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The study suggests that quieting communication between heart cells and their environment protects this organ from harmful signals related to stresses such as high blood pressure, but at the cost of preventing heart cells from receiving signals that promote regeneration. The study was published today (October 24) in the journal Developmental Cell. “This paper provides an explanation for why adult hearts do not regenerate themselves, but newborn mice and human hearts do,” said senior author Bernhard Kühn, M....

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious reactor design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable....

Atmospheres have previously been detected on planets much larger than our own, including several hot-Jupiters and sub-Neptunes, all of which are primarily made of ice and gas. But this is the first time scientists have been able to nail down whether an Earth-sized, terrestrial planet outside our solar system has an atmosphere. The planet in question, LHS 3844b, was discovered in 2018 by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, and was measured to be about 1....

HSE University researchers assessed the effectiveness of the T-cell immune response to 11 variants of SARS-CoV-2. The researchers used their results to develop the T-cell COVID-19 Atlas portal (T-CoV). The continuing emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 mutations allows the virus to spread more effectively and evade antibodies. However, it is unclear whether new strains are capable of evading T-cell immunity— one of the body’s main lines of defense against COVID-19. The development of a T-cell immune response is largely governed by genetic factors, including variations in the genes of the major histocompatibility complex (also known as HLA)....

Progress 82 launched on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 8:20 p.m. EDT (5:20 a.m. Baikonur time) on Tuesday, October 25. It was in orbit for two days before docking to the orbital laboratory.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford discovered that at the core of every atom is a nucleus. Atomic nuclei consist of electrically positive protons and electrically neutral neutrons. These are held together by the strongest known fundamental force, called the strong force. The nucleus makes up much less than .01% of the volume of the atom, but typically contains more than 99.9% of the mass of the atom. The chemical properties of a substance are determined by the negatively charged electrons enshrouding the nucleus....

Dr. Natalia Freund and doctoral students Michael Mor and Ruofan Lee of the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine led the research. The study was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ben Croker of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Prof. Ye Xiang of Tsinghua University in Beijing as well as Prof. Meital Gal-Tanamy and Dr. Moshe Dessau of Bar-Ilan University also took part in the study....

Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after CO2 in terms of volume in the atmosphere, but it has a much stronger greenhouse effect. Therefore, whether negative climatic impacts would arise from this incident is a key concern worldwide. Although a news article published in the journal Nature commented on this issue, no quantitative conclusions were made. Recently, scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated the possible climatic impact of the leaked methane by adopting the energy-conservation framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6), released in 2021....

University of Birmingham scientists are among more than 100 experts who have signed a letter published in The Lancet accusing the UK government of conducting a ‘dangerous and unethical experiment’ and urging it to reconsider its plans to abandon all COVID-19 restrictions. The doctors and scientists, including Professors Alan McNally, KK Cheng, Alice Roberts and Joanna Parish at the University of Birmingham, claim the government’s strategy of mass infection when only half the UK population is fully vaccinated will entail “both acute and long-term illness....

The new coronavirus has caused more than five million deaths. Many lives could have been saved with antiviral drugs, but no treatment of this type has been available to the healthcare system. During the pandemic, researchers around the world have tried to find a pharmaceutical, but the development of new medications often takes a long time. During the first months of the pandemic, researchers were able to determine the structure of the coronavirus and how it functions at the molecular level....

The Discovery of a natural cyan blue: A unique food-sourced anthocyanin could replace synthetic brilliant blue. Scientists have developed a long-sought naturally derived cyan blue colorant sourced from red cabbage anthocyanin pigments that may offer an alternative to the industry standard blue dye, although more testing is needed to determine the compound’s safety. The novel colorant, which was developed using an enzyme that converts a range of anthocyanins to one with the ideal wavelength, remains highly stable over time and may also produce better green colors than those derived from existing natural blue colorants....

In mice, roseolovirus disrupts immune cells’ process of learning self-recognition. Autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Type 1 diabetes are thought to arise when people with a genetic susceptibility to autoimmunity encounter something in the environment that triggers their immune systems to attack their own bodies. Scientists have made progress in identifying genetic factors that put people at risk, but the environmental triggers have proven more elusive. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St....

Over a half-billion years ago, life on Earth was comprised of simple ocean organisms unlike anything living in today’s oceans. Then, beginning about 540 million years ago, animal structures changed dramatically. During this time, ancestors of many animal groups we know today appeared, such as primitive crustaceans and worms, yet for years scientists did not know how these two seemingly unrelated communities of animals were connected, until now. An analysis of tubular fossils by scientists led by Jim Schiffbauer at the University of Missouri provides evidence of a 550 million-year-old digestive tract — one of the oldest known examples of fossilized internal anatomical structures — and reveals what scientists believe is a possible answer to the question of how these animals are connected....

Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. Wächtershäuser and others predicted that short peptides would have bound metals and served as catalysts of life-producing chemistry, according to to study co-author Vikas Nanda, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School....

By measuring the velocity at which seismic waves travel at various depths, scientists can determine the types of rocks and other materials that lie beneath the Earth’s surface. The accuracy of such seismic maps depends on scientists’ understanding of how various materials affect seismic waves’ speeds. Now researchers at MIT and the Australian National University have found that seismic waves are essentially blind to a very common substance found throughout the Earth’s interior: water....

The point of no return: In astronomy, it’s known as a black hole — a region in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Black holes that can be billions of times more massive than our sun may reside at the heart of most galaxies. Such supermassive black holes are so powerful that activity at their boundaries can ripple throughout their host galaxies....

Roger Wiens, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University’s College of Science, leads the instrument team behind the discovery. He is the principal investigator of Perseverance’s SuperCam, a suite of tools that make up the rover’s “head,” including advanced remote-sensing instruments, spectrometers, cameras, and the microphone. “We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,” Wiens said. “They take readings at regular intervals....

However, like with the rest of the body, as you age your brain may not be nearly as sharp. You may need to write things down, miss appointments, or have trouble watching TV without straining to understand the dialogue or action. Fortunately, you can also exercise your brain. “The keys to our nervous system are the grey and white matter,” says Hermundur Sigmundsson, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Psychology....

A new weapon in the fight against cancer has emerged, changing the treatment landscape. CAR T-cell therapy, which was first approved for clinical usage in 2017, attacks cancer with a patient’s own re-engineered immune cells. It has been shown to be very effective against some forms of lymphoma. Its success reflects the continuous expansion of immunotherapy, a type of treatment that boosts or modifies the immune system to attack disease....

Although a number of COVID-19 vaccines exist, some people who received the shots have still become sick with the disease, and only a fraction of the world’s population is vaccinated. That means effective treatments are still needed, and a few are now available that target the virus’s RNA polymerase — the enzyme it uses to make more of its own RNA inside human cells. But some of these drugs, such as remdesivir, don’t work unless given at very early stages of infection and can require injections....