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Part of the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) initiative, the trial expects to enroll approximately 2,160 hospitalized adults with moderate to severe COVID-19 at medical facilities in the United States and Latin America. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of NIH, will coordinate and oversee the trial with funding support from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, in support of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed goals....

Symbolic material culture, a collection of cultural and intellectual achievements handed down from generation to generation, has so far been attributed to our own species, Homo sapiens. “The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” says Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Artifacts whose functional value lies not so much in their practical but rather in their symbolic use are proxies for fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it....

Its name sounds legendary, but the newly discovered insect Neuroterus (noo-ROH’-teh-rus) valhalla doesn’t look or act the part. It’s barely a millimeter long and spends 11 months of the year locked in a crypt. N. valhalla does have the noteworthy distinction of being the first insect species to be described alongside its fully sequenced genome, and the Rice University researchers who discovered it are preparing to see how the tiny, nonstinging wasps may have been impacted by Houston’s historic February 2021 freeze....

A Phase 2 clinical trial is testing the new drug’s ability to reduce mortality in older people hospitalized with COVID-19. By directly targeting immune aging, BGE-175 could effectively treat emerging COVID variants that evade vaccine-based immunity. The immune system deteriorates with age, making COVID-19 particularly deadly in older people — but to date, no clinically available medication addresses this key risk factor. A study published today (March 21, 2022) in Nature shows that an oral drug that reverses multiple aspects of immune aging effectively prevents death in a mouse model of COVID-19, suggesting that the medication could be used to protect the elderly patients who are at greatest risk in the pandemic....

It was previously believed that the mechanism by which lithium ions are stored in battery materials is uniform for each active particle. However, the Cambridge-led research discovered that lithium storage is anything but uniform over the charge-discharge cycle. When the battery is nearing the conclusion of its discharge cycle, the active particles’ surfaces become lithium saturated while their cores are lithium deficient. This causes a reduction in capacity and the loss of reusable lithium....

Triantha occidentalis makes its home in wetlands and bogs from Alaska to California and inland to Montana. In the summer, it shoots up tall flowering stems coated with sticky hairs that trap small insects like gnats and midges. The scientists discovered that the plant acquires more than half of its nitrogen by digesting these ensnared insects, a welcome treat in its nutrient-poor habitat. This is the 12th known independent evolution of carnivory in the plant kingdom, and the first time the trait has been discovered in the Alismatales order, a group of largely aquatic flowering plants....

In a paper published today in Science Immunology, the authors outline how, through combining a sophisticated sequencing technique with a mass cytometry method (the measurement of cell characteristics), they discovered the Tfh cell dysfunction. According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, about 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., about 1 million are living with the virus, and 1 in 7 of those infected don’t know it....

Psammogorgia pax, collected at a depth of 63 meters (207 feet) in Hannibal Bank — a flat-topped seamount located in Coiba National Park, a biodiversity hotspot and World Heritage Site — is part of an unexplored and understudied marine ecosystem: the mesophotic coral communities. These difficult-to-access habitats, found 40-150 meters (130-490 feet) deep and in between shallow-water reefs and deep-water corals, are under the increasing need for protection, yet little is known about their ecology and biodiversity....

New research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, indicates that these events actually occurred a hundred million years earlier, changing perceptions of the evolution of the Earth’s biosphere. Plants are major contributors to the chemical weathering of continental rocks, a key process in the carbon cycle that regulates Earth’s atmosphere and climate over millions of years. The team used ‘molecular clock’ methodology, which combined evidence on the genetic differences between living species and fossil constraints on the age of their shared ancestors, to establish an evolutionary timescale that sees through the gaps in the fossil record....

Researchers have used advanced imaging approaches to achieve super-resolution microscopy at unprecedented speeds. The new method should make it possible to capture the details of processes occurring in living cells at speeds not previously possible. Super-resolution techniques, often called nanoscopy, achieve nano-scale resolution by overcoming the diffraction limit of light. Although nanoscopy can capture images of individual molecules inside cells, it is difficult to use with living cells because hundreds or thousands of imaging frames are needed to reconstruct an image – a process too slow to capture quickly changing dynamics....

