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“Marine protected areas are increasingly being promoted as an ocean-based climate solution. Yet such claims remain controversial due to the diffuse and poorly synthesized literature on climate benefits of marine protected areas,” write the authors. “To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic literature review of 22,403 publications spanning 241 marine protected areas.” The scientists discovered that carbon sequestration increased significantly in marine-protected seagrass areas, mangroves, and regions where sediment was not trawled....

As a result of early vaccination efforts, the average state experienced five fewer deaths from COVID-19 per 10,000 adult residents. The study estimates the number of lives saved during the first five months of the vaccination campaign in each of the 50 states and Washington, DC. Adjusting for population size, New York saw the largest estimated reduction, with 11.7 fewer COVID-19 deaths per 10,000 adult residents. Hawaii observed the smallest reduction, with 1....

The reduction ranges from 28 to 40 percent fewer occurrences for the various conditions. “We compared children who ate fish at least once a week until they were two years old with children who consumed less fish than that,” says associate professor and first author Torbjørn Øien in NTNU’s Department of Public Health and Nursing. Researchers from St. Olavs hospital and NTNU conducted the study, which was published in MDPI on August 21, 2019....

About 42% of adults in the United States are obese, which increases the risk of developing chronic diseases including diabetes, cancer, and other conditions. While popular healthy diet mantras warn against midnight snacking, few studies have thoroughly studied the combined impacts of late dining on the three key factors in body weight regulation and therefore obesity risk: calorie intake regulation, calorie burn, and molecular changes in fat tissue. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding institution of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, discovered in a recent study that the timing of meals has a big impact on our energy expenditure, appetite, and molecular pathways in adipose tissue....

Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature’s most skillful camouflage artists, able to change both the color and texture of their skin within seconds to blend into their surroundings — a capability that engineers have long struggled to duplicate in synthetic materials. Now a team of researchers has come closer than ever to achieving that goal, creating a flexible material that can change its color or fluorescence and its texture at the same time, on demand, by remote control....

Although centimeter-sized soft robots have been created, thus far it has not been possible to fabricate multifunctional, flexible robots that can move and operate at smaller size scales. A team of researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston University now has overcome this challenge by developing an integrated fabrication process that enables the design of soft robots on the millimeter scale with micrometer-scale features....

In a study published in Nature Materials, researchers led by Prof. LI Shaochun at Nanjing University and Prof. MENG Sheng at the Institute of Physics (IoP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered for the first time that the many-body effects, particularly the electronic quantum correlation, can be tuned in metallic vdW monolayers through moiré engineering. The researchers synthesized the epitaxial heterostructure of 1T-TiTe2/1T-TiSe2 with various twist angles using molecular beam epitaxy and investigated the moiré pattern induced/enhanced charge density wave (CDW) states with scanning tunneling microscopy....

Dimorphos, the target asteroid, poses no threat to Earth. And don’t worry – DART’s kinetic impact cannot shove the asteroid into an Earth-impacting path. What this experiment should do, is slightly alter the asteroid’s orbit. This will help scientists learn more about deflection for if and when a dangerous asteroid is discovered. ESA’s ground stations are a key element in the Agency’s autonomous capability to track and link European missions virtually anywhere in the Solar System, while the Space Safety program is leading Europe in creating a responsible future in space....

This newly released ESO image shows the center of the Milky Way crossed by the eerie glow of zodiacal light. The sky is full of optical phenomena that can make it tricky to get a clear view of the cosmos. These present a frustrating challenge to astronomers, but for astrophotographers they can provide a real feast for the eyes! This stunning image shows the center of the Milky Way crossed by the eerie glow of zodiacal light, and is full of dust-induced features that obstruct scientific observations — but they look so beautiful it’s difficult to mind too much....

Why a wandering mind sometimes comes up with creative solutions to a problem when a person is engaged in a “mindless” task is explained by Zac Irving, a University of Virginia assistant professor of philosophy, in new co-written research. The secret seems to be that the task at hand isn’t truly mindless. A moderate level of engagement is actually required. “Say you’re stuck on a problem,” Irving said. “What do you do?...

Europe has been experiencing a severe drought for years. Across the continent, groundwater levels have been consistently low since 2018, even if extreme weather events with flooding temporarily give a different picture. The beginning of this tense situation is documented in a publication by Eva Boergens in Geophysical Research Letters from the year 2020. In it, she noted that there was a striking water shortage in Central Europe during the summer months of 2018 and 2019....

As COVID-19 cases continue to rise worldwide, it is increasingly urgent to understand how climate impacts the continued spread of the coronavirus, particularly as winter virus infections are more common and countries in the northern hemisphere will soon see cooler temperatures. In a paper in the journal Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers studied the effects of relative humidity, environmental temperature, and wind speed on the respiratory cloud and virus viability....

In research published today(January 17, 2020) in the journal Science, the solar scientists who recorded those images have pinpointed for the first time ever exactly when and where the explosion released the energy that heated spewing plasma to energies equivalent to 1 billion degrees in temperature. With data collected in the microwave spectrum, they have been able to provide quantitative measurements of the evolving magnetic field strength directly following the flare’s ignition and have tracked its conversion into other energy forms – kinetic, thermal, and superthermal – that power the flare’s explosive 5-minute trip through the corona....

A team of physicists at Penn State and the University of Wurzburg in Germany led by Cui-Zu Chang, an assistant professor of physics at Penn State studied over three dozen devices similar to the one used to produce the angel particle in the 2017 report. They found that the feature that was claimed to be the manifestation of the angel particle was unlikely to be induced by the existence of the angel particle....

Astronomers have detected a bright X-ray outburst from a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy almost 200,000 light years from Earth. A combination of X-ray and optical data indicate that the source of this radiation is a white dwarf star that may be the fastest-growing white dwarf ever observed. In several billion years, our Sun will run out of most of its nuclear fuel and shrink down to a much smaller, fainter “white dwarf” star about the size of Earth....

Doctoral candidate Nina Andrejevic combines spectroscopy and machine learning techniques to identify novel and valuable properties in matter. Born into a family of architects, Nina Andrejevic loved creating drawings of her home and other buildings while a child in Serbia. She and her twin sister shared this passion, along with an appetite for math and science. Over time, these interests converged into a scholarly path that shares some attributes with the family profession, according to Andrejevic, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at MIT....

As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. In contrast, the Milky Way’s center shows little activity. But it wasn’t always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way’s central black hole was much more active in the past. “These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago,” said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal....

Gastroesophageal reflux (GERD) is associated with chronic, painful temporomandibular disorder — pain in the temporomandibular joint — and anxiety and poor sleep contribute to this association, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Pain from temporomandibular disorder (TMD) affects about 13% of Canada’s population. Reflux is an uncomfortable condition in which stomach contents are regurgitated into the throat. Evidence indicates that anxiety, somatization, and depression are linked to GERD....

A newly published study led by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found evidence that substantial gene flow between Indian populations and Australia occurred about 4,000 years ago. Australia is thought to have remained largely isolated between its initial colonization around 40,000 years ago and the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s. A study led by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now finds evidence of substantial gene flow between Indian populations and Australia about 4,000 years ago....

In a new study, researchers identify regions in the banyan fig’s genome that promote the development of its unusual aerial roots and enhance its ability to signal its wasp pollinator. The study, published in the journal Cell, also identifies a sex-determining region in a related fig tree, Ficus hispida. Unlike F. microcarpa, which produces aerial roots and bears male and female flowers on the same tree, F. hispida produces distinct male and female trees and no aerial roots....