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The most comprehensive genomic analysis of the human brain ever undertaken has revealed new insights into the changes it undergoes through development, how it varies among individuals, and the roots of neuropsychiatric illnesses such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. The multi-institutional analysis of almost 2,000 brains integrates the complex choreography of brain development and function and was published on December 14 in 11 studies appearing in a special edition of the journal Science and two sister publications....

What is Ginkgo Biloba? Ginkgo biloba is a medicinal herb that comes from a tree also known as the maidenhair tree. Among the oldest tree species in the world, ginkgo trees are considered “living fossils” because they’ve survived planetary extinction events. Maidenhair trees grow at least about 130 feet tall and can live well over a thousand years.[1] Ginkgo biloba leaves have been dried and ground into powder in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years....

Researchers at The University of Auckland have proposed a new method for finding Earth-like planets and they anticipate that the number will be in the order of 100 billion. The strategy uses a technique called gravitational microlensing, currently used by a Japan-New Zealand collaboration called MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) at New Zealand’s Mt John Observatory. Their work appears in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

The tsunami’s obvious cause: the quake occurred in a subduction zone, where the tectonic plate underlying the Pacific Ocean was trying to slide under the adjoining continental plate holding up Japan and other landmasses. The plates had been largely stuck against each other for centuries, and pressure built up. Finally, something gave. Hundreds of square miles of seafloor suddenly lurched horizontally some 160 feet (50 meters), and thrust upward by up to 33 feet (10 meters)....

Although the new system is in the early stages of development, it may eventually provide a way to treat patients whose burn injuries are too extensive to allow skin grafts. The results are reported today (February 4, 2020) in the IOP Publishing journal Biofabrication. Senior author Professor Axel Günther, from the University of Toronto, said: “Skin grafts, where the damaged tissue is removed and replaced with skin taken from another area of the patient’s body, are a standard treatment for serious burns....

New metrics and forecasting models are key to understanding and anticipating the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted U.S. healthcare organizations. Hospitals have faced drug and device shortages and created new ICUs overnight. Care plans have evolved out of necessity, and hospitals’ carefully constructed patient flow systems were up-ended. In an article published today in NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, leaders and clinician researchers from Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) propose using complexity science — a field concerned with understanding dynamic, unpredictable systems, such as the human brain, economies or climates — to identify strategies that healthcare organizations can use to respond better to the ongoing pandemic and to anticipate future challenges to healthcare delivery....

Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster Since 2003, the black hole at the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves emitted by the black hole generated ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be translated into a note — one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine....

Heat has been used for healing long before saunas were invented. The ancient Greeks and Romans built public baths over hot springs and on manmade fire furnaces. In East Asian history, stones were heated by fire and placed on the body to deliver the healing powers of heat. Today, scientists understand the mechanism behind the therapeutic benefits of heat immersion. When the body is exposed to temperatures of 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit and above, heat shock proteins are released....

Products popular among glasses-wearers during masked pandemic. The anti-fogging sprays and cloths many people use to prevent condensation on their eyeglasses when wearing a mask or face shield may contain high levels of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), a new Duke University-led study finds. Exposure to some PFAS, particularly perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), is associated with impaired immune function, cancer, thyroