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The ethereal green glow of Aurora Australis high over Concordia station on July 18, 2012. It was taken by ESA-sponsored scientist Alexander Kumar and his colleague Erick Bondoux from about 1 km from the station, located in the Antarctic at –75°S latitude. The French–Italian Concordia station’s program of research includes glaciology, human biology and the atmosphere. ESA uses the base to prepare for future long-duration missions beyond Earth. During the winter, Concordia is under almost total darkness, with an average temperature of –51°C (–60°F) and a record low of –85°C –121°F....

Strong antibody response to mRNA vaccines declined over an eight-month follow-up period; lower initial response to single-shot Ad26 vaccine remained stable over time, research shows. Based on the strength of clinical trial data showing the vaccines conferred robust protection against COVID-19, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to the mRNA-based vaccines known as BNT162b2 (BioNTech, Pfizer) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) in December 2020, and to the Ad26....

Tracking new hotspots of SARS-CoV-2 will become more important as the virus evolves and becomes endemic.New variants may be more contagious than previous ones—and escape vaccines.Serum biomarkers, identified in rhesus macaques, can differentiate between primary infection and reinfection.A tool utilizing these biomarkers may help identify surges in reinfection, scientists noted. Many experts now predict that COVID-19, which so far has killed more than 5.5 million people worldwide, will remain endemic as new, infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge....

“The fibers we discovered can be produced easily using high-tech processes that are already established in the industry – and on the basis of polymers that are readily available worldwide. One individual fiber is as thin as a human hair, weighs less than a fruit fly, and yet is very strong: It can lift a weight of 30 grams without tearing. This corresponds to about 150,000 times the weight of a fruit fly....

At the center of every galaxy in our Universe lives a supermassive black hole—a black hole that’s millions to billions times the mass of our Sun. Big galaxies are assembled from smaller galaxies merging together, so collisions of supermassive black holes are expected to be common in the cosmos. But merging supermassive black holes remain elusive: no conclusive evidence of their existence has been found so far. One way to look for these mergers is through their emission of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time....

Rutgers-led team develops innovative process to rapidly dissolve plant fibers to make it easier to turn plant waste into biofuels. Researchers have developed a new process that could make it much cheaper to produce biofuels such as ethanol from plant waste and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Their approach, featuring an ammonia-salt-based solvent that rapidly turns plant fibers into sugars needed to make ethanol, works well at close to room temperature, unlike conventional processes, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Green Chemistry....

While many nanomaterials exhibit promising electronic properties, scientists and engineers are still working to best integrate these materials together to eventually create semiconductors and circuits with them. Northwestern Engineering researchers have created two-dimensional (2D) heterostructures from two of these materials, graphene and borophene, taking an important step toward creating intergrated circuits from these nanomaterials. “If you were to crack open an integrated circuit inside a smartphone, you’d see many different materials integrated together,” said Mark Hersam, Walter P....

Recently, an international team assembled observations from a trio of observatories — NASA’s Juno spacecraft, W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, and the Hisaki satellite from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — to discover the likely source of Jupiter’s thermal boost. “We found that Jupiter’s intense aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, is responsible for heating the entire planet’s upper atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures,” said James O’Donoghue of the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Sagamihara, Japan....

Because it has no source of energy, a dead star — known as a white dwarf — will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets, says Prof. Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. Now Prof. Maoz and Prof. Avi Loeb, Director of Harvard University’s Institute for Theory and Computation and a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at TAU, have shown that, using advanced technology to become available within the next decade, it should be possible to detect biomarkers surrounding these planets — including oxygen and methane — that indicate the presence of life....

Normal supernovae brighten dramatically (and then dim) over periods of weeks. A few recent supernova searches using faster cadences, however, have spotted a handful of luminous transients that peak more quickly, in only ten days, before fading in a month. The K2 mission, with its frequent monitoring of stars, has now found an extreme case: a supernova that brightened in only 2.2 days and then dimmed in roughly a week....

