Fascination surrounding spaceflight and rockets is at an all-time high. Sites near launchpads draw crowds of spectators, eager to witness the flash of fire and feel the vibrations as the rumble of the motor becomes a roar. People, squinting and craning their necks to watch the rocket hurtle out of sight, aren’t likely thinking about the science behind the propulsion that makes it all possible.  What are the key elements that influence the combustion process? Are there advantages to utilizing solid propellants versus liquid? Simplicity, lower cost, and ease of storage and handling make solid fuel sources ideal for military and space ...

A team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has filled a major gap in the state’s fossil record – describing the first known Jurassic vertebrate fossils in Texas. The weathered bone fragments are from the limbs and backbone of a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile that would have swum the shallow sea that covered what is now northeastern Mexico and far western Texas about 150 million years ago. The bones were discovered in the Malone Mountains of West Texas during two fossil hunting missions led by Steve May, a research associate at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences Museum of Earth ...

The Department of Energy (DOE) today signed an implementation agreement with Sweden to further promote and facilitate basic science research in energy and related fields. The agreement reflects the United States and Sweden’s commitment to advancing scientific knowledge. It aims to foster joint research, shared facilities and exchanges of scientists in topics such as scientific computing, high energy physics, nuclear physics, fusion, basic energy sciences, and biological and environmental research. Present at the ...

FROM: James Urton University of Washington 206-543-2580 jurton@uw.edu   (Note: researcher contact information at the end)   For immediate release June 27, 2023   Researchers make a quantum computing leap with a magnetic twist   Quantum computing could revolutionize our world. For specific and crucial tasks, it promises to be exponentially faster than the zero-or-one binary technology that underlies today’s machines, from supercomputers in laboratories to smartphones in our pockets. But developing quantum computers hinges on building a stable network of qubits — or quantum ...

A University of Texas at Arlington faculty member is pioneering a transformative technique aimed at enhancing the utilization of tungsten in additive manufacturing processes, specifically overcoming significant challenges presented by tungsten’s high melting point, intrinsic brittleness and high susceptibility to cracking. Narges Shayesteh, assistant professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and director of the Innovative Additive Manufacturing Laboratory, has earned a five-year, $582,358 Faculty Early Career Award Development Program (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation to advance her research and education initiatives. The ...

DURHAM, N.C. – What people say they’ve eaten and what they’ve actually eaten are often two very different lists of foods. But a new technique using DNA barcoding to identify the plant matter in human feces may get at the truth, improving clinical trials, nutrition studies and more. Building on earlier studies that attempted to compare DNA found in feces with reported diets, researchers in the lab of Lawrence David, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology in the Duke ...

“This is the first report that showed the efficacy of methionine restriction to reverse old-age-induced obesity.” BUFFALO, NY- June 27, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 11, entitled, “Old-age-induced obesity reversed by a methionine-deficient diet or oral administration of recombinant methioninase-producing Escherichia coli in C57BL/6 mice.” Obesity increases with aging. Methionine restriction ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, PhD, was announced today as the recipient of the 2023 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize by Gladstone Institutes. Zernicka-Goetz is a professor of mammalian development and stem cell biology in the Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, as well as the Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. A pioneering stem cell scientist, Zernicka-Goetz was selected for the prize because of her work uncovering fundamental mechanisms that drive the development of mammalian embryos, which led to the ...

Nearly half of parents who relied on formula to feed their babies during the infant formula shortage last year resorted to potentially harmful feeding methods, according to a survey from researchers at the University of California, Davis. The study was published in the journal BMC Pediatrics. In an online anonymous survey of U.S. parents, the number of individuals that used at least one unsafe feeding practice increased from 8% before the formula shortage to nearly 50% during the shortage. Unsafe practices included watering down formula, using expired or homemade formula, or using human milk from informal sharing. The percentage of parents who shared human milk ...

URBANA, Ill. – In its simplest form, popcorn is pretty uncomplicated. Most supermarket varieties offer the choice of two kernel colors, yellow or white, and two kernel shapes, pointed or pearl. When popped, the flake typically expands into one of two shapes: mushroom or butterfly. But there’s more to popcorn than meets the eye. New research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reveals a wealth of untapped diversity lurking in popcorn’s genetic code. Analyzing 320 publicly available popcorn lines, crop sciences researchers found variation at more ...

Irvine, Calif., June 27, 2023 — As human-driven climate change amplifies natural disasters, hurricanes and typhoons stand to increase in intensity. Until now, there existed very few freely available computer models designed to estimate the economic costs of such events, but a team of researchers led by Jane W. Baldwin at the University of California, Irvine recently announced the completion of an open-source model that stands to help countries with high tropical cyclone risks better calculate just how much those storms will impact their people and their economies. “Tropical cyclones are some of the most impactful natural disasters on Earth. They pose huge risks ...

Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This initiates an explosion of cellular diversity in which the embryonic cells later become the precursors of future blood, tissue, muscle, and more types of cells, and the primitive body axes start to form. Studying this process in the human-specific context has posed significant challenges to biologists, but new research offers an unprecedented window into this point in time in ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, US, led by Calvin Kersbergen report that mice with the most common form of human congenital deafness develop normal auditory circuitry – until the ear canal opens and hearing begins. Publishing June 27th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study suggests that this is possible because spontaneous activity of support cells in the inner ear remains present during the first weeks of life. Mutations to the protein connexin 26 are the most common cause of hearing loss at birth, accounting for more than 25% of genetic hearing loss worldwide. To understand how these mutations lead to deafness ...

