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European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a member of the Expedition 50 crew, captured this image from the International Space Station on “February 9th, 2017, saying, “winter landscapes are also magical from the International Space Station: this river north of Kyiv reminds me of a Hokusai painting.” Each day, the International Space Station completes 16 orbits of our home planet as the crew conducts important science and research. Their work will not only benefit life here on Earth, but will help us venture deeper into space than ever before....

The researchers focused on the Murge karst plateau in Apulia, where Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens coexisted for at least 3,000 years, from approximately 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. This study was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Data extracted from the stalagmites showed that climate changes that happened during that time span were not particularly significant. “Our study shows that this area of Apulia appears as a ‘climate niche’ during the transition from Neanderthals to Homo Sapiens” explains Andrea Columbu, researcher and first author of this study....

New data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite reveal the decline of air pollution, specifically nitrogen dioxide emissions, over Italy. This reduction is particularly visible in northern Italy which coincides with its nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The animation shows the fluctuation of nitrogen dioxide emissions across Europe from January 1, 2020, until March 11, 2020, using a 10-day moving average. These data are thanks to the Tropomi instrument on board the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite which maps a multitude of air pollutants around the globe....

Single atomic layers are combined to create novel materials with completely new properties. Layered oxide heterostructures are a new class of materials, which has attracted a great deal of attention among materials scientists in the last few years. A research team at the Vienna University of Technology, together with colleagues from the USA and Germany, has now shown that these heterostructures can be used to create a new kind of extremely efficient ultra-thin solar cells....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters. The narrow size range may be simply explained in the inner workings of trees. If this is correct, this could also explain why the tallest trees can only attain about 100 meters. The team only considered angiosperms like maples and oaks, not gymnosperms, like pines and redwoods. They reviewed data for 1925 species and found that among angiosperms shorter than 30 meters, leaf length varies enormously, from 3 cm all the way up to 60 cm....

Researchers of motor neuron diseases have long had a hunch that two fatal diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), might somehow be linked. A new study confirms that this link exists. “Our study is the first to link the two diseases on a molecular level in human cells,” said Robin Reed, Harvard Medical School professor of cell biology and lead investigator of the study. The results were published online in the September 27 issue of Cell Reports....

Men who never married were more than twice as likely to die within about five years after a heart failure diagnosis compared with women of any marital status or men who were previously married, according to a study that will be presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology. The study offers new evidence that a person’s gender and marital status can influence their heart disease risk and prognosis....

Last year, the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result — but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia — it’s likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, “a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds” that scientists are not picking up....

Aspirin is an established, safe, and low-cost medication in long-standing common use in prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, and in the past a pain relief and fever reducing medication. The use of aspirin was very popular during the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, several decades before in-vitro confirmation of its activity against RNA viruses. Studies showed that aspirin, in addition to its well-known anti-inflammatory effects, could modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses helping the human immune system battle some viral infections....

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience....

If you’ve ever tried to put several really strong, small cube magnets right next to each other on a magnetic board, you’ll know that you just can’t do it. What happens is that the magnets always arrange themselves in a column sticking out vertically from the magnetic board. Moreover, it’s almost impossible to join several rows of these magnets together to form a flat surface. That’s because magnets are dipolar....

Recently, researchers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), have developed an agglutinate, reprogrammable, disintegrable and biocompatible magnetic spray (M-spray) that can easily turn inanimate objects into millirobots. The research findings have been published in Science Robotics in an article entitled “An agglutinate magnetic spray transforms inanimate objects into millirobots for biomedical applications.”...

There have been a number of mass extinction in the geological past. Only one was caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth, which was 66 million years ago when the dinosaurs became extinct. Three of the others, including the end Permian Great Dying, 252 million years ago, were caused by huge continental-scale volcanic eruptions that destabilized the Earth’s atmospheres and oceans. Now, scientists have found evidence showing it was high levels of UV radiation which collapsed forest ecosystems and killed off many species of fish and tetrapods (our four-limbed ancestors) at the end of the Devonian geological period, 359 million years ago....

For the study, published in Chromosome Research, researchers used a powerful X-ray beam at the UK’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, to determine the number of electrons in a spread of 46 chromosomes which they used to calculate mass. They found that the chromosomes were about 20 times heavier than the DNA they contained – a much larger mass than previously expected, suggesting there might be missing components yet to be discovered....

A cross-disciplinary multi-institutional team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Professor Jian-Wei Pan, has spent more than ten years developing a sophisticated satellite, Micius, dedicated to quantum science experiments, which was launched on August 2016 and orbits at an altitude of ~500 km (310 mi). Five ground stations are built in China to cooperate with the Micius satellite, located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), Delingha (37°22’44....

Microorganisms in the body may contribute to the destabilization of coronary plaques and subsequent heart attack, according to late breaking research presented today at ESC Congress 2019 together with the World Congress of Cardiology. The study found that, unlike gut bacteria, the bacteria in coronary plaques were pro-inflammatory. In addition, patients with the acute coronary syndrome (heart attack) had different bacteria in their guts compared to patients with stable angina....

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, doctors and researchers rushed to find effective treatments. There was little time to spare. “Making new drugs takes forever,” says Caroline Uhler, a computational biologist in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Really, the only expedient option is to repurpose existing drugs....

MIT researchers have now devised a way to help blood cells regenerate faster. Their method involves stimulating a particular type of stem cell to secrete growth factors that help precursor cells differentiate into mature blood cells. Using a technique known as mechanopriming, the researchers grew mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on a surface whose mechanical properties are very similar to that of bone marrow. This induced the cells to produce special factors that help hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) differentiate into red and white blood cells, as well as platelets and other blood cells....

Terahertz radiation, also known as submillimeter radiation, has wavelengths that lie between those of microwaves and visible light. It can penetrate many nonmetallic materials and detect signatures of certain molecules. These handy qualities could lend themselves to a wide array of applications, including industrial quality control, airport security scanning, nondestructive characterization of materials, astrophysical observations, and wireless communications with higher bandwidth than current cellphone bands. However, designing devices to detect and make images from terahertz waves has been challenging....

It was clear early on in the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic that a critical need in the coming weeks and months would be for ventilators, the potentially life-saving devices that keep air flowing into a patient whose ability to breathe is failing. Seeing a potential shortfall of hundreds of thousands of such units, professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum Sr. and other engineers at MIT swung into action, rapidly pulling together a team of volunteers with expertise in mechanical design, electronics, and controls, and a team of doctors with clinical experience in treating respiratory conditions....