proteins—for example, when determining the mechanisms of their biological actions—researchers need to understand the motion of individual atoms within a sample. This is difficult not just because atoms are so tiny, but also because such rearrangements usually occur in picoseconds—that is, trillionths of a second....

PhD Candidate Scott Spillias, from UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Science, said seaweed offered a sustainable alternative to land-based agricultural expansion to meet the world’s growing need for food and materials. “Seaweed has great commercial and environmental potential as a nutritious food and a building block for commercial products including animal feed, plastics, fibers, diesel, and ethanol,” Mr. Spillias said. “Our study found that expanding seaweed farming could help reduce demand for terrestrial crops and reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by up to 2....

A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and University of Utrecht examined trends in daily crime counts before and after COVID-19 restrictions were implemented in major metropolitan areas such as Barcelona, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Brisbane and London. While both stringency of lockdowns and the resulting crime reductions varied considerably from city to city, the researchers found that most types of crime — with the key exception of homicide — fell significantly in the study sites....