This achievement has been led by Professor Dae Won Moon and Dr. Jae Young Kim from the department of New Biology at DGIST. The study demonstrates a high-resolution mass spectrometry imaging system capable of analyzing live biological samples at a resolution of several micrometers (㎛). Mass spectrometry imaging system is a technology to measure how much of a substance exists in a certain region as it acquires biomolecular information of tissues and cells as well as the spatial distribution of biomolecules through the measurement of the mass of biomolecules by desorbing biomolecules from tissues and cells....

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft uses the JunoCam imager to highlight features on Jupiter where multiple atmospheric conditions appear to collide. The image was taken at a distance of 7,900 miles (12,700 kilometers) from the planet on March 27, 2017, as Juno performed a close flyby of Jupiter. This publicly selected target is called “STB Spectre.” The ghostly bluish streak across the right half of the image is a long-lived storm, one of the few structures perceptible in these whitened latitudes where the south temperate belt of Jupiter would normally be....

The first images of an upward surge of the Sun’s gases into quiescent coronal loops have been identified by an international team of scientists. The discovery is one more step towards understanding the origins of extreme space storms, which can destroy satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth. The study published today by University of Cambridge scientists working with colleagues in India and the USA is the first to visualize the movement of gases at one million degrees in coronal loops – solar structures that are rooted at both ends and extend out from active regions of the Sun....

However, while actions towards the closure of all nuclear power plants in only a few decades’ time are already well underway, the alternative energy sources currently in operation have some major drawbacks: they rely mainly on non-renewable resources, produce significantly less energy compared with nuclear power plants and, most importantly, are considered to be amongst the main contributors of carbon emissions and, thereby, the climate crisis which humanity is now set to battle....

Funded by the Department of Defense Deployed Warfighter Protection program, the controlled-release passive device was designed by Nagarajan Rajagopal, a PhD candidate and Dr. Christopher Batich in UF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. It recently was tested successfully in a four-week semi-field study at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Gainesville in a collaboration with Dr. Daniel Kline, Dr. Jerry Hogsette, and Adam Bowman from the USDA’s Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology....

Power Grid One is focused on defending large U.S. electrical utility systems from potential attacks by hostile nations, as well as from damage inflicted by extreme natural disasters like hurricanes and solar flares. The Resilient Energy Systems campaign, a multi-year research portfolio with up to $40 million in total funding, is supported by Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, which funds exploratory work in science and technology. “The original electric grid was not designed with security in mind against cyberhacks, or protection from electromagnetic disturbances, or natural disasters such as hurricanes or geomagnetic solar storms,” portfolio manager Craig Lawton said....

The scientists note that it’s actually hard to describe how loud the bellbird’s call is, because it’s difficult to compare sounds from different distances. But the calls are so loud, they wonder how white bellbird females listen at close range without damaging their hearing. Calls of howler monkeys and bison are well studied and quite loud, Podos, an expert in bioacoustics, points out, but not nearly as loud as the impressive bellbirds, who weigh about half a pound (1/4 kg) compared to the larger mammals....

“That’s a huge decline in impact,” said Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University. “We found that as they get older, the work of biomedical scientists was just not as innovative and impactful.” However, Weinberg noted that the causes of this pattern of falling innovation make the findings more nuanced and highlight the need to continue supporting scientists into the latter stages of their careers....

That question led him and his students to develop a new type of microfluidics platform in which droplets are sealed within tiny wells, overcoming the problem of drug leakage that had stymied previous efforts. This system worked well for screening drugs, but it also ended up being useful for many other applications, far beyond what Blainey had originally envisioned. “That’s one of the things I love about science — you can have a thought about why doesn’t microfluidics do more for chemistry, and then you develop something that turns out to have all these really exciting uses and applications that no one imagined,” says Blainey, a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering....

Machine learning, introduced 70 years ago, is based on evidence of the dynamics of learning in our brains. Using the speed of modern computers and large data sets, deep learning algorithms have recently produced results comparable to those of human experts in various applicable fields, but with different characteristics that are distant from current knowledge of learning in neuroscience. Using advanced experiments on neuronal cultures and large-scale simulations, a group of scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has demonstrated a new type of ultrafast artificial intelligence algorithms — based on the very slow brain dynamics — which outperform learning rates achieved to date by state-of-the-art learning algorithms....