The introduction of large-scale PCR testing for COVID-19 presented a number of logistical challenges. A major one was a scarcity of personnel adequately trained to do nasopharyngeal swabbing. Research from a government-funded lab in Belgium identified inadequate personal protective equipment (PPE) management in testing centers as a source of major cross-contamination. Scientists at the COVID-19 Federal Platform, Department of Laboratory Medicine UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium were alerted to the problem in September 2021 after they noticed that 70% of samples that were taken that day at a testing center in Flemish Brabant, Flanders, had tested positive for COVID-19....

In our researchers’ case, the generation of energy is observed from the nuclear fission of Uranium-235 (U-235). As a neutron is bombarded into the U-235 nucleus, it produces a Uranium-236 (U-236) nucleus and gives it extra energy to help it split into two separate fragments. The excitation energy causes the fragmentation, generating atomic energy (see Figure 1). However, predicting this energetic interaction is difficult, so scientists use simplified models to represent the fragmentation of the nucleus....

A page of Leonardo’s Paris Manuscript I is covered in sketches of marine fossils, including a honeycomb-like array of hexagons that paleontologists think might constitute the first recorded observation of Paleodictyon, an enigmatic trace fossil. Many paleontologists think that the imprint shows burrows made by an animal living in loose sediment on the floor. There have been specimens of Paleodictyon discovered dating back to the Cambrian Period, 542 million to 488 million years ago....

Lessons from first nations governance in environmental management. As large-scale agriculture, drought, bushfire and introduced species reduce entire countries’ biodiversity and long-term prosperity, Indigenous academics are calling for a fresh look at the governance and practices of mainstream environmental management institutions. Aboriginal Australians’ worldview and connection to the Country provide a rich source of knowledge and innovations for better land and water management policies when Indigenous decision-making is enacted, the researchers say....

A widely adopted police interview technique, used by both the FBI and British police, to spot if a suspect is lying, is not fit for use, a report out today concludes. In fact, there is evidence that the technique helps liars become even better liars. Researchers led by the University of Portsmouth carried out a critical analysis of the Model Statement lie detection technique and the results have been published today in the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling....

Naturally occurring lithium in public drinking water may have an anti-suicidal effect – according to a new study from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London. Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the study collated research from around the world and found that geographical areas with relatively high levels or concentration of lithium in public drinking water had correspondingly lower suicide rates....

A millimeter wave network for billions of things. Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a cheaper and more efficient method for Internet-of-Things devices to receive high-speed wireless connectivity. With 75 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to be in place by 2025, a growing strain will be placed on the requirements of wireless networks. Contemporary WiFi and cellular networks won’t be enough to support the influx of IoT devices, the researchers highlighted in their new study....

Scuba divers frequently report unprovoked attacks by sea snakes, which can involve chasing and biting. The reasons for these attacks have been unclear, but the new research suggests the sea snakes may be mistaking divers for potential mates. Professor Rick Shine from Macquarie University’s Department of Biological Sciences and colleagues analyzed data collected between 1994 and 1995 describing Olive sea snake behavior during encounters with one of the authors, Tim Lynch, when he was a diver in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia....

COVID-19 can be diagnosed in 55 minutes or less with the help of programmed magnetic nanobeads and a diagnostic tool that plugs into an off-the-shelf cellphone, according to Rice University engineers. The Rice lab of mechanical engineer Peter Lillehoj has developed a stamp-sized microfluidic chip that measures the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein in blood serum from a standard finger prick. The nanobeads bind to SARS-CoV-2 N protein, a biomarker for COVID-19, in the chip and transport it to an electrochemical sensor that detects minute amounts of the biomarker....

A study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators hints that people with COVID-19 may experience milder symptoms if certain cells of their immune systems “remember” previous encounters with seasonal coronaviruses — the ones that cause about a quarter of the common colds kids get. These immune cells are better equipped to mobilize quickly against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, if they’ve already met its gentler cousins, the scientists concluded....