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The new biosensor device developed at Northwestern has been field tested in rural Kenya, providing evidence that water testing for fluoride can be easily used outside of a lab and accurately interpreted by non-experts. Worldwide, it is estimated that tens of millions of people live in areas where the water supply is contaminated with toxic levels of naturally occurring fluoride, a colorless, odorless, and tasteless substance. The scale of the issue has been difficult to measure because of the high cost or complexity of available testing options....

The gravitational waves from this surprising event were detected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on August 14, 2019, with the signal coming from a distance of around 800 million light-years. Researchers think the mystery object is most likely either the lightest black hole or possibly the heaviest neutron star ever discovered. Neutron stars are formed during the explosion of a giant star and are the smallest and densest type of star in the Universe....

Now, physicist Fatima Ebrahimi of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has used high-resolution computer simulations to investigate the practicality of this technique. The simulations show that CHI could produce the current continuously in larger, more powerful tokamaks than exist today to produce stable fusion plasmas. “Stability is the most important aspect of any current-drive system in tokamaks,” said Ebrahimi, author of a paper reporting the findings in Physics of Plasmas....

The brain scans of French and Mandarin native speakers have shown that people use the same areas in the brain for reading, no matter what language they are reading. The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Reading is connected to two neural systems, one that recognizes the shape of the word and another that assesses the physical movement used to make the marks on a page, states Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France....

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities....

The findings, which were recently published in the leading journal Cell Reports Medicine, have significant implications for our understanding of viral resistance and the potential for developing therapies to treat infected individuals. Between 1977-79 in Ireland, several thousand women were exposed to the hepatitis C virus through contaminated anti-D, which is a medication made using plasma from donated blood and given to Rhesus-negative women who are pregnant with a Rhesus-positive fetus....

Rats that consumed the caffeine extracted from mate tea gained 16% less weight and accumulated 22% less body fat than rats that consumed decaffeinated mate tea, scientists at the University of Illinois found in a new study. The effects were similar with both synthetic caffeine and that extracted from coffee. Mate tea is an herbal beverage rich in phytochemicals, flavonoids, and amino acids that’s consumed as a stimulant by people in southeastern Latin American countries....

Proteins can communicate through DNA, conducting a long-distance dialogue that serves as a kind of genetic “switch,” according to Weizmann Institute of Science researchers. They found that the binding of proteins to one site of a DNA molecule can physically affect another binding site at a distant location, and that this “peer effect” activates certain genes. This effect had previously been observed in artificial systems, but the Weizmann study is the first to show it takes place in the DNA of living organisms....

Low levels of omega-3 associated with higher risk of psychosis. New research has found that adolescents with higher levels of an omega-3 fatty acid in their blood were less likely to develop psychotic disorder in early adulthood, suggesting that it may have a potential preventative effect of reducing the risk of psychosis. The study, led by researchers from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, is published in Translational Psychiatry. Over 3,800 individuals in Bristol’s Children of the 90s health study were assessed for psychotic disorder, depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder at age 17 and at age 24....

In the new study, published recently in the journal Cancer Research, scientists used a preclinical model of bladder cancer to investigate the role of the enzyme called APOBEC3G in promoting the disease and found that it significantly increased the number of mutations in tumor cells, boosting the genetic diversity of bladder tumors and hastening mortality. “Our findings suggest that APOBEC3G is a big contributor to bladder cancer evolution and should be considered as a target for future treatment strategies,” said study senior author Dr....

The holidays will look remarkably different this year due to COVID-19. Months into the global pandemic, we continue to see how family gatherings are often responsible for spreading the virus, sometimes with fatal consequences. That doesn’t mean we have to skip the holidays completely—but it does mean making major adjustments to our traditions to protect vulnerable relatives. “You’ll need to get creative and have honest (and possibly uncomfortable) conversations with every member of your family about their individual safety needs and risk tolerances,” said Assoc....

This striking image was created with data from two different astronomical investigations, using one of Hubble’s retired instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). This instrument has since been replaced by the more powerful Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), but during its operational lifetime, it contributed to cutting-edge science and produced a series of stunning public outreach images. The first of the two WFPC2 investigations used DEM L 190 as a natural laboratory in which to study the interaction of supernova remnants and the interstellar medium, the tenuous mixture of gas and dust that lies between stars....

To much fanfare and a packed press room, CERN physicists announced in the early morning of July 4th the discovery of a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected of the Higgs boson. The historic milestone was reported by both CMS and ATLAS, the main LHC-Higgs-hunting experiments currently on the way. They discovered a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 GeV with a 5-sigma significance, implying that there is a 99....

The study, “Dietary trends in herbivores from the Shungura Formation, southwestern Ethiopia,” served as a comparative framework to an associated hominin diet study, also published this week, of which Negash was a co-author. The associated study, “Isotopic evidence for the timing of the dietary shift towards C4 foods in eastern African Paranthropus,” examined carbon isotope data from the fossilized tooth enamel of Paranthropus boisei, a nonancestral hominin relative. Led by Jonathan Wynn, now a program director in the National Science Foundation’s division of Earth sciences, the research team behind that paper found a profound shift toward the consumption of C4-derived foods approximately 2....

This dance was previously measured through a method called incoherent scatter radar in the northern hemisphere, where researchers beam radio wave into the ionosphere. The electrons in the atmosphere scatter the radio wave “incoherently.” The different ways they scatter tell researchers about the particles populating the layer. Now, researchers have used radar in Antarctica to make the first measurements from the Antarctic region. They published their preliminary results on September 17, 2019, in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology....

The challenge is that lengths of chemical bonds are between 0.1 – 0.3 nm, about half a million times smaller than the width of a human hair, making direct imaging of bonding between a pair of atoms difficult. Advanced microscopy methods, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) or scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), can resolve atomic positions and measure bond lengths directly, but filming chemical bonds to break or to form, with spatiotemporal continuity, in real time, still remains one of the greatest challenges of science....

Yale School of Medicine researchers have found that children born to mothers who smoked more than one pack per day during pregnancy struggled on tests designed to measure how accurately a child reads aloud and comprehends what they read. The findings are published in the current issue of The Journal of Pediatrics. Lead author Dr. Jeffrey Gruen, professor of pediatrics and genetics at Yale School of Medicine, and colleagues analyzed data from more than 5,000 children involved in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a large-scale study of 15,211 children from 1990-1992 at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom....

The European Union is now increasing the ambition of its climate goals, and the German Federal Constitutional Court has recently committed Germany to implementing more ambitious climate action. So, are we already on the path to a climate-neutral future? “Which climate futures are plausible is not only a physical question, it is at present especially a social one,” says CLICCS Speaker Prof. Detlef Stammer from Universität Hamburg. “In the Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook we investigate the transformative power of social processes and have developed a completely new method for doing so....

Like many other viruses, COVID-19 is transmitted primarily via particles carried in the air. An infected person breathes out particles containing the virus into the air, which can then be inhaled by another person, who then becomes infected. Masks are widely considered an important first-line defense against airborne transmission of the disease, as is supported by a preponderance of evidence. Fueled by the omicron variant, the latest wave of the pandemic prompted public health officials to recommend more protective face coverings because not all masks are created equal....

“These findings do not support the routine use of azithromycin for outpatient SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said lead author Catherine E. Oldenburg, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor with the UCSF Proctor Foundation. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. Azithromycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic, is widely prescribed as a treatment for COVID-19 in the United States and the rest of the world. “The hypothesis is that it has anti-inflammatory properties that may help prevent progression if treated early in the disease,” said Oldenburg....