A new coronavirus test can get accurate results from a saliva sample in less than 30 minutes, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications. Many of the components of the hand-held device used in this technology can be 3D-printed, and the test can detect as little as one viral particle per 1-microliter drop of fluid. “We developed a rapid, highly sensitive, and accurate assay, and a portable, battery-powered device for COVID-19 testing that can be used anywhere at any time,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Huimin Zhao, who led the research....

This view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows a site with a network of prominent mineral veins below a cap rock ridge on lower Mount Sharp. Researchers used the rover in March 2015 to examine the structure and composition of the crisscrossing veins at the “Garden City” site in the center of this scene. For geologists, the vein complex offers a three-dimensional exposure of mineralized fractures in a geological setting called the Pahrump section of the Lower Murray Formation....

That’s the latest theory coming from NASA’s New Horizons team, as it continues to analyze telescope data on the target of a New Year’s Day 2019 flyby. “We really won’t know what MU69 looks like until we fly past it, or even gain a full understanding of it until after the encounter,” said New Horizons science team member Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, who offered an update on the analysis of MU69 Monday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans....

Researchers say the device can tell with 95% percent accuracy if someone has a virus, a significant improvement over current rapid tests. University of Central Florida researchers have developed a device that detects viruses like COVID-19 in the body as fast as and more accurately than current, commonly used rapid detection tests. The optical sensor uses nanotechnology to accurately identify viruses in seconds from blood samples. Researchers say the device can tell with 95% percent accuracy if someone has a virus, a significant improvement over current rapid tests that experts warn could have low accuracy....

To grow and divide, cells rely on a unique mixture of enzymes that perform millions of chemical reactions per second. Many enzymes, working in relay, perform a linked series of chemical reactions called a “pathway,” where the products of one chemical reaction are the starting materials for the next. By making many incremental changes to molecules, enzymes in a pathway perform vital functions such as turning nutrients into energy or duplicating DNA....

Face masks have become an important tool in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, improper use or disposal of masks may lead to “secondary transmission.” A research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has successfully produced graphene masks with an anti-bacterial efficiency of 80%, which can be enhanced to almost 100% with exposure to sunlight for around 10 minutes. Initial tests also showed very promising results in the deactivation of two species of coronaviruses....

The newest high-resolution images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons are both dazzling and mystifying, revealing a multitude of previously unseen topographic and compositional details. The image above —showing an area near the line that separates day from night —captures a vast rippling landscape of strange, aligned linear ridges that has astonished New Horizons team members. “It’s a unique and perplexing landscape stretching over hundreds of miles,” said William McKinnon, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team deputy lead from Washington University in St....

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took this stunning image of Pluto only a few minutes after closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image was obtained at a high phase angle –that is, with the sun on the other side of Pluto, as viewed by New Horizons. Seen here, sunlight filters through and illuminates Pluto’s complex atmospheric haze layers. The southern portions of the nitrogen ice plains informally named Sputnik Planum, as well as mountains of the informally named Norgay Montes, can also be seen across Pluto’s crescent at the top of the image....

Exactly 85 years after Clyde Tombaugh’s historic discovery of Pluto, the NASA spacecraft set to encounter the icy dwarf planet this summer is providing its first views of the small moons orbiting Pluto. The moons Nix and Hydra are visible in a series of images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft from January 27-Feburary 8, at distances ranging from about 125 million to 115 million miles (201 million to 186 million kilometers)....

Wendiceratops pinhornensis is described from more than 200 bones representing the remains of at least four individuals (three adults and one juvenile) collected from a bonebed in the Oldman Formation of southern Alberta, near the border with Montana, USA. It was an herbivore, and would crop low-lying plants with a parrot-like beak, and slice them up with dozens of leaf-shaped teeth. Wendiceratops had a fantastically adorned skull, particularly for an early member of the horned dinosaur family....

The results further fuel the mismatch between measurements for the expansion rate of the nearby universe, and those of the distant, primeval universe — before stars and galaxies even existed. This so-called “tension” implies that there could be new physics underlying the foundations of the universe. Possibilities include the interaction strength of dark matter, dark energy being even more exotic than previously thought, or an unknown new particle in the tapestry of space....

When the lamp is shattered,The light in the dust lies dead.When the cloud is scattered,The rainbow’s glory is shed. These words, which open Shelley’s poem “When the Lamp is Shattered,” employ visions of nature to symbolize life in decay and rebirth. It’s as if he had somehow foreseen the creation of this new Gemini Legacy image, and penned a caption for it. What Gemini has captured is nothing short of poetry in motion: the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting....

The uptake of foreign genetic material from the environment is a common trick used by bacteria to ensure their survival. For example, bacteria can become resistant to substances that would otherwise kill them. In this way, resistance is passed on from cell to cell. It has long been a mystery how a bacterial cell is able to import a molecule as complex as DNA. The Frankfurt research team has now achieved a breakthrough in answering that question....

Current ion exchange membranes, known as Nafion, are used to purify water and store renewable energy output in fuel cells and batteries. However, the ion transport channels in Nafion membranes are not well defined and the membranes are very expensive. In contrast, low-cost polymer membranes have been widely used in the membrane industry in various contexts, from the removal of salt and pollutants from water, to natural gas purification – but these membranes are usually not conductive or selective enough for ion transport....

Now, two researchers have proposed a new model to explain these dynamic turbulent processes. The findings, by Nuno Loureiro, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at MIT, and Stanislav Boldyrev, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, are reported today in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper is the third in a series this year explaining key aspects of how these turbulent collections of charged particles behave....

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched most aspects of human life. In recent months, NASA has initiated research projects focused on how the human response to the pandemic has affected our environment, like how air quality has improved in the wake of reduced vehicular traffic in many places. But the tentacles of the pandemic extend well beyond that. How have production disruptions affected agriculture and food supply? What about our ability to forecast water availability in coming months?...

The vaccine uses gene transfer technology developed at the University of Eastern Finland by Academy Professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala’s research group, and the technology has already been successfully used in several clinical trials using gene therapy to treat cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The vaccine uses a safe adenovirus carrier that contains a cloned DNA strand, which causes nasopharyngeal cells to produce the virus protein which, in turn, produces a response to the vaccine....

This is the highest efficiency value ever reported for an organic photovoltaic module. It was confirmed by a certified calibrated measurement under standard testing conditions by the independent certification laboratory of Fraunhofer ISE (Freiburg) in September 2019. The multi-cell module was developed at the Solar Factory of the Future at the Energie Campus Nürnberg (EnCN) in a coating laboratory with a unique megawatt pilot line for thin-film photovoltaics, which was designed and implemented with financial support by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs....

Now MIT spinout Endor has developed a predictive-analytics platform that lets anyone, tech-savvy or not, upload raw data and input any business question into an interface — similar to using an online search engine — and receive accurate answers in just 15 minutes. The platform is based on the science of “social physics,” co-developed at the MIT Media Lab by Endor co-founders Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Yaniv Altshuler, a former MIT postdoc....

Losing weight during COVID-19 pandemic is urgent as obesity increases risk of severe disease and death. Losing weight during the COVID-19 pandemic has increasing urgency because obesity increases the risk of severe disease and death. Two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A new Northwestern Medicine remote weight-loss program, called Opt-IN, provides maximum weight loss for the lowest cost and with much less hassle than the gold-standard National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), the most successful behavioral non-drug treatment currently available....