A team of astrophysicists and citizen scientists have identified what may be some of the last planets NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope observed during its nearly decade-long mission. The trio of exoplanets – worlds beyond our solar system – are all between the size of Earth and Neptune and closely orbit their stars. ''These are fairly average planets in the grand scheme of Kepler observations,” said Elyse Incha, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But they’re exciting because Kepler observed them during its last few days of operations. It showcases just how good Kepler was at planet hunting, even at the end of its ...

The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2023 is awarded in equal shares to Matthew Bailes, Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Duncan Lorimer, Professor and Interim Chair of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Dean for Research at Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, USA and Maura McLaughlin, Eberly Family Distinguished Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, USA, for the discovery ...

Worldwide, one of the initial responses to the COVID-19 virus was locking down parts of the economy to reduce social interactions and the virus’s spread. Now, the development and production of vaccines have largely replaced broad lockdowns. In a new study that considered epidemiology and economics, researchers sought to determine how the arrival of vaccines should affect the duration and intensity of lockdown policies. They concluded that boosting the rate of vaccine use influences intensity and duration of lockdowns, depending on a variety of factors. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, ...

Health care organizations today are caring for patients with increasingly complex needs and leveraging larger teams that include clinicians with diverse and specialized expertise. At the same time, high turnover and labor shortages mean that facilities frequently employ a more temporary and mobile workforce. In a new commentary, researchers point out that, as a result, “the structure of health care teams often defies decades of wisdom from team-design research about the conditions that support the best possible performance.” The article was written ...

30 May 2023 - A detailed plan to transform product packaging and significantly cut plastic production and pollution has been developed by researchers. The study comes as government representatives meet in Paris to negotiate a legally binding global plastics treaty with a mandate to end plastic pollution.  The research, published today by the University of Portsmouth’s Global Plastics Policy Centre, commissioned by the Break Free From Plastic movement, consolidates 320 articles and papers, plus 55 new interviews with reuse experts from around the world [1], to suggest a universal definition of reuse systems and, for the ...

Visiting zoos in silence can generate a range of novel experiences, helping people to connect to animals in a more intimate way and giving visits more gravitas, according to new research. Experts ran special silent events at Paignton and Bristol zoos as part of a wider project on the auditory culture of zoos. Visitors were better able to focus, concentrate and even meditate on specific animals and their behaviour, which sometimes fostered feelings of intimacy with and attachment to particular zoo animals. The research, published in TRACE: Journal for Human-Animal Studies, was conducted by Professor Tom Rice, Dr Alexander Badman-King, Professor Sam ...

A group of world leading health and scientific experts are calling on the aviation industry to take action to protect passengers and aircrew from dangerous cabin fumes which they say have led to a new emerging disease. Led by former pilot and leading global aviation health researcher Dr Susan Michaelis, the specialists have released the first medical protocol of its kind to help treat those effected by contamination of the aircraft cabin breathing air supply and collect data on contamination events. The International Fume Events Task Force, made up of 17 doctors, occupational health specialists, toxicologists, epidemiologists and aviation experts, have spent six years researching ...

A mutation that causes severe hypertension also protects the kidneys from being damaged, reports a team led by Enno Klußmann of the Max Delbrück Center and the DZHK in “Kidney International”. The researchers are now exploring how the effects of the mutated gene can be used therapeutically. Over time, high blood pressure leads to kidney damage – unless you happen to have a mutated PDE3A gene. “This mutation causes extremely high blood pressure, but the kidneys still work normally even ...

Two Southwest Research Institute scientists were part of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team that observed a towering plume of water vapor more than 6,000 miles long — roughly the distance from the U.S. to Japan — spewing from the surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. In light of this NASA JWST Cycle 1 discovery, SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein also received a Cycle 2 allocation to study the plume as well as key chemical compounds on the surface, to better understand the potential habitability of this ocean world. During its 13-year reconnaissance of the Saturn system, the Cassini spacecraft discovered that Enceladus has a subsurface ocean ...

Fereshte Ghahari Kermani, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received funding for the project: "Local Probe of Correlated and topological phases in graphene Van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures."  These heterostructures are  constructed by different two-dimensional (2D) monolayers vertically stacked and weakly coupled by van der Waals interactions. Such interactions take place when adjacent atoms come close enough that their outer electron clouds barely touch. This action induces charge fluctuations that result in nonspecific, nondirectional attraction.  For this project, Ghahari will ...

More than 5,000 planets are confirmed to exist beyond our solar system. Over half were discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a resilient observatory that far outlasted its original planned mission. Over nine and a half years, the spacecraft trailed the Earth, scanning the skies for periodic dips in starlight that could signal the presence of a planet crossing in front of its star.  In its last days, the telescope kept recording the brightness of stars as it was running out of fuel. On Oct. 30, 2018, its fuel tanks depleted, the ...

Proteins are biological molecules that perform almost all biochemical tasks in all forms of life. In doing so, the tiny structures perform ultra-fast movements. In order to investigate these dynamic processes more precisely than before, researchers have developed a new algorithm that can be used to evaluate measurements at X-ray free-electron lasers such as the SwissFEL more efficiently. They have now presented it in the journal Structural Dynamics. Sometimes, when using the navigation system while travelling by car, the device will locate you off the road for a short time. This is due to the inaccuracy ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified three 4,000-year-old British cases of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria causing the plague – the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain to date, reported in a paper published today in Nature Communications. Working with the University of Oxford, the Levens Local History Group and the Wells and Mendip Museum, the team identified two cases of Yersinia pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria. They took small skeletal samples from 34 individuals across the ...

WASHINGTON, May 30, 2023 – Holograms are often displayed in science fiction as colorful, life-sized projections. But what seems like the technology of the future is actually the technology of the present, and now it has been used to recreate the Mona Lisa. In Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Tianjin University, the Beijing Institute of Technology, Rowan University, the University of Missouri, Qingdao University, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, and Beijing Jiaotong University developed an acoustic metasurface-based holography technique that uses a deep learning algorithm to generate and iteratively ...

WASHINGTON, May 30, 2023 -- How do flying insects like important pollinators locate odor sources in the great outdoors, despite encountering highly variable wind conditions? They use odor plumes — which travel like smoke and form when the wind blows odor molecules from their source — to track down sources such as flowers or pheromones. But wind tunnels are typically unable to replicate realistic outdoor wind conditions. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, University of Nevada at Reno researchers decided to explore microscale wind conditions in various outdoor environments to better understand what flying insects might experience while tracking odor plumes. Authors ...

About The Study: The findings of this study that included 1,979 women indicate that healthy sleep measured prior to SARS-CoV-2 infection, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, may be protective against post–COVID-19 condition (PCC), also known as long COVID. Future research should investigate whether interventions on sleep health may prevent PCC or improve PCC symptoms.  Authors: Siwen Wang, M.D., of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: ...

About The Study: In this study of 30,465 adults without myocardial infarction (MI; heart attack), stroke, or dementia, overall, incident MI was not associated with an acute decrease in global cognition, memory, or executive function at the time of the event compared with no MI. The rate of decline in global cognition, memory, and executive function was significantly faster over the years for adults with an MI event compared with those without an MI. These findings suggest that prevention of MI ...

About The Study: Using survey data from across the United States, researchers found that volunteering was associated with higher odds of excellent or very good health and flourishing in children and adolescents, and with lower odds of anxiety in adolescents and behavioral problems in children and adolescents. Authors: Kevin Lanza, Ph.D., of the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living in Austin, Texas, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.15980) Editor’s ...

About The Study: Use of and access to metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) have increased among U.S. youth and among most racial and ethnic groups. Compared with 2015-2019, MBS use in youths increased significantly in 2020-2021 during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, MBS rates in adults decreased in 2020.  Authors: Sarah E. Messiah, Ph.D., of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health—Dallas Campus, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.0803) Editor’s ...

About The Study: The results of this study of 8,269 pediatric patients show disparities in central line–associated bloodstream infection rates for Black patients and patients who speak a language other than English that persisted after adjusting for known risk factors, suggesting that systemic racism and bias may play a role in inequitable hospital care for hospital-acquired infections. Stratifying outcomes to assess for disparities prior to quality improvement efforts may inform targeted interventions to improve ...

A survey of philosophers finds they broadly agree with economists on the best way of valuing the environment of the future in policy decisions made now – although for different reasons. In a new study published in Nature Climate Change, environmental economists including the University of Exeter’s Professor Ben Groom found consensus between the two academic disciplines over an aspect of climate policy known as the ‘social discount rate’, with philosophers offering support for a rate of 2% - a value predominantly backed by economists, and which is in line with UN climate ...

A spacecraft can estimate the attitude state by comparing external measurements from attitude sensors with reference information. CubeSats tend to use 4-quadrant analog solar sensors which have the advantages of extremely low power consumption, minimal volume, low complexity, low cost, and high reliability as attitude sensors, considering the limitation of satellite volume and payload. The performance of the sensor can be importantly improved by the calibration procedure and compensation model. However, the various error sources affecting the calibration of the 4-quadrant sun sensor lead to a complicated ...

Being obese significantly increases the chances of also developing mental disorders. This applies to all age groups, with women at higher risk than men for most diseases, as a recent study of the Complexity Science Hub and the Medical University of Vienna shows. The results were published in the specialist journal "Translational Psychiatry".   “We analyzed a population-wide national registry of inpatient hospitalizations in Austria from 1997 to 2014 in order to determine the ...

Astronauts are affected by various physical and chemical factors during spaceflight, resulting in a series of pathological and physiological changes. Many studies have shown that spaceflight causes oxidative stress and induces brain disorder in astronauts, negatively affecting neuronal function and brain structure. However, the underlying mechanisms and the countermeasures need to be further explored. Moreover, it is observed that hydrogen has preventative and curative effects on ischemia–reperfusion ...

A team of researchers have confirmed that 107-million-year-old pterosaur bones discovered more than 30 years ago are the oldest of their kind ever found in Australia, providing a rare glimpse into the life of these powerful, flying reptiles that lived among the dinosaurs. Published in the journal Historical Biology and completed in collaboration with Museums Victoria, the research analysed a partial pelvis bone and a small wing bone discovered by a team led by Museums Victoria Research Institute’s Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology Dr Tom Rich and Professor Pat Vickers-Rich at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia in the late 1980s. The team found the bones belonged ...