Each year, factories around the world churn out more than 12 million metric tons of the organic chemical 1,3-butadiene, which is used in tires, adhesives, sealants, and other plastic and rubber products. They produce it by an energy-intensive process that relies on petroleum, which contributes to climate change. Scientists have tried for many years to create 1,3-butadiene from more environmentally friendly starting materials by using specially designed microbes. But no one had previously succeeded in transforming a simple sugar such as glucose into the chemical in one easy step....

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown virus infecting nearly a third of America’s bald eagle population. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources found the virus while searching for the cause of Wisconsin River Eagle Syndrome, an enigmatic disease endemic to bald eagles near the Lower Wisconsin River. The newly identified bald eagle hepacivirus, or BeHV, may contribute to the fatal disease, which causes eagles to stumble and have seizures....

Earth and Venus are rocky planets of about the same size and rock chemistry, so they should be losing their internal heat to space at about the same rate. How Earth loses its heat is well known, but Venus’ heat flow mechanism has been a mystery. A study that uses three-decade-old data from NASA’s Magellan mission has taken a new look at how Venus cools and found that thin regions of the planet’s uppermost layer may provide an answer....

Comprehensive case finding, repeat testing, and apps for contact tracing and self-isolation also key. Border controls, restricted entry, and quarantine for inbound travelers are essential for stopping not just COVID-19, but any future pandemic, in its tracks, finds a review of the available published evidence on early infection control in the online journal BMJ Open. Comprehensive case finding, repeat testing to rule out false results, apps, and use of GPS data to enable contact tracing and self isolation, as well as financial support are also key elements in any policies to curb the spread of infection....

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have shown that Gulf War Illness patients have one of two different kinds of changes after exercise when compared with healthy patients. The results clarify that Gulf War illness (GWI) leads to measurable physiological changes in the brain, suggesting multiple strategies for future treatments of Gulf War illness patients. GWI affects about 25% to 30% of veterans from the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War....

Scientists have developed a drug that potently neutralizes SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus, and is equally effective against the Omicron variant and every other tested variant. The drug is designed in such a way that natural selection to maintain infectiousness of the virus should also maintain the drug’s activity against future variants. The investigational drug was developed by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. As described in a report published on December 7 in the journal Science Advances, the drug is not an antibody, but a related molecule known as an ACE2 receptor decoy....

The new approach, described in the August 13, 2019, issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, uses a small needle to inject harmless, genetically engineered viruses into the space between the white of the eye and the eye’s vascular layer, called the suprachoroidal space. From there, the virus can spread throughout the eye to deliver therapeutic genes to cells in the retina. The gene therapy approach currently used to treat Leber congenital amaurosis, an inherited eye disorder, involves a surgical procedure to inject the gene-carrying virus under the retina....

Cell membranes are just a few nanometers thick but are essential for life. They serve as a barrier between the cell’s interior and its surrounding environment and host many activities necessary for cell function. Researchers from Virginia Tech and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using neutron scattering to investigate how the cell membrane and the virus impact each other and what therapeutic candidates could make cell membranes more resistant to viral entry....

A series of six articles appearing in the March issue of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences finds new correlations between a Mediterranean diet and healthy aging outcomes — while also underscoring the need for careful approaches to the use of data in order to measure the diet’s potential benefits. Among their findings, the new articles report on the underlying mechanisms of the diet; the positive relationship between the diet and physical and cognitive function; the value of taking a coenzyme Q10 supplement while adhering to the diet; and the role of the diet in reducing inflammation....

Almost immediately after NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft made their brief visits to Saturn in the early 1980s, scientists were hungry for more. The Voyagers had offered them only a brief glimpse of a family of new worlds — Saturn’s icy moons — and the researchers were eager to spend more time among those bodies. The successor to the Voyagers at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, has spent the past 10 years collecting images and other data as it has toured the Ringed Planet and its family of satellites....

This lofty cloud, imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, was part of the winter cap of condensation over Titan’s north pole. Now, eight years after spotting this mysterious bit of atmospheric fluff, researchers have determined that it contains methane ice, which produces a much denser cloud than the ethane ice previously identified there. “The idea that methane clouds could form this high on Titan is completely new,” said Carrie Anderson, a Cassini participating scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study....

There are no drugs that can cure people who are infected. But researchers at SDU have now developed a substance that can form the basis for the development of drugs against COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, arrived one year ago and turned our lives upside-down. While worldwide vaccination programs are currently ongoing, we do not yet know for how long the vaccine will provide immune protection against infection, and if the currently approved vaccines can provide protection against the emerging virus variants....

Tucson, Arizonia — A long-standing debate about the source of the asteroid that impacted the Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs has been put to rest thanks to the Chelyabinsk meteorite that disintegrated over Russia in February 2013, a new paper published in the journal Icarus shows. Astronomers have debated whether the dinosaur killer was linked to the breakup of a large asteroid forming the Baptistina Asteroid Family (BAF) beyond Mars, some of which ended up on Earth-crossing orbits....

NRG Oncology Phase III clinical trial, NRG-GY018, evaluating pembrolizumab in combination with standard of care chemotherapy (carboplatin and paclitaxel) met its primary endpoint of progression free survival (PFS) for the treatment of patients with stage III-IV or recurrent endometrial carcinoma, regardless of mismatch repair status. A pre-specified interim analysis, conducted by an independent Data Monitoring Committee, demonstrates that pembrolizumab in combination with chemotherapy has a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in PFS compared with chemotherapy alone in both study cohorts, mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) and mismatch repair proficient (pMMR)....

Findings reveal potential new strategy for treating people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Columbia researchers have restored normal working memory to a mouse model of schizophrenia, eliminating a core symptom of the disorder that, in people, has proven virtually impossible to treat. Working memory is a fundamental brain process used to retain and recall information on the fly, such as remembering a new phone number long enough to dial it. It is severely impaired in people with schizophrenia altering their reasoning, perception, and decision-making....

The image is enhanced and involved masking, separately enhancing, and then reassembling water and land portions of the image. The water patterns are the result of an RGB display of Landsat-8’s red, blue, and ultra-blue bands. Land is shown using short-wavelength-infrared, near-infrared, and green.

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, scientists from the CNRS, the University of Lyon, and The Michelin Group use a laser imaging technique to study water flow in front of and through tire grooves. To counteract hydroplaning, tread designs are chosen to drain water from the front of the tire without decreasing its ability to adhere to the road. Very few quantitative experimental studies of the movement of water through tire grooves have been done, so little is known about the exact flow patterns in these situations....

A team of astronomers led by Jose Dias do Nascimento (Department of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte [DFTE, UFRN], Brazil) has found the farthest known solar twin in the Milky Way Galaxy — CoRoT Sol 1, which has about the same mass and chemical composition as the Sun. Spectra from the High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) on the Subaru Telescope showed that CoRoT Sol 1 is about 6....

Astronomers have discovered several pairs of such merging galaxies, or luminous “dual” quasars, using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawaii – Subaru Telescope, W. M. Keck Observatory, and Gemini Observatory. These dual quasars are so rare, a research team led by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo estimates only 0.3% of all known quasars have two supermassive black holes that are on a collision course with each other....

People who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This is the result of a study by DDZ, DZD and IQVIA, which has now been published in Diabetologia. Studies show that the human pancreas can also be a target of the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 virus). Following a COVID infection, reduced numbers of insulin secretory granules in beta cells and impaired glucose-stimulated insulin secretion have been observed....