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Red supergiant stars, like Antares and its more well-known cousin Betelgeuse, are huge, relatively cold stars at the end of their lifetime. They are on their way to run out of fuel, collapse, and become supernovae. Through their vast stellar winds, they launch heavy elements into space, thereby playing an important role in providing the essential building blocks for life in the universe. But it is a mystery how these enormous winds are launched....

Vast amounts of valuable energy, agricultural nutrients, and water could potentially be recovered from the world’s fast-rising volume of municipal wastewater, according to a new study by UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH). Today, some 380 billion cubic meters (m3 = 1000 liters) of wastewater are produced annually worldwide — 5 times the amount of water passing over Niagara Falls annually — enough to fill Africa’s Lake Victoria in roughly seven years, Lake Ontario in four, and Lake Geneva in less than three months....

The analysis examined results from published studies and found that microorganisms, which cause disease in humans, can be found in vultures with some bacterial pathogens showing multi-antibiotic resistance. In some cases, these microorganisms cause health alterations of variable degree in different vulture species, but there was no clear evidence that vultures play a role spreading pathogens to humans and other species. On the contrary, they may actually help to prevent the spread of infectious diseases when they consume and remove decomposing carcasses from the environment....

“These exciting results suggest that there may be a novel mechanism for achieving weight loss with a profound loss of body fat and an increase in lean mass, along with other metabolic benefits,” said Steve Heymsfield, MD, FTOS, past president of The Obesity Society and corresponding author of the study. Heymsfield is professor and director of the Metabolism and Body Composition Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La....

Many individuals recall emotional occurrences, such as their wedding day, with vivid clarity, yet researchers remain uncertain about how the human brain assigns priority to such memories. A recent study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, has shed light on this question. Joshua Jacobs, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, and his team have uncovered a particular neural mechanism in the human brain that marks information with emotional connections to enhance its memorability....

Right now, about 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from electricity production, which must be reduced to combat climate change. The team found that as the amount of electricity produced by solar and wind increases, avoiding major blackouts becomes increasingly challenging. Policymakers and planners need to consider that wind and solar resources will have natural variability, the team said. “Our team took a simplified approach aimed at understanding fundamental geophysical constraints on wind and solar power,” explained lead author Shaner....

The researchers conducted experiments where participants rated the likability of other participants, based on photographs. The participants were divided into pairs, shown the photograph of their partner beforehand, and learned how their partner rated them. The pairs then played games with each other where rewards depended on the degree of cooperation. In one version, participants chose to contribute any integer value out of an initial endowment of 6 euros to a joint project....

The supermassive black hole is powering jets of particles that travel at almost the speed of light. These jets produce light spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to visible light to gamma rays. To gain crucial insight into the black hole’s properties and help interpret the EHT image, scientists coordinated observations with 19 of the world’s most powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, collecting light from across the spectrum....

ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory has completed the most detailed study ever of the fierce wind from a giant star, showing for the first time that it is not a uniform breeze but is fragmented into hundreds of thousands of pieces. Massive stars are relatively rare, but play a very important role in recycling materials in the Universe. They burn their nuclear fuel much more rapidly than stars like the Sun, living only for millions of years before exploding as a supernova and returning most of their matter to space....

In the global race to measure ever shorter time spans, physicists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now taken the lead: together with colleagues at the accelerator facility DESY in Hamburg and the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin, they have measured a process that lies within the realm of zeptoseconds for the first time: the propagation of light within a molecule. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second (10-21 seconds)....

Published today (October 14) in the journal Science Advances, the study is from North Carolina State University. The scientists bioprinted cells from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and from soybeans. They wanted to study whether plant cells would live after being bioprinted – and for how long. Moreover, they also wanted to examine how they acquire and change their identity and function. “A plant root has a lot of different cell types with specialized functions,” said Lisa Van den Broeck, an NC State postdoctoral researcher who is the first author of a paper describing the work....

The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name ‘counterportation’, provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe. By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, which harnesses the basic laws of physics, a small object can be reconstituted across space without any particles crossing....

Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in our universe, but they are notoriously difficult to detect and study: they don’t have an electrical charge and have nearly no mass. They are often referred to as “ghost particles” because they rarely interact with atoms. But because they are so abundant, they play a large role in helping scientists answer fundamental questions about the universe. In groundbreaking research described in the journal Nature—led by researchers from the University of Rochester—scientists from the international collaboration MINERvA have, for the first time, used a beam of neutrinos at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, to investigate the structure of protons....

The increase in calls to the Regional Center for Poison Control and Prevention at Boston Children’s Hospital occurred despite legislative mandates for childproof packaging and warning labels, and before the recreational use of marijuana was legalized for adults. “As states across the country enact more permissive marijuana policies, we need to do more to promote safe storage in households with children,” says Whitehill, assistant professor of health promotion and policy and lead author of the research published in JAMA Network Open....

The Iberian Peninsula plays a significant role in the reconstruction of human population history. Being located in the southwestern part of Europe and acting as a geographic cul-de-sac, it served as a refuge during the last Ice Age with its extreme temperature fluctuations. On the other hand, it may have been one of the starting points for the recolonization of Europe after the glacial maximum. Indeed, previous studies had reported on the genomic profiles of 13,000 to 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from the Iberian Peninsula and provided evidence for the survival and continuation of a much older Palaeolithic lineage that has been replaced in other parts of Europe and is no longer detectable....

Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on February 23, 1987. This time-lapse video sequence, created of images taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, reveals the dramatic changes in the ring of material around the supernova 1987A. The images, taken between 1994 to 2016, show the movement of debris from the supernova within the ring....

The Transformational Challenge Reactor Demonstration Program’s unprecedented approach to nuclear energy leverages advances from ORNL in manufacturing, materials, nuclear science, nuclear engineering, high-performance computing, data analytics and related fields. The lab aims to turn on the first-of-its-kind reactor by 2023. The program has maintained its aggressive timeline during the COVID-19 pandemic, using remote work to continue design and analysis efforts. The Transformational Challenge Reactor will demonstrate a revolutionary approach to deploying new nuclear power systems....

A fossil fragment of a human lower jaw recovered from a Serbian cave is the oldest human ancestor found in this part of Europe. The newly obtained radiometric date of the fossil was published today in PLOS ONE by William Jack Rink, McMaster University, Canada, and the international team under the direction of Dušan Mihailović, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Mirjana Roksandic, University of Winnipeg, Canada. “The fossil was found to be at least 397,000 years old and possibly older than 525,000 years old,” explained Rink....

Gut health refers to the health of the digestive tract, or gut, the organ that digests and absorbs nutrients from food to provide fuel for your body. But your digestive tract does so much more. It also plays a vital role in maintaining mental and physical health. That’s why you want your gut to thrive and flourish. Most doctors believe gut health is integral to overall health, specifically in terms of disease prevention....

Results from the primary analysis of the ongoing phase 3 clinical trial demonstrate efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 infections and severe illness. A peer-reviewed paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine provides data from the much-anticipated COVE study, which evaluated mRNA-1273, a vaccine candidate against COVID-19 manufactured by Moderna, Inc. Results from the primary analysis of the study, which will continue for two years, provide evidence that the vaccine can prevent symptomatic infection....