Experiments show that visceral fat – fat around the liver, intestines, and other organs, considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure – contributes more to severe COVID-19 than subcutaneous fat (under the skin, as in “love handles”). The experiments were conducted in Brazil by researchers at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and the University of São Paulo (USP). In order to arrive at this conclusion, Marcelo Mori, a professor at the Institute of Biology at UNICAMP and one of the study’s leaders, infected in the lab two different types of fat cells: one obtained from human stem cells isolated from subcutaneous tissue and the other differentiated from stem cells taken from visceral fatty tissue....

Experts are calling for a public health campaign aimed at promoting a ‘brain-healthy lifestyle’ to reduce the risk of developing neurodegenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. The campaign should support existing health promotion work by emphasizing that “what is good for the heart is generally good for the brain,” they urge. In a report published by the Oxford Health Policy Forum today, they go on to talk about a ‘window of opportunity’ in midlife where individuals may be able to make the biggest difference to their risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease or delaying its progress....

The paper, “Energy Finance Must Account for Extreme Weather Risk,” was published February 17 in the journal Nature Energy. “If the market doesn’t do a better job of accounting for climate, we could have a recession — the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” said the article’s author, Paul Griffin, an accounting professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. The central message in his latest research is that there is too much “unpriced risk” in the energy market....

“Many people living with HIV have overcome significant obstacles to live longer, healthier lives, though many still experience liver disease,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “It is encouraging that tesamorelin, a drug already approved to treat other complications of HIV, may be effective in addressing the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.” Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, frequently occurs alongside HIV, affecting as many as 25% of people living with HIV in the developed world....

A fermentation technique once used to make cordite, the explosive propellant that replaced gunpowder in bullets and artillery shells, may find an important new use in the production of advanced biofuels. With the addition of a metal catalyst, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown that the production of acetone, butanol and ethanol from lignocellulosic biomass could be selectively upgraded to the high volume production of gasoline, diesel or jet fuel....

An international team of astronomers, using NASA’s Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source. This accomplishment opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes. It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope....

Now, using a new technique, a team in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, has shown that this “missing” baryonic matter is found filling the space between the galaxies as hot, low density gas. The same technique also gives a new tool that shows that the gravitational attraction experienced by galaxies is compatible with the theory of General Relativity. This research is published in three articles in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)....

On Saturday, an asteroid the size of one and a half football fields flew within 240,000 miles of Earth. If the space rock had hit land, it would have leveled an area the size of San Francisco Bay. If it had hit the Pacific Ocean, the impact would have sent a tsunami to every facing shore. But what is perhaps most alarming about this particular asteroid, called 2013 ET, is that, until March 3, no one had any idea it was headed toward Earth....

“Research has shown that ingesting concentrated carbohydrate gels during prolonged exercise promotes carbohydrate availability during exercise and improves exercise performance,” said University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Nicholas Burd, who led the research. “Our study aim was to expand and diversify race-fueling options for athletes and offset flavor fatigue.” “Potatoes are a promising alternative for athletes because they represent a cost-effective, nutrient-dense, and whole-food source of carbohydrates,” the researchers reported on October 17, 2019, in the Journal of Applied Physiology....

People usually cite the lack of job security and benefits as the main reasons why they wouldn’t want to be self-employed. However, a new study indicates that many people are becoming contractual workers and these independent workers are finding a happier job satisfaction than their permanently-employed colleagues. This study was completed by Harris Interactive for Randstad. Generally, contractors are more likely to state that they are paid what they’re worth and 28% of the contract workers said that they chose to be on contracts because the pay was better....

A new, Yale-led study suggests the 21st century will see an expansion of hurricanes and typhoons into mid-latitude regions, which includes major cities such as New York, Boston, Beijing, and Tokyo. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study’s authors said tropical cyclones — hurricanes and typhoons — could migrate northward and southward in their respective hemispheres, as the planet warms as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. 2020’s subtropical storm Alpha, the first tropical cyclone observed making landfall in Portugal, and this year’s Hurricane Henri, which made landfall in Connecticut, may be harbingers of such storms....

“Understanding how these particles form and contribute to cloud properties in the tropics will help us better represent clouds in climate models and improve those models,” said Christina Williamson, a CIRES scientist working in NOAA ESRL’s Chemical Sciences Division and the paper’s lead author. The research team mapped out how these particles form using measurements from one of the largest and longest airborne studies of the atmosphere, a field campaign that spanned the Arctic to the Antarctic over a three-year period....

Despite a daunting more than 130 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections to date worldwide, another global pathogen — the Aedes mosquito-borne dengue virus — saw a record number of over 400 million cases in 2019. But vaccine development has been challenging due to the need to protect equally against all four dengue strains. The discovery of new possible biomarkers to predict clinical and immune responses to dengue virus infection, published today (May 24, 2021) in Nature Communication, could be critical to informing future vaccines....

The recent detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) came from two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun, merging into one. Gravitational waves span a wide range of frequencies that require different technologies to detect. “Detecting this signal is possible if we are able to monitor a sufficiently large number of pulsars spread across the sky,” said Stephen Taylor, lead author of the paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters....

Lying in the North Atlantic Ocean, Greenland is the world’s largest island and is home to the second largest ice sheet after Antarctica. Greenland’s ice sheet covers more than 1.7 million sq km and covers most of the island. Ice sheets form in areas where snow that falls in winter does not melt entirely over the summer. Over thousands of years, layers of snow pile up into thick masses of ice, growing thicker and denser as the new snow and ice layers compress the older layers....

Rings of dust have previously been detected in great numbers in systems older than one million years, and prior to the study, scientists believed that stars are well into adulthood before planets to begin to form. Observations of IRS 63—a young protostar located 470 light years from Earth, deep within the dense LI709 interstellar cloud in the constellation Ophiuchus—revealed that this may not be the case after all. At less than half the age of other young stars with dust rings—and younger than 500,000 years old—IRS 63 has a long way to go in gathering mass, and yet, planets have already begun to form....

Sleep is traditionally considered to be a homeostatic process that resists deviation from equilibrium. In that regard, brief episodes of waking are viewed as perturbations that lead to sleep fragmentation and related sleep disorders. While addressing aspects of sleep regulation related to consolidated sleep and wake and the sleep-wake cycle, the homeostatic paradigm does not account for the dozens of abrupt sleep-stage transitions and micro-states within sleep stages throughout the night....

Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system. Today, there are indications that an active moon outside our solar system, an exo-Io, could be hidden at the exoplanet system WASP-49b. “It would be a dangerous volcanic world with a molten surface of lava, a lunar version of close-in Super-Earths like 55 Cancri-e” says Apurva Oza, a postdoctoral fellow at the Physics Insitute of the University of Bern and associate of the NCCR PlanetS, “a place where Jedis go to die, perilously familiar to Anakin Skywalker....

For decades, experts at the Institute have been shaping the future of the game. Chess has a long history at MIT that began decades before 62 million households tuned in to Netflix’s miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit.” Though the show ranked as Netflix’s No. 1 in 63 countries within its first month, and sparked a global surge in the sale of chess sets and books, several members of MIT’s chess club say, with a laugh, that they haven’t seen it yet....