A high-fat diet increases the incidence of colorectal cancer. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Fellow Semir Beyaz and collaborators from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that in mice, fat disrupts the relationship between intestinal cells and the immune cells that patrol them looking for emerging tumors. Reconfiguring the gut microbiome may be a way to heal the relationship. The immune system patrols tissues looking for and eliminating threats....

Photosensitizers are molecules that absorb sunlight and pass that energy along to generate electricity or drive chemical reactions. They’re generally based on rare, expensive metals; so the discovery that iron carbenes, with plain old iron at their cores, can do this, too, triggered a wave of research over the past few years. But while ever more efficient iron carbenes are being discovered, scientists need to understand exactly how these molecules work at an atomic level in order to engineer them for top performance....

Researchers from the University of Nicosia simulated an intercontinental ballistic missile’s atomic bomb explosion and its resulting blast wave to assess its impact on people seeking refuge indoors. The findings were published in Physics of Fluids by AIP Publishing. In the moderate damage zone, the blast wave is enough to topple some buildings and injure people caught outdoors. However, sturdier buildings, such as concrete structures, can remain standing. The team used advanced computer modeling to study how a nuclear blast wave speeds through a standing structure....

The scientists presented their findings at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology last week in Raleigh, North Carolina. In total, they found 18 specimens that had teeth marks. None of the bones showed any signs of healing, indicating that the bites were inflicted on dead animals as they were in the process of being consumed. The bite marks included extensive puncture and pull marks on the neck frills on some of the specimens....

This galaxy offers a peek back to the very early formative years of the universe and may just be the tip of the iceberg. “This galaxy is an example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of extremely small, faint objects that existed about 500 million years after the big bang, the beginning of the universe,” explained study leader Adi Zitrin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California....

Light from the distant, high-redshift galaxy arrives at Earth, having been distorted by the gigantic gravitational influence of the intervening cluster. Fascinatingly, instead of making it more difficult to perceive cosmological objects, such strong lensing effects improve the resolution and depth of an image by magnifying the background object. Sometimes gravitational lensing can even produce multiple images of the object as light is bent in different directions around the foreground cluster....

NGC 1866 is found at the very edges of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy located near the Milky Way. The cluster was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop, who cataloged thousands of stars and deep-sky objects during his career. However, NGC 1866 is no ordinary cluster. It is a surprisingly young globular cluster situated close enough to us that its stars can be studied individually — no mean feat given the mammoth distances involved in studying the cosmos!...

The finding suggests that quasars—the brilliant cores of active galaxies – may commonly host two central supermassive black holes, which fall into orbit about one another as a result of the merger between two galaxies. Like a pair of whirling skaters, the black-hole duo generates tremendous amounts of energy that makes the core of the host galaxy outshine the glow of its population of billions of stars, which scientists then identify as quasars....

This observation comes from a project which delves into two rogues’ galleries of weird and wonderful galaxies: A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, compiled by astronomers Halton Arp and Barry Madore, and the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp. Each collection contains a menagerie of spectacularly peculiar galaxies, including interacting galaxies such as Arp 248, as well as one- or three-armed spiral galaxies, galaxies with shell-like structures, and a variety of other space oddities....

After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has, at last, come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013. The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus. Normally, a moon like Proteus should have gravitationally swept aside or swallowed the smaller moon while clearing out its orbital path....

The School of Social Sciences‘ Dr. Andrea Kay said some scientists defined the Anthropocene as starting in the 20th century, but the new research showed human-induced landcover change was globally extensive by 2000BC. The Anthropocene – the current geological age – is viewed as the period in which human activity has been the dominant influence on Earth’s climate and environment. “The activities of farmers, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers had significantly changed the planet four millennia ago,‘‘ Dr....

Wei Gao, Ayesegul Uygun and Joseph Wang from the University of California, San Diego, published their study on hydrogen-bubble-powered mircorockets in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. They state that this is the first reported use of chemically-powered microrockets that can be self-propelled without any external fuel. These acid-powered microrockets could expand the scope of nano- and microscale motor applications in extreme environments, such as the human stomach or silicon wet-etching baths....

The formation of ice in clouds is a core element of the water cycle on Earth. It is usually difficult to isolate the ice formation process in order to study it individually because the interaction of aerosol particles, air motion, and microphysical processes in clouds is too complex. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand these processes in detail in order to better map this mechanism in weather and climate models....

Supernovae form in a few different ways, but always involve a dying star. These stars become unbalanced, lose control, and explode violently, briefly shining as brightly as an entire galaxy before slowly fading away. One of the four supernovae observed within this galaxy, SN 2015bh, is especially interesting. This particular supernova initially had its identity called into question. When it was first discovered in 2015, astronomers classified SN 2015bh as a supernova imposter, believing it to be not an exploding star but simply an unpredictable outburst from a massive star in its final phase of life....

The type and quantity of an infant’s language exposure relates to their brain function, according to new research published in JNeurosci. Babies learn their native language by interacting with their caregivers. Rather than simply overhearing adult words, taking turns in a “conversation” predicts an infant’s future language abilities. But it is unclear how language exposure shapes brain circuitry. The brain’s language networks may develop in two stages: a bottom-up auditory-processing network begins developing in gestation, and a top-down network for processing more complex syntax and semantics develops in early childhood....

Considering next-generation smart windows and façade devices, one aspect of this problem is addressed in the research project Large-Area Fluidic Windows (LaWin) which has been coordinated at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, since 2015. A new type of such smart windows was now presented in the upcoming issue of Advanced Sustainable Systems. In their paper ‘Large-Area Smart Window with Tunable Shading and Solar-Thermal Harvesting Ability Based on Remote Switching of a Magneto-Active Liquid’ the Jena materials researchers introduce prototypes of a window that changes its light permeability at the touch of a button, and, at the same time, can be used for solar-thermal energy harvesting....

Ayala Rao, professor of plant pathology and microbiology, has been studying Brome Mosaic virus for decades. Unlike some viruses, the genetic material of this virus is divided into three particles that until now were impossible to tell apart. “Without a more definitive picture of the differences between these particles, we couldn’t fully understand how they work together to initiate an infection that destroys food crops,” Rao said. “Our approach to this problem has brought an important part of this picture into very clear focus....

Over the past 20 years, there has also been a growing number of therapeutic applications for botulinum toxin type A, known as Botox, including treatment for migraines, leaky bladders, excessive sweating, and cardiac conditions. “This is the first time that an active botulinum toxin has been identified outside of Clostridium botulinum and its relatives, which are often found in soil and untreated water,” said Andrew Doxey, one of the study’s two corresponding authors and a bioinformatics professor at the University of Waterloo....

The team, which includes Wei-Jun Cai of the University of Delaware, found a strong correlation between the rate of ocean acidification and the accelerated rate of ice melting in the region. This is a dangerous combination that puts the survival of plants, shellfish, coral reefs, other marine life, and other biological processes throughout the planet’s ecosystem at risk. The new study, published in the prestigious journal Science, is the first to analyze Arctic acidification data covering more than two decades, from 1994 to 2020....

An investigation aboard the International Space Station has come to the rescue. The European Space Agency (ESA) Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) is a collection of optical cameras, photometers and a large X- and gamma-ray detector mounted on the outside of ESA’s Columbus Module on the station. For at least two years, it will observe thunderstorm-generated electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere – the stratosphere and mesosphere – up to the ionosphere, the edge of space....