Scientists will present their findings at this year’s Frontiers in Optics conference, happening from October 14 to 18, in Rochester, New York. Light can travel through a silk strand as easily as it travels through a fiber optic cable, states Nolwenn Huby, optical physicist at the Institut de Physique de Rennes, in France. Huby and her team of scientists were able to transmit laser light down a strand of silk on an integrated circuit chip....

NASA’s Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, at 9:40 a.m. PST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, after a record-breaking mission. During the Artemis I flight test, the Orion spacecraft traveled more than 1.4 million miles on a path around the Moon and returned safely to Earth. Splashdown is the final milestone of the Artemis I mission that began with a successful liftoff of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on November 16, from Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida....

Staying home and limiting local travel, supporting access to primary care, and limiting contacts in contagion hubs — including hospitals, schools, and workplaces — are strategies that might help reduce COVID-19-related deaths, according to new research. The research team, by statisticians at Penn State, the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, and Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, used novel statistical approaches to compare the first wave of the epidemic across 20 regions in Italy and identify factors that contributed to mortality....

Scientists have for the first time watched and manipulated stem cells as they regenerate tissue in an uninjured mammal, Yale researchers report July 1 online in the journal Nature. Using a sophisticated imaging technique, the researchers also demonstrated that mice lacking a certain type of cell do not regrow hair. The same technique could shed light on how stem cells interact with other cells and trigger repairs in a variety of other organs, including lung and heart tissue....

The new form of ice is amorphous. Unlike ordinary crystalline ice where the molecules arrange themselves in a regular pattern, in amorphous ice, the molecules are in a disorganized form that resembles a liquid. In their paper, published in the journal Science on February 2, the team created a new form of amorphous ice in an experiment and achieved an atomic-scale model of it in a computer simulation. The experiments used a technique called ball-milling, which grinds crystalline ice into small particles using metal balls in a steel jar....

Stress was the most common reason teachers cited for leaving the profession before and during the pandemic, according to a RAND Corporation survey of nearly 1,000 former public-school teachers. Three of four former teachers said work was often or always stressful in the most recent year in which they taught in a public school. In fact, teachers cited stress nearly twice as often as insufficient pay as a reason for quitting....

The most recent addition to the long list of the amazing properties of graphene was announced in Nature Physics in a paper authored by ICFO researchers, in collaboration with researchers from MIT, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, and Graphenea S.L. The paper demonstrates that graphene is able to convert a single photon that it absorbs into multiple hot electrons, and that the higher photon’s energy, the larger the number of hot electrons created....

Sunnier areas are associated with fewer deaths from COVID-19, an observational study suggests. Increased exposure to the sun’s rays — specifically UVA — could act as a simple public health intervention if further research establishes it causes a reduction in mortality rates, experts say. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh compared all recorded deaths from COVID-19 in the continental US from January to April 2020 with UV levels for 2,474 US counties for the same time period....

In June of 2018, telescopes around the world picked up a brilliant blue flash from the spiral arm of a galaxy 200 million light years away. The powerful burst appeared at first to be a supernova, though it was much faster and far brighter than any stellar explosion scientists had yet seen. The signal, procedurally labeled AT2018cow, has since been dubbed simply “the Cow,” and astronomers have catalogued it as a fast blue optical transient, or FBOT — a bright, short-lived event of unknown origin....

TACC’s Frontera supercomputer aids in building infection models of COVID-19 variants. All viruses mutate as they make copies of themselves to spread and thrive. SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes COVID-19, is proving to be no different. There are currently more than 4,000 variants of COVID-19, which has already killed more than 2.7 million people worldwide during the pandemic. The UK variant, also known as B.1.1.7, was first detected in September 2020, and is now causing 98 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom....

The galaxy is known as NGC 1022, and is officially classified as a barred spiral galaxy. You can just about make out the bar of stars in the center of the galaxy in this image, with swirling arms emerging from its ends. This bar is much less prominent than in some of the galaxy’s barred cousins and gives the galaxy a rather squat appearance; but the lanes of dust that swirl throughout its disc ensure it is no less beautiful....

In order to better understand the history and evolution of the Milky Way, astronomers are studying the composition of the gases and metals that make up an important part of our galaxy. Three main elements stand out: the initial gas coming from outside our galaxy, the gas between the stars inside our galaxy – enriched with chemical elements – and the dust created by the condensation of the metals present in this gas....

An even more intriguing fact was revealed by a York University-led study team that investigated bacteria’s quorum-sensing trait, a complex type of cooperation that allows bacteria to regulate gene expression based on population density. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and York University collaborated on the research, which was recently published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. They were astonished to learn that bacterial colonies can go to the point of harming themselves in order to get rid of freeloaders....

Liquid metal catalysts show great promise for capturing carbon and cleaning up pollutants, requiring so little energy they can even be created in the kitchen. Forget the laboratory, substances that can solve environmental problems by capturing carbon dioxide, decontaminating water, and cleaning up pollutants can be easily created in a kitchen, a University Of New South Wales Sydney study shows. In a paper published on October 11, 2019, in Nature Communications, Chemical engineers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) shed light on the mysterious world of liquid metals and how they may be used as catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions while consuming little energy....

“Habitual tea consumption is associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease and all-cause death,” said first author Dr. Xinyan Wang, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China. “The favorable health effects are the most robust for green tea and for long-term habitual tea drinkers.” The analysis included 100,902 participants of the China-PAR project2 with no history of heart attack, stroke, or cancer. Participants were classified into two groups: habitual tea drinkers (three or more times a week) and never or non-habitual tea drinkers (less than three times a week) and followed up for a median of 7....

New research shows that TH17 cells can convert from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory, revealing a possible therapeutic strategy for inflammation-mediated diseases. A type of immune cell that promotes inflammation during the immune response, TH17, can convert into another type of cell that reduces inflammation, Yale researchers have found. The finding, published on April 29 in the journal Nature, points to a possible therapeutic strategy for inflammation-mediated diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis....

The way a black hole spins can provide insight into its origins, particularly for binary black holes, which are two black holes that orbit each other closely before merging. The spin and tilt of each black hole just before they merge can indicate whether the black holes formed from a quiet galactic disk or a more active cluster of stars. Astronomers are hoping to tease out which of these origin stories is more likely by analyzing the 69 confirmed binaries detected to date....

But slip beneath the surface and the above-ground simplicity gives way to subterranean complexity. Tunnels dive downward, branching and leading to specialized chambers that serve as home for the colony’s queen, as nurseries for its young, as farms for fungus cultivated for food, and as dumps for its trash. These are not just burrows. They are underground cities, some of them home to millions of individuals, reaching as far as 25 feet underground, often lasting for decades....

What is OPAL? OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) is a project to obtain long time baseline observations of the outer planets in order to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution as gas giants. The yearly observations from OPAL throughout the remainder of Hubble’s operation will provide an important legacy of time-domain images for use by planetary scientists. Viewers might notice that some of the images of the same planets appear to be different colors....

A new study, published in Frontiers in Communication, led by the University of Arizona suggests that individuals in a negative mood may be quicker at spotting inconsistencies in what they read. This study builds upon existing research on the way the brain processes language. Vicky Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UArizona, collaborated with researchers in the Netherlands to investigate the differences in how people’s brains respond to language when they are in a positive versus a negative mood....