The very earliest crocodilians were very different to the beasts we know well today, they were much smaller-bodied, slender, and had longer legs. It is speculated that they led a much different lifestyle to the crocodiles we all know and fear today. A new study by a team of international experts, led by University of Witwatersrand Ph.D. candidate Kathleen Dollman and Professor Jonah Choiniere published today in the American Museum Novitates, endeavored to further explore the mouth of one of the earliest occurring and least understand groups of crocodilians, the shartegosuchids....

An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. Analyses of this individual’s DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays....

Among other findings linking complement to COVID, the researchers found that people with age-related macular degeneration — a disorder caused by overactive complement — are at greater risk of developing severe complications and dying from COVID. The connection with complement suggests that existing drugs that inhibit the complement system could help treat patients with severe disease. The study was published today (August 3, 2020) in Nature Medicine. The authors also found evidence that clotting activity is linked to COVID severity and that mutations in certain complement and coagulation genes are associated with hospitalization of COVID patients....

The case study suggests that the viruses, called bacteriophages, could be an effective treatment against many drug-resistant infections, said the researchers. The Connecticut doctor suffered from an infection after he received an aortic arch replacement operation and required massive doses of antibiotics to keep him alive. But the bacteria infecting his heart, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, had developed a resistance to drug treatment. His physician, Dr. Deepak Narayan, was then contacted by research scientist Benjamin Chan who had been screening natural samples for bacteriophage to see if these viruses might be effective against drug-resistant infections....

Possible infant feeding vessels, made from clay, first appear in Europe in the Neolithic (at around 5,000 BC), becoming more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The vessels are usually small enough to fit within a baby’s hands and have a spout through which liquid could be suckled. Sometimes they have feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. Despite this, in the lack of any direct evidence for their function, it has been suggested they may also be feeding vessels for the sick or infirm....

Arsenic occurs naturally in the minerals that make up aquifer sediments. Some species of bacteria can dissolve arsenic- and iron-containing minerals, releasing arsenic into the water. Scientists have tried to simulate this process in the lab by using simple carbon sources, such as acetate and lactate, as food for arsenic-freeing bacteria. However, NOM in groundwater contains more complex carbon sources, such as plant-derived organic matter, amino acids, and carbohydrates. Andreas Kappler and colleagues wanted to study how NOM from actual aquifer sediments near the village of Van Phuc, Vietnam (where groundwater is contaminated with high levels of arsenic), influenced arsenic release....

During this mission, which will pave the way for missions with astronauts, NASA’s Orion spacecraft will journey thousands of miles beyond the Moon in what is called a Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO) to evaluate the spacecraft’s capabilities. DRO provides a highly stable orbit where little fuel is required to stay for an extended trip in deep space to put Orion’s systems to the test in an environment far from Earth....

WASP-39 b is a planet unlike any in our solar system – a Saturn-sized behemoth that orbits its star closer than Mercury is to our Sun. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope initially began regular science operations, this exoplanet was one of the first to be examined. The exoplanet science community is buzzing with excitement over the results. Webb’s incredibly sensitive instruments have provided a profile of WASP-39 b’s atmospheric constituents and identified a plethora of contents, including water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium....

Those clues come in the form of asteroids, comets, and other small objects. Like detectives sifting through forensic evidence, scientists carefully examine these small bodies for insights about our origins. They tell of a time when countless meteors and asteroids rained down on the planets, burned up in the Sun, shot out beyond the orbit of Neptune or collided with one another and shattered into smaller bodies. From distant, icy comets to the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, each space rock contains clues to epic events that shaped the solar system as we know it today — including life on Earth....

The surprising discovery was obtained using a number of telescopes and instruments, among them the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The denser environment in a cluster will cause more frequent interactions between planets and nearby stars, which may explain the excess of hot Jupiters. A Chilean, Brazilian, and European team led by Roberto Saglia at the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, in Garching, Germany, and Luca Pasquini at ESO, has spent several years collecting high-precision measurements of 88 stars in Messier 67....

It took a long time to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the inscriptions of the pyramids. It finally succeeded with the help of the so-called Rosetta Stone found in 1799. This stele was inscribed with three versions of the same text – one in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script, one in Demotic script, and the bottom one in Ancient Greek. Realizing that it is the same text, the enigmatic hieroglyphs could be deciphered and translated with the help of the ancient Greek language....

This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an unprecedented Earth-sized virtual telescope....

The crater, informally named Organa, caught scientists’ attention as they were studying the highest-resolution infrared compositional scan of Charon. Organa and portions of the surrounding material ejected from it show infrared absorption at wavelengths of about 2.2 microns, indicating that the crater is rich in frozen ammonia – and, from what scientists have seen so far, unique on Pluto’s largest moon. The infrared spectrum of nearby Skywalker crater, for example, is similar to the rest of Charon’s craters and surface, with features dominated by ordinary water ice....

Star formation in galaxies is by no means a steady process. Not only can there be bursts of activity, prompted perhaps by a collision with a neighboring galaxy, but the opposite can occur. Star formation can be self- limiting because its massive young stars produce winds and supernovae that can blow apart the natal molecular clouds and disable future star formation. Combined with the disruption induced by jets from an active nuclear supermassive black hole, this disruptive process is called quenching and is thought to be able to bring star formation to a halt....

This winter has brought many intense and powerful storms, with cold fronts sweeping across much of the United States. On a much grander scale, astronomers have discovered enormous “weather systems” that are millions of light years in extent and older than the Solar System. The researchers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study a cold front located in the Perseus galaxy cluster that extends for about two million light years, or about 10 billion billion miles....

A star maintains its stability through a fine balance between its own gravity, which pulls it together, and the outwards pressure from ongoing thermonuclear fusion processes taking place at its core. However, once a star’s core runs out of hydrogen, that state of equilibrium is lost and the core begins to collapse. As the core collapses, the shell of plasma surrounding the core becomes hot enough to begin fusing hydrogen itself....

One of the most fundamental predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is the existence of black holes. In spite of the recent detection of gravitational waves from binary black holes by LIGO, direct evidence using electromagnetic waves remains elusive and astronomers are searching for it with radio telescopes. Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt, and collaborators in the ERC-funded project BlackHoleCam in Bonn and Nijmegen have created and compared self-consistent and realistic images of the shadow of an accreting supermassive black hole – such as the black-hole candidate Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) in the heart of our galaxy – both in general relativity and in a different theory of gravity....

Patient with serious brain injury can temporarily talk, walk, and recognize family members. A patient who could not move and talk spontaneously for eight years started to do so again after being administered a sleeping pill. The spectacular but temporary effect was visualized with brain scans, giving researchers from Radboud university medical center and Amsterdam UMC a better understanding of this disorder’s underlying neurophysiological processes. The article has been published in Cortex....

A design breakthrough has enabled a 10-minute charge time for a typical electric vehicle battery. A paper detailing the record-breaking combination of a shorter charge time and more energy acquired for a longer travel range was published on October 12 in the journal Nature. “The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever,” said Chao-Yang Wang, lead author on the study. “There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand....

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world.” Atwater, who is also the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, leads the project jointly with two other researchers: Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and co-director of SSPP; and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, co-director of SSPP, and a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)....