**EMBARGOED TILL TUESDAY, JUNE 27, AT 2 P.M. ET** For the first two weeks of life, mice with a hereditary form of deafness have nearly normal neural activity in the auditory system, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists. Their previous studies indicate that this early auditory activity — before the onset of hearing — provides a kind of training to prepare the brain to process sound when hearing begins. The findings are published June 27 in PLOS Biology. Mutations in Gjb2 cause more than a quarter of all hereditary forms of hearing loss at birth in people, according to some estimates. The connexin 26 protein coded by ...

The universe is awash in billions of possible chemicals. But even with a bevy of high-tech instruments, scientists have determined the chemical structures of just a small fraction of those compounds, maybe 1 percent.   Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are taking aim at the other 99 percent, creating new ways to learn more about a vast sea of unknown compounds. There may be cures for disease, new approaches for tackling climate change, or new chemical or biological threats lurking in the chemical universe.   The work is part of an initiative known as m/q or “m over q”—shorthand ...

Increasing access to prescription opioid painkillers may reduce opioid overdose deaths in the United States, according to a Rutgers study. “When access to prescription opioids is heavily restricted, people will seek out opioids that are unregulated,” said Grant Victor, an assistant professor in the Rutgers School of Social Work and lead author of the study published in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment. “The opposite may also be true; our findings suggest that restoring easier access to opioid pain medications may protect against fatal overdoses.” America’s opioid crisis has ...

Science is a collaborative effort. What we know today would have never been, had it not been generations of scientists reusing and building on the work of their predecessors. However, in modern times, academia has become increasingly competitive and indeed rather hostile to the individual researchers. This is especially true for early-career researchers yet to secure tenure and build a name in their fields. Nowadays, scholars are left to compete with each other for citations of their published work, awards and funding.  So, understandably, many scientists have grown unwilling ...

A new USC study that zeros in on the workings of individual T cells targeting the hepatitis C virus (HCV) has revealed insights that could assist in the development of an effective vaccine. Every year, hepatitis and related illnesses kill more than one million people around the world. If unaddressed, those deaths are expected to rise—and even outnumber deaths caused collectively by HIV, tuberculosis and malaria by 2040. For that reason, the World Health Organization and other leading groups have pledged to work toward eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030. While there are vaccines for two of the three most common ...

Collaborative work by teams at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) ​​at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) has shown that interplay between circadian clocks in liver and skeletal muscle controls glucose metabolism. The findings reveal that local clock function in each tissue is not enough for whole-body glucose metabolism but also requires signals from feeding and fasting cycles to properly maintain glucose levels in the ...

Children with disabilities, and their families, may face discrimination in in the hospitals and clinics they visit for their health care, according to a new study led by researchers at University of Utah Health. These attitudes may lead to substandard medical treatment, which could contribute to poor health outcomes, say the study’s authors. “They mistreated her and treated her like a robot. Every single time a nurse walked in the room, they treated her like she was not even there,” said one mother who was interviewed about her child’s health care encounters. The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, ...

Chicago, Illinois (Embargoed until 10:05 a.m. CDT, Tuesday, June 27, 2023)—Molecular imaging with 18F-flubatine PET/MRI has shown that neuroreceptors in the brains of individuals with obesity respond differently to food cues than those in normal-weight individuals, making the neuroreceptors a prime target for obesity treatments and therapy. This research, presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 2023 Annual Meeting, contributes to the understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying obesity ...

The pandemic made remote work the norm for many, but that doesn’t mean it was always a positive experience. Remote work can have many advantages: increased flexibility, inclusivity for parents and people with disabilities, and work-life balance. But it can also cause issues with collaboration, communication, and the overall work environment. New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology used data from the employee review website Glassdoor to determine what made remote work successful. Companies that catered to employees’ interests, ...

(Boston)— Intersex people’s (people whose sex characteristics do not fit within the strict binary categorizations of male or female) healthcare has received a lot of media attention recently, particularly with the uptick in anti-transgender legislation, which often also targets this community. Discrimination and mistreatment in social and medical settings, largely due to the stigma of not conforming to binary views of sex, results in many intersex individuals experiencing isolation, secrecy and shame, which can have a lasting impact on their mental health.   A new study from researchers at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine highlights the need ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A cancerous tumor is the accumulation of cells uncontrollably dividing, some of which can invade other parts of the body. The process is difficult to predict in detail, and eradicating the cells poses even greater difficulty. Now, a Penn State-led research team has revealed how the exodus initiates, shedding light on a potential therapeutic target to halt the invasion and providing a prognostic marker to help clinicians select the best treatment option.   They published their findings on June 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   “Cancer cells don’t randomly detach from the primary tumor and disseminate ...

HOUSTON – (June 27, 2023) – Many of the drugs we use to treat cancer and infectious disease are ⎯ or derive from ⎯ natural products, but it’s difficult to know exactly how nature assembles them. Retracing nature’s steps, Rice University chemical engineer Xue Gao and her team mapped out the full series of enzyme-powered reactions a marine fungus uses to produce 21R-citrinadin A, a complex molecule with anticancer properties. In the process, Gao and her collaborators identified a new enzyme, CtdY, which is the only one ...