A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
Using information from a suite of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a mysterious, giant object that existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. Objects such as this one are dubbed extended Lyman-Alpha blobs; they are huge bodies of gas that may be precursors to galaxies. This blob was named Himiko for a legendary, mysterious Japanese queen. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. That length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way's disk.
An international team of astronomers has used the world's biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see. The study solidifies the link between an active galaxy's gamma-ray emissions and its powerful radio-emitting jets. "Now we know for sure that the fastest, most compact, and brightest jets we see with radio telescopes are the ones that are able to kick light up to the highest energies," said Yuri Kovalev, a team member at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
Take that, Taliban. Western decadence, in the form of caring about beauty and nature, has infested your fundamentalist madness and it's here to stay.We are talking about Band-i-Amir national park in Afghanistan, which opens today.The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) provided key funding that led to the park's creation, including support of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to conduct preliminary wildlife surveys, identify and delineate the park's boundaries, and work with local communities and the provincial government. WCS also developed the park's management plan, helped the government hire and train local rangers, and provided assistance to the Afghan Government to design the laws enabling the park to be created.
Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have discovered a potential chink in the armor of fibers that make the cell walls of certain inedible plant materials so tough. The insight ultimately could lead to a cost-effective and energy-efficient strategy for turning biomass into alternative fuels.In separate papers published today in Biophysical Journal and recently in an issue of Biomacromolecules, Los Alamos researchers identify potential weaknesses among sheets of cellulose molecules comprising lignocellulosic biomass, the inedible fibrous material derived from plant cell walls. The material is a potentially abundant source of sugar that can be used to brew batches of methanol or butanol, which show potential as biofuels.
Researchers know that animals which seem identical can actually belong to completely different species. But if it's worms used in laboratory testing, that could be important news in research.Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, say they have used DNA analyses to discover that one of our most common segmented worms, Lumbriculus variegatus, is actually two types of worm. Along with some obvious issues in research it also affirms that the variety of species on the earth could be considerably larger than we thought. "We could be talking about a large number of species that have existed undiscovered because they resemble other known species," says Professor Christer Erséus.
WHAT: New research from Baylor College of Medicine indicates a positive effect of chewing gum on academic performance in teenagers. The study examined whether chewing Wrigley sugar-free gum can lead to better academic performance in a "real life" classroom setting. Major findings include:
The researchers found that students who chewed gum showed an increase in standardized math test scores and their final grades were better compared to those who didn't chew gum.
A new study reveals that asteroid surfaces age and redden much faster than previously thought — in less than a million years, the blink of an eye for an asteroid. The solar wind is the likely culprit in very rapid space weathering, they say, and this knowledge will help astronomers relate the appearance of an asteroid to its actual history and identify any after effects of a catastrophic impact with another asteroid.
Waves from DaphnisUndulations mark both sides of the path of Saturn's moon Daphnis through the A ring. Daphnis may be small at only 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, but the moon's gravity is great enough, and the Keeler gap in which it resides is narrow enough, so that the perturbed particles create the wavelike patterns seen here.
Utah and Texas researchers have learned how quiet sounds are magnified by bundles of tiny, hair-like tubes atop “hair cells” in the ear: when the tubes dance back and forth, they act as “flexoelectric motors” that amplify sound mechanically.“We are reporting discovery of a new nanoscale motor in the ear,” says Richard Rabbitt, the study’s principal author and a professor and chair of bioengineering at the University of Utah College of Engineering. “The ear has a mechanical amplifier in it that uses electrical power to do mechanical amplification.”
A team of astronomers from University College London (UCL) have discovered that an exotic world passes directly in front of the Sun-like star it orbits, revealing for the first time that it is about the same size as Jupiter. The team were alerted by the exoplanet science website http://www.oklo.org, run by Greg Laughlin of the University of California Santa Cruz. Using infrared space observations, Greg predicted that a planet (HD 80606b) would pass in front of its parent star (HD 80606) in a so-called transit event.Rather than travelling to one of the major observatories in Hawaii or Chile, the students used a telescope at UCL's University of London Observatory (ULO) in the capital's northern suburb of Mill Hill.
Exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, Gliese 581 e, in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist.These amazing discoveries are the outcome of more than four years of observations using the most successful low-mass-exoplanet hunter in the world, the HARPS spectrograph attached to the 3.6-meter ESO telescope at La Silla, Chile.
Want to hunt down enemy bacteria? Look at the sugars on the germs' surface where they start building a 'structure' that helps the microbes resist efforts to kill them.Scientists have determined that the bacterial cell-surface sugar, a polysaccharide called Psl, is anchored on the surface of the bacterium as a helix, providing a structure that encourages cell-to-cell interaction. When multiple bacterial cells join together with the help of such a structure, they form what is called a biofilm, a persistent community of bugs that is able to resist the effects of a human immune response, as well as antibiotic drugs.
