But many experts surveyed also believe COVID-19 vaccine development will take place at an accelerated rate. Experts working in the field of vaccine development tend to believe that an effective vaccine against COVID-19 is not likely to be available for the general public before the fall of 2021. In a paper published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, a McGill-led team published the results of a recent survey of 28 experts working in vaccinology....

“The upwelling we detected is like a hot air balloon, and we infer that something is rising up through the deeper part of our planet under New England,” said lead author Vadim Levin, a geophysicist and professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “It is not Yellowstone (National Park)-like, but it’s a distant relative in the sense that something relatively small – no more than a couple hundred miles across – is happening....

The first two of 20 platforms surrounding the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft that allow work on the integrated system inside the building were retracted for roll out to Launch Complex 39B. Teams retracted the platforms, which move like hydraulic kitchen drawers, near the launch abort system on the Orion spacecraft in anticipation of the roll. Teams are continuing to install instrumentation on the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters inside the VAB....

Study includes more than 2,700 healthcare workers in Delhi, India, who were symptomatic and underwent RT-PCR testing for COVID-19.Findings suggest 50% vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic COVID-19 after two doses of BBV152. This vaccine effectiveness is lower than the vaccine efficacy suggested by Bharat Biotech’s phase 3 randomized control trial results. The authors note several reasons for this difference, including that the delta variant was surging in India during the study period (April 15 – May 15, 2021), and this study population was healthcare workers who likely had more exposure to COVID-19....

For female common yellowthroats, beauty isn’t just skin – or features – deep. New research provides evidence that large or showy physical features of males attract females because they signal high-quality male genes, such as those linked with robust immunity or stress resistance. This association has previously been unclear, particularly in cases where females in different populations prefer different male ornaments. Yellowthroats are small songbirds found throughout the U.S. In comparative studies across two decades, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Skidmore College have determined that different types of ornaments in male yellowthroats are linked to the same superior genes that enhance survival of offspring....

“This treatment expands the repertoire of fetal therapies in a new direction,” said co-senior and corresponding author Tippi MacKenzie, MD, a pediatric surgeon at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, co-director of UCSF’s Center for Maternal-Fetal Precision Medicine and director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. “As new treatments become available for children with genetic conditions, we are developing protocols to apply them before birth....

A team of scientists headed by SANKEN (The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research) at Osaka University demonstrated that single virus particles passing through a nanopore could be accurately identified using machine learning. The test platform they created was so sensitive that the coronaviruses responsible for the common cold, SARS, MERS, and COVID could be distinguished from each other. This work may lead to rapid, portable, and accurate screening tests for COVID and other viral diseases....

How do scientists detect new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19? The answer is a process called DNA sequencing. Researchers sequence DNA to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks, or nucleotides, that make it up: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. The millions to billions of these building blocks paired up together collectively make up a genome that contains all the genetic information an organism needs to survive....

The giant lacewing was formerly widespread across North America, but was mysteriously extirpated from eastern North America by the 1950s. This discovery suggests there may be relic populations of this large, Jurassic-Era insect yet to be discovered, explained Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab. Skvarla found the specimen in 2012, but misidentified it and only discovered its true identity after teaching an online course based on his personal insect collection in 2020....

Their study demonstrated that the plots with the greatest evolutionary diversity were a third more productive compared to areas with the least evolutionary diversity. The finding suggests that evolutionary diversity should be an important consideration when identifying priority areas for conservation. Study lead author Fernanda Coelho from the School of Geography at Leeds said: “Understanding how biodiversity affects productivity in tropical forests is important because it allows us to understand how conservation strategies can best be designed to maximize protection of species and the services that these ecosystems provide....

Named TSAM (Talin Shock Absorbing Materials), this novel protein-based family of materials represents the first known example of a SynBio (or synthetic biology) material capable of absorbing supersonic projectile impacts. It opens the door for the development of next-generation bulletproof armor and projectile capture materials to enable the study of hypervelocity impacts in space and the upper atmosphere (astrophysics). Professor Ben Goult explained: “Our work on the protein talin, which is the cells natural shock absorber, has shown that this molecule contains a series of binary switch domains which open under tension and refold again once tension drops....

The results, which were published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, indicate that activity patterns, not simply activity intensity, are essential for healthy aging and mental health. “There’s something about getting going early, staying active all day, and following the same routine each day that seems to be protecting older adults,” said lead author Stephen Smagula, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Pitt. “What’s exciting about these findings is that activity patterns are under voluntary control, which means that making intentional changes to one’s daily routine could improve health and wellness....

The Herschel Space Observatory has uncovered a weird ring of dusty material while obtaining one of the sharpest scans to date of a huge cloud of gas and dust, called NGC 7538. The observations have revealed numerous clumps of material, a baker’s dozen of which may evolve into the most powerful kinds of stars in the universe. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. “We have looked at NGC 7538 with Herschel and identified 13 massive, dense clumps where colossal stars could form in the future,” said paper lead author Cassandra Fallscheer, a visiting assistant professor of astronomy at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and lead author of the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal....

Secondary craters form from rocks ejected at high speed from the primary crater, which then impact the ground at sufficiently high speed to make huge numbers of much smaller craters over a large region. In this scene, however, the secondary crater ejecta has an unusual raised-relief appearance like bas-relief sculpture. How did that happen? One idea is that the region was covered with a layer of fine-grained materials like dust or pyroclastics about 1 to 2 meters thick when the Zunil impact occurred (about a million years ago), and the ejecta served to harden or otherwise protect the fine-grained layer from later erosion by the wind....

For years, physicists have assumed that Cooper pairs, the electron duos that enable superconductors to conduct electricity without resistance, were two-trick ponies. The pairs either glide freely, creating a superconducting state, or create an insulating state by jamming up within a material, unable to move at all. But in a new paper published today (November 14, 2019) in Science, a team of researchers has shown that Cooper pairs can also conduct electricity with some amount of resistance, as regular metals do....

In “Caring for the Unvaccinated,” William F. Parker, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine and assistant director, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, looked at cases in which hospitals delayed time-sensitive and medically necessary procedures for vaccinated adults when they were overwhelmed with unvaccinated patients who had severe, life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia and suggested an ethical framework for triaging these patients....

McGill University researchers reveal in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the ventral striatum plays an important role in decisions regarding future pain vs future profit. It’s interesting to note that while this area of the brain has been linked to motivation and rewards, pain has not previously been connected to it. This finding could lead to improved therapies for a variety of conditions characterized by extreme avoidance....

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 4 percent of its present age. The deepest images to date from Hubble yield the first statistically robust sample of galaxies that tells how abundant they were close to the era when galaxies first formed. The results are from an ambitious Hubble survey of an intensively studied patch of sky known as the Ultra Deep Field (UDF)....

First released in 2006, this popular image reveals Hubble’s sharpest view to date of the Orion Nebula. The image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image....

Climate change used to be obscured by the statistical uncertainty The traditional way of calculating hurricane damage, in order to be able to compare hurricanes and follow their development over time, was to survey the subsequent cost of the damage done by each hurricane. In other words, what would a hurricane from the 1950s cost, if it made landfall today? Using this method, a typical find is that the majority of the rising tendency in damage can be attributed to the fact that there are more of us and we are more wealthy, and there is quite simply more costly infrastructure to suffer damage....