Despite a surge in COVID-19 cases, emergency department visits declined by nearly a third in five Boston-area hospitals during the early days of the pandemic. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New England, emergency department visits for medical emergencies — including psychiatric problems, trauma and heart attacks — declined by nearly a third, raising concerns among clinicians that critically ill patients were not seeking the care they needed for fear of coronavirus infection....

A team from the University of Cambridge used the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b and determined that it’s possible for the planet to host liquid water at habitable conditions beneath its hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The exoplanet K2-18b, 124 light-years away, is 2.6 times the radius and 8.6 times the mass of Earth, and orbits its star within the habitable zone, where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist....

Researchers from the University of Houston have reported a significant breakthrough with a new oxygen evolution reaction catalyst that, combined with a hydrogen evolution reaction catalyst, achieved current densities capable of supporting industrial demands while requiring relatively low voltage to start seawater electrolysis. Researchers say the device, composed of inexpensive non-noble metal nitrides, manages to avoid many of the obstacles that have limited earlier attempts to inexpensively produce hydrogen or safe drinking water from seawater....

Exhaustive seismic data from repeating earthquakes and new data-processing methods have yielded the best evidence yet that the Earth’s inner core is rotating – revealing a better understanding of the hotly debated processes that control the planet’s magnetic field. The new study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Geologists do not fully understand how the Earth’s magnetic field generator works, but suspect it is closely linked to dynamic processes near the inner core-outer core boundary area, the researchers said....

Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the review is the most comprehensive to date, encompassing 97 reviews, 1039 trials, and 128,119 participants. It shows that physical activity is extremely beneficial for improving symptoms of depression, anxiety, and distress. Specifically, the review showed that exercise interventions that were 12 weeks or shorter were most effective at reducing mental health symptoms, highlighting the speed at which physical activity can make a change....

Harmless meteoroids, and sometimes small asteroids, impact our planet’s atmosphere daily. When they do, they disintegrate and create meteors or “shooting stars” and sometimes bright fireballs or bolides. Such was the case on February 12 when a very small asteroid impacted Earth’s atmosphere over Northern France soon after discovery, resulting in a spectacular light show for local onlookers. Much more rarely, a larger asteroid that is still too small to reach the ground intact, yet large enough to release considerable energy when it disintegrates, can do significant damage to the ground....

It’s 9:00 a.m., and you’re at your desk. You’ve got a ton of work to do, but you just can’t seem to focus on it. Your eyesight’s fine — you can see the words on the page or screen in front of you, but for some reason they’re just… not going in. You’re not sick, hungover, or preoccupied, and you got plenty of sleep last night — so you know it’s not that....

Toronto, Ontario – Astronomers from the University of Toronto and the University of Arizona have theorized that as a field galaxy falls into a cluster of galaxies, it encounters the cloud of hot gas at the center of the cluster. As the galaxy moves through this intra-cluster medium at thousands of kilometers per second, the cloud acts like a wind, blowing away the gas within the galaxy without disturbing its stars....

Published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience the UK-US science team report that, in addition to the natural variations, which last about a decade, there has been a longer-term change in the winds that can be linked with human activities. This is an important result because continued ice loss could cause tens of centimeters of sea-level rise by the year 2100. The research team combined satellite observations and climate model simulations to understand how winds over the ocean near West Antarctica have changed since the 1920s in response to rising greenhouse gas concentrations....

Research team now examines impact of food competition and climate change. A research team from Osnabrück University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has, for the first time, observed lethal attacks by chimpanzees on gorillas in the wild. Whether this behavior is due to competition for food or to the decline of the rainforest’s productivity caused by climate change will now be investigated in more detail....

Oregon State University entomologist George Poinar Jr. and his son Greg, a fragrance collector, found evidence that floral scents originated in primitive flowers as far back as 100 million years ago as pollinator attractants – a role they still play even though today’s flowers also have colorful petals for luring pollinators. “I bet some of the dinosaurs could have detected the scents of these early flowers,” George Poinar said. “In fact, floral essences from these early flowers could even have attracted these giant reptiles....

“We have developed the first fully autonomous, DNA robotic system for a very precise drug design and targeted cancer therapy,” said Hao Yan, director of the ASU Biodesign Institute’s Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics and the Milton Glick Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences. “Moreover, this technology is a strategy that can be used for many types of cancer, since all solid tumor-feeding blood vessels are essentially the same,” said Yan....

Menopause affects humans, pilot whales and killer whales. These are the only organisms on Earth that stop being able to reproduce long before their lifespan is over. In evolution, passing on genes is one of the main reasons for living, which indicates that it’s difficult to find a reason for menopause. Thanks to new data from Finland, researchers have been able to test a hypothesis that competition between different generations of genetically unrelated breeding women could have helped the evolution of menopause....

The #HealthyRecovery initiative, signed by more than 4500 health professionals from 90 countries, urges G20 Presidents and Prime Ministers to legislate and fund projects to enable ecological restoration for better human health as part of their stimulus packages in the aftermath of COVID-19. One of the co-signatories, the Adelaide-based Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative (HUMI) research group, is conducting a rearguard of research to support these vital initiatives. “As the COVID-19 pandemic shows, global health systems are struggling to cope with the burden of disease, with scientists and health experts connecting public health interventions with ecological restoration, including for improved air quality and soil health,” says HUMI member, Flinders University scientist Dr....

The researchers tracked the formation of these supermountains throughout Earth’s history using traces of zircon with low lutetium content — a combination of mineral and rare earth elements only found in the roots of high mountains where they form under intense pressure. The study found the largest of these supermountains only formed twice in Earth’s history — the first between 2,000 and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago....

The Glass Brain is kind of like it sounds: a colorful, three-dimensional window into the myriad mysterious activities that light up the brain. Aided by virtual reality technology, users can journey through a person’s brain in real time. Of all the fascinating reasons researchers may want to take such a journey, neuroscientists are especially focused on using the Glass Brain technology to study diseases, including Alzheimer’s, autism and multiple sclerosis....

An international team led by researchers from the University of Warwick and Oxford University is now dealing with unexpected results of an experiment with strongly heated graphite (up to 17,000 degrees Kelvin). The findings may pose a new problem for physicists working in laser-driven nuclear fusion and may also lead astrophysicists to revise our understanding of the life cycle of giant planets and stars. The research paper entitled “Observation of inhibited electron-ion coupling in strongly heated graphite” was published in Scientific Reports on November 26th....

This effect, called gravitational lensing, is only visible in rare cases and only the best telescopes can observe the related phenomena. Hubble’s sensitivity and high resolution allow it to see faint and distant gravitational lenses that cannot be detected with ground-based telescopes whose images are blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere. The gravitational lensing results in multiple images of the original galaxy each with a characteristically distorted banana-like shape or even into rings....

The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted more than a year and continues to impact our lives tremendously. Although some countries have launched speedy vaccination campaigns, many still await large-scale immunization schemes and effective antiviral therapies — before that happens, the world urgently needs to regain a semblance of normalcy. One way to bring us closer to that point is massive parallel testing. Molecular tests that detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 have become the best way to isolate positive cases and contain the spread of the virus....

A new study of New York City firefighters has found that exposure to 9/11 World Trade Center (WTC) dust is associated with a significantly increased long-term risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The study, conducted by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Health System, and the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), found that those who arrived first at the WTC site—when the air-borne dust was thickest—have a 44% increased risk of CVD compared to those who arrived later in the day....