Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have discovered that one of the earliest signs of heart failure is a change in how the heart produces energy, with findings offering a potential way to pre-empt heart failure before the heart begins to deteriorate. Led by Dr. Paul Delgado-Olguín, a Scientist in the Translational Medicine program, and supported by the Ted Rogers Center for Heart Research, the research may also help to explain the diversity of causes underlying heart failure....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. Most of the 40,000 meteorites that have been recovered came from the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, in the case of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite, astronomers were able to find a more precise origin. The scientists used records of the meteorite from weather data, which is commonly used to track rainfall in real time, and combined it with photographic and video images, as well as other data....

“So far, metals have been the chemical elements commonly used in the fabrication of electronic devices. This project took a step forward, and we have been able to generate electricity by using light and more affordable and less toxic materials”, explains José Alejandro Heredia, one of the authors of this project. The formula is very simple: water and ethanol -a type of ecological alcohol- derived from tomato skin and carbon nanoparticles....

“Natural selection” in semiconductor technology over almost 80 years has led to silicon emerging as the predominant material for chips. Most digital microcircuits are created using CMOS technology (CMOS), which stands for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor. Yet manufacturers have hit a wall on the way to increasing their performance even further: heat release due to high density of elements in CMOS circuits. One potential workaround is reducing heat generation by switching from metallic connections between elements in microcircuits to optical ones: unlike electrons in conductors, photons can travel giant distances in waveguides with minimal heat losses....

A critical ingredient for auroras exists much higher in space than previously thought, according to new research in the journal Scientific Reports. The dazzling light displays in the polar night skies require an electric accelerator to propel charged particles down through the atmosphere. Scientists at Nagoya University and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and the US have found that it exists beyond 30,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface – offering insight not just about Earth, but other planets as well....

This is the first time that photogrammetry has been used in the study of flowers, the results of which have been published in the journal New Phytologist. Photogrammetry uses information gathered from photos taken from different angles. Thanks to the triangulation of common points present in the photos, it’s possible to reconstruct a 3D model of a flower. Colors are then applied to the 3D flower using information from the photos....

Researchers from the University of Kent, the Research Institute for Environment Treatment, and Vita-Market Ltd have discovered the universal mathematical formula that can describe any bird’s egg existing in nature, a feat which has been unsuccessful until now. Egg-shape has long attracted the attention of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists from an analytical point of view. The shape has been highly regarded for its evolution as large enough to incubate an embryo, small enough to exit the body in the most efficient way, not roll away once laid, is structurally sound enough to bear weight and be the beginning of life for 10,500 species that have survived since the dinosaurs....

Now that it looks like the hunt for the Higgs boson is over, particles of dark matter are at the top of the physics “Most Wanted” list. Dozens of experiments have been searching for them, but often come up with contradictory results. Theorists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint SLAC-Stanford institute, believe they’ve come up with an algorithm – a mathematical description of how the individual particles behave – that could help narrow the search for these elusive particles, which are thought to make up more than 25 percent of the matter and energy in the universe....

The team, led by CU Boulder Associate Professor Brian Hynek, braved second-degree burns, sulfuric acid fumes and the threat of eruptions to collect samples of water from the aptly-named Laguna Caliente. Nestled in Costa Rica’s Poás Volcano, this body of water is 10 million times more acidic than tap water and can reach near-boiling temperatures. It also resembles the ancient hot springs that dotted the surface of early Mars, Hynek said....

Seven Earth-sized exoplanets circle the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, just 40 light-years from our own blue planet. Now an international team of scientists at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, MIT, and elsewhere, report that the outer planets in this system may still hold significant stores of water. Three of these potential water worlds are also considered within the habitable zone of the star, giving further support to the possibility that these neighboring planets may, in fact, be hospitable to life....

Solar Orbiter and the Parker Solar Probe both carry instruments to study the Sun and its influence on space. Among those instruments are low-light cameras that can observe the Sun’s outer atmosphere and the solar wind. It’s these instruments that saw several planets pass through their fields of view in 2020. The image above shows Venus, Earth, and Mars as observed by the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) on November 18, 2020....

400 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation of Ophiuchus, two galaxies are crashing into each other and forming a galaxy we know as NGC 6240. This peculiarly-shaped galaxy has been observed many times before, as it is relatively close by. But NGC 6240 is complex and chaotic. The collision between the two galaxies is still ongoing, bringing along in the crash two growing supermassive black holes that will likely merge as one larger black hole....

Research conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) describes a validation exercise for simple models used to understand hot-spot conditions reached in an implosion, which find good agreement when compared to a set of simulations. Progress toward ignition requires accurately diagnosing current conditions and assessing proximity metrics for implosion experiments at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). Hot-spot conditions are not directly measured, but rather inferred, often using simple 0- and 1-dimensional (1D) models....

An estimated 80% of people worldwide will experience low back pain in their lifetimes, sometimes owing to strain or injury. But the vast majority of low back pain, the researchers say, emerges in the absence of injury, especially in older age. The new experiments were designed to investigate whether a painful overgrowth of sensory nerves into the cartilaginous endplates in the spine could be the root of these unexplained cases....

A new theoretical study examines how well NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2021, will be able to separate the light of host galaxies from the bright central quasar. The researchers find that Webb could detect host galaxies that existed just 1 billion years after the big bang. This video zooms into a highly detailed simulation of the universe called BlueTides. Much like the iconic Powers of Ten video, each step covers a distance 10 times smaller than the previous one....

While most research into viral infections has focused on mechanisms viruses use to enter cells, less is known about the late steps in infection. The new findings were identified in reovirus, a common virus that is normally harmless but has recently been implicated as a potential cause of celiac disease. “Our work provides compelling evidence that reoviruses, and perhaps additional distantly related viruses, require a specialized protein-folding machine expressed in cells to replicate,” said Terence Dermody, M....

A new study finds that most molecular-level changes that occur during aging are associated with gene lengthOrganisms balance the activity of short and long genesAging is accompanied by a shift in gene activity toward short genes, which are associated with accelerated agingResearcher: “Aging is a subtle imbalance, away from equilibrium” that requires your cells to expend more effort to function properlyFindings could lead to medical interventions that slow or even reverse the biological hallmarks of aging...

New findings further our understanding of extreme climate change and evolution. How did life survive the most severe ice age? A McGill University-led research team has found the first direct evidence that glacial meltwater provided a crucial lifeline to eukaryotes during Snowball Earth, when the oceans were cut off from life-giving oxygen, answering a question puzzling scientists for years. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on December 2, 2019, researchers studied iron-rich rocks left behind by glacial deposits in Australia, Namibia, and California to get a window into the environmental conditions during the ice age....

Washington State University researchers have developed a novel way to identify previously unrecognized antibiotic-resistance genes in bacteria. By employing machine learning and game theory, the researchers were able to determine with 93 to 99 percent accuracy the presence of antibiotic-resistant genes in three different types of bacteria. The researchers, including graduate student Abu Sayed Chowdhury and Professor Shira Broschat in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Douglas Call in the Paul Allen School of Global Animal Health, report on their work in the high-profile journal, Scientific Reports....

UC Riverside-led team develops new computational method that applies techniques from statistical physics mathematical models in epidemiology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple new and more transmissible variants of the virus have emerged. Understanding how specific mutations affect SARS-CoV-2 transmission could help us to better understand the biology of the virus and to control outbreaks. This, however, is a challenging task, said John Barton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, who is presenting results from his research titled ‘Inferring the Effects of Mutations on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission From Genomic Surveillance Data’ at the American Physical Society’s March Meeting....