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Algebraists are promising to improve wireless bandwidth by an order of magnitude, not by adding base stations, but by using algebra to eliminate the network-clogging task of resending dropped packets of data. This technology will eliminate wasteful processes and will seamlessly weave data streams from Wi-Fi and LTE, which is a step forward from other approaches that toggle back and forth instead. Several companies have licensed the underlying technology in recent months, but the exact details are subject to nondisclosure agreements....

Fragile polar biological communities in marine and terrestrial Antarctic habitats are vulnerable to invasion by species from other parts of the world. In some cases they can have devastating effects. Lead author Dr. Kevin Hughes, an environmental researcher at British Antarctic Survey (BAS), worked with an international team of researchers to identify which non-native species are most likely to threaten biodiversity and ecosystems in the Antarctic Peninsula region. The team studied hundreds of academic papers, reports, and databases, to find species most likely to invade the Antarctic Peninsula region....

“One of the best parts of ALMA observations is to see the far-away galaxies with unprecedented resolution,” says Ken-ichi Tadaki, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the lead author of the research paper published in the journal Nature. Monster galaxies, or starburst galaxies, form stars at a startling pace; 1000 times higher than the star formation in our Galaxy....

Exactly what goes inside advanced lithium-air batteries as they charge and discharge has always been impossible to observe directly. Now, a new technique developed by MIT researchers promises to change that, allowing study of this electrochemical activity as it happens. The research has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. The reactions that take place inside a conventional lithium-air battery are complex, says Yang Shao-Horn, the Gail E. Kendall Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, who was the senior author of the paper....

Many of these odd adaptations seem to be associated with what the animals were eating, but how do scientists study the diet of animals that have been dead for millions of years? Two researchers—one from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and one from Stony Brook University—have tried to tackle this question by bringing together mathematical analyses of the animals’ shapes, surveys of modern crocodiles’ diet, modeling methods for reconstructing the diet of fossil groups, and forensic-style interpretations of damaged bones from the distant past....

In ancient Egypt, Egyptians used black ink for writing the main body of text, while red ink was often used to highlight headings, instructions or keywords. During the last decade, many scientific studies have been conducted to elucidate the invention and history of ink in ancient Egypt and in the Mediterranean cultures, for instance ancient Greece and Rome. A team of scientists led by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, and the University of Copenhagen used the powerful X-rays of the ESRF to study the red and black ink in papyri from the only large-scale institutional library known to have survived from ancient Egypt: the Tebtunis temple library....

The study, led by Andrea Garber, Ph.D., RD, chief nutritionist for the UCSF Eating Disorders Program, compared weight loss and illness severity among two groups of patients aged 12 to 24 who had been enrolled in a clinical trial upon admission to the hospital for treatment: 66 with anorexia nervosa, which excluded those who were severely underweight, and 50 heavier patients with so-called atypical anorexia nervosa. They found that patients with atypical anorexia nervosa are as likely as underweight patients to suffer from bradycardia, or slow heart rate, a key sign of medical instability that can lead to irregular heartbeat and other complications....

The clinical trial, conducted by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, compared fluvoxamine with a placebo in 152 adult outpatients infected with the coronavirus. None of the participants who received fluvoxamine saw “clinical deterioration” after 15 days, while six patients who received placebo did. Of those six, four were hospitalized, for periods ranging from four to 21 days. One was on a ventilator for 10 days. While the study size was small, the researchers say the results are statistically significant and that fluvoxamine warrants further study as a COVID-19 treatment....

Researchers analyzed the antibody responses of a dengue-experienced volunteer who participated in a Phase 1 clinical trial of the WRAIR-developed Zika purified inactivated virus vaccine. They identified a potent cross-reactive antibody called MZ4 that demonstrated a potent ability to neutralize the Zika virus as well as the dengue virus serotype-2 strain. In addition, MZ4 protected against Zika and dengue in a mouse model of infection. “Rapid-onset countermeasures are needed to protect military personnel, travelers, and residents in areas where emerging infections such as Zika and dengue viruses are already widespread and expanding,” said Dr....

18 months after the controversy started, it’s become official that the arsenic-tolerant bacterium, GFAJ-1, found in California’s Mono Lake, cannot live without phosphorous. It was reported in 2010 by a group led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a microbiologist, now working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in the journal Science that the Halomonadaceae bacterium GFAJ-1 could include some atoms of arsenic instead of phosphorous in hits crucial biochemicals. Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, tested these claims and now has reported in the journal Science that although GFAJ-1 tolerates arsenic, it still depends on phosphorous, effectively refuting Wolfe-Simon’s claims....

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented both challenges and opportunities for medical training. Remote learning technology has become increasingly important in several fields. A new study finds that in a remote environment, an artificial intelligence (AI) tutoring system can outperform expert human instructors. The Neurosurgical Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) recruited seventy medical students to perform virtual brain tumor removals on a neurosurgical simulator....

The small near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth on February 15, so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office can accurately predict the asteroid’s path with the observations obtained, and it is therefore known that there is no chance that the asteroid might be on a collision course with Earth. Nevertheless, the flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close....

Motions of a remarkable cosmic structure have been measured for the first time, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The blast wave and debris from an exploded star are seen moving away from the explosion site and colliding with a wall of surrounding gas. Astronomers estimate that light from the supernova explosion reached Earth about 1,700 years ago, or when the Mayan empire was flourishing and the Jin dynasty ruled China....

Astronomers have uncovered the strange case of a neutron star with the peculiar ability to transform from a radio pulsar into an X-ray pulsar and back again. This star’s capricious behavior appears to be fueled by a nearby companion star and may give new insights into the birth of millisecond pulsars. “What we’re seeing is a star that is the cosmic equivalent of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ with the ability to change from one form to its more intense counterpart with startling speed,” said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia....

A team of astronomers has discovered an unusual planetary system in which a large gas giant planet orbits a small red dwarf star called TOI-5205. Their findings challenge long-held ideas about planet formation. Led by Shubham Kanodia from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the researchers published their findings in The Astronomical Journal. Smaller and cooler than our Sun, M dwarfs are the most common stars in our Milky Way galaxy....

That’s because the latest Hubble finding confirms a nagging discrepancy showing the universe to be expanding faster now than was expected from its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang. Researchers suggest that there may be new physics to explain the inconsistency. “The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy,” said lead researcher and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland....

Active galactic nuclei are among the brightest and most mysterious objects in space. A galaxy is deemed active if it produces a thin long beam of matter and energy directed outward. Known as a relativistic jet, this phenomenon cannot be accounted for by the stars in the galaxy. The current consensus is that the jets are produced by some kind of “motors,” termed galactic nuclei. While their nature is poorly understood, researchers believe that a spinning black hole could power an active galaxy....

The thought of bacteria joining together to form a socially organized community capable of cooperation, competition, and sophisticated communication might at first seem like the stuff of science fiction — or just plain gross. But biofilm communities have important implications for human health, from causing illness to aiding digestion. And they play a role in a range of emerging technologies meant to protect the environment and generate clean energy. New UCLA-led research could give scientists insights that will help them cultivate useful microbes or clear dangerous ones from surfaces where biofilms have formed — including on tissues and organs in the human body....

Weighing in at roughly 21 solar masses, the black hole in the X-ray binary system Cygnus X-1 is so massive that it challenges current stellar evolution models, a new study reveals. Ultimately, the mass of a black hole is determined by its parent star’s properties and is generally constrained by the mass lost to stellar winds throughout its lifetime. If a black hole interacts with a binary companion star, the system emits X-rays and can sometimes form radio jets, which make the systems visible to electromagnetic observations as an X-ray binary....

Sleep is essential for consolidating memories and maintaining brain health. During sleep, a specific brain wave occurs – the sleep spindle. They are associated with converting short-term memories into long-term memories. Spindles may also predict brain health. Schneider et al. recorded the brain activity in sheep over one day and two nights using electroencephalography. The sheep generated sleep spindles falling within the frequency range typical of human sleep spindles. Like humans, each sheep maintained their own pattern of spindles that stayed consistent during both nights of sleep....