The Helix Nebula in the Aquarius constellation, located some 700 light-years away from Earth, was just observed by the piercing infrared gaze of the VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Some have referred to the images as the Eye of Sauron, from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The images reveal cold gas that is normally hidden from view among the warmer, star-lit material. Helix’s central star was once like Sol, but its outer layers of gas and dust have sloughed off....

“We thought that there are simple principles according to which these neurons process visual information, and those principles are in all the textbooks,” said Christof Koch, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, and co-senior author on the study along with R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “But now that we can survey tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a more subtle — and much more complicated — picture....

Booming demand for consumer and goods, labor shortages, bad weather, and an array of COVID-related supply chain snarls are contributing to backlogs of cargo ships at ports around the world. Among those seaports are the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach in Southern California, the two busiest container ports in the United States. On October 10, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this natural-color image of dozens of cargo ships waiting offshore for their turn to unload goods....

After Cumbre Vieja split open and began erupting on September 19, 2021, a slow-moving wall of basaltic lava began bulldozing its way through populated parts of La Palma. Lava flows have destroyed nearly 400 homes, buried dozens of kilometers of roads, and consumed farmland as molten rock creeps down the western flank of the volcanic island toward the ocean. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured a natural-color image (above) of lava flowing through the communities of El Paraiso and Todoque on September 26, 2021....

With Webb’s near-infrared data we can see the galaxy’s longer, extremely dusty spiral arms in far more detail. It gives the arms an appearance of overlapping with the central bulge of the bright white elliptical galaxy on the left. While the two foreground galaxies are relatively close astronomically speaking, they are not actively interacting. VV 191 is the latest addition to a small number of galaxies that helps researchers directly compare the properties of galactic dust....

A remarkable cosmic sight is revealed in a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. At least 17 concentric dust rings are seen mysteriously emanating from a pair of stars. Collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140, the duo is located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth. Each ring was formed when the stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) from the two stars collided as they approached one another, compressing the gas and generating dust....

This research, published in the journal Conservation Physiology, comes at a critical time for these large sharks, that can reach lengths of up to 18 m. Other recent studies have shown that as their popularity within the wildlife tourism sector increases, so do interactions with humans and boat traffic. As a result, these sharks face an additional source of injury on top of natural threats, and some of these ocean giants exhibit scars caused by boat collisions....

“The interplay of diseases is the norm rather than the exception,” says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, a complexity scientist at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. “And yet when we model them, it’s almost always one disease in isolation.” When disease modelers map an epidemic like coronavirus, Ebola, or the flu, they traditionally treat them as isolated pathogens. Under these so-called “simple” dynamics, it’s generally accepted that the forecasted size of the epidemic will be proportional to the rate of transmission....

While previous research has demonstrated that the antioxidant compounds in brown rice can guard against oxidative stress, the specific compound responsible for these beneficial effects has long remained a mystery. In a recent study led by Professor Yoshimasa Nakamura from the Graduate School of Environmental and Life Science, Okayama University, researchers from Japan have identified cycloartenyl ferulate (CAF) as the main “cytoprotective” or cell-protecting compound in brown rice. CAF is a unique compound owing to its hybrid structure....

With this information, researchers can now track the detailed dynamics of entire populations across unprecedented spatial scales, without being limited to small and localized parts of populations. Population size and distribution A vital part of wildlife management is knowledge about the population dynamics and distribution of wild species. Large carnivores are one of the most controversial topics in wildlife management. A landscape-level approach to wildlife monitoring, that tracks and forecasts wildlife populations across political jurisdictions, can help humans better manage and coexist with apex predators....

Nasal microbiota holds clues to who will develop COVID symptoms from novel coronavirus. The microbiota in the nose and upper throat likely contains biomarkers for assessing how sick an individual infected with SARS-CoV-2 may get and for developing new treatment strategies to improve their outcome, researchers say. This nasopharyngeal microbiota is generally considered a frontline protection against viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens that enter these natural passageways, says Dr. Sadanand Fulzele, geriatric researcher in the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University....

Wildfire smoke may greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to new research from the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Washoe County Health District (WCHD), and Renown Health (Renown) in Reno, Nev. In a study published recently in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, the DRI-led research team set out to examine whether smoke from 2020 wildfires in the Western U....

Scientists from the Yale Cancer Center have identified what causes a third of all myelomas, a type of cancer affecting plasma cells. The findings, published February 10 in the New England Journal of Medicine, could fundamentally change the way this cancer and others are treated. Multiple myeloma is a cancer involving the growth of plasma cells, which are immune cells that make antibodies to fight infection. Uncontrolled growth of these cells leads to anemia, bone pain, kidney problems, Gaucher disease, and myeloma....

The scientists presented their findings at the Society for Neuroscience Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The blood has a huge effect on brain cells, but scientists were unsure how if the effects extended beyond cell regeneration. The team tested for changes in cognition by linking the circulatory system of young and old mice, analyzing the blood of each conjoined mouse once the blood had fully mixed. Tissue from the hippocampus of old mice given young blood showed changes in the expression of 200 to 300 genes, especially in those that involved synaptic plasticity, which is linked to learning and memory....

Mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted Zika virus has become widespread across Central and South America and the Caribbean. A viable vaccine is expected to be available in the next several years, but a vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing infections depends not only on its efficacy, but also on demographic and fertility patterns, local Zika attack rates, and the proportion of the population still susceptible when it becomes available. The research is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine....

The virology team, led by Professor Eric Gowans and Dr. Branka Grubor-Bauk — based at the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research and supported by The Hospital Research Foundation — has developed a vaccine that prevents Zika infection in pre-clinical models of the disease. Their findings were published on December 11, 2019, in the leading international journal Science Advances. Zika is a mosquito-transmitted ‘flavivirus’ that can cause microcephaly (a birth defect where a baby’s head is significantly smaller than expected) and severe birth defects in infants born to infected mothers....

Malicious COVID-19 online content — including racist content, disinformation, and misinformation — thrives and spreads online by bypassing the moderation efforts of individual social media platforms, according to new research published in the journal Scientific Reports. By mapping online hate clusters across six major social media platforms, researchers at the George Washington University show how malicious content exploits pathways between platforms, highlighting the need for social media companies to rethink and adjust their content moderation policies....

Now scientists at MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have for the first time created and observed a single phonon in a common material at room temperature. Until now, single phonons have only been observed at ultracold temperatures and in precisely engineered, microscopic materials that researchers must probe in a vacuum. In contrast, the team has created and observed single phonons in a piece of diamond sitting in the open air at room temperature....

Such as a truly three-legged animal. Tracy Thomson, a graduate student in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has been pondering the non-existence of tripeds. He recently published an essay on it, “Three‐Legged Locomotion and the Constraints on Limb Number: Why Tripeds Don’t Have a Leg to Stand On” in Bioessays. Thomson got the idea after taking a graduate class on evolution with UC Davis paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, who challenged the students to come up with a “forbidden phenotype:” an animal or plant that does not and cannot exist....

Researchers at the University of Kansas have identified two sister species of near-primates, referred to as “primatomorphans,” which lived approximately 52 million years ago and are the oldest known to have inhabited areas north of the Arctic Circle. These findings were recently published in the journal PLOS ONE. According to Kristen Miller, lead author and a doctoral student at the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum of the University of Kansas, both species – Ignacius mckennai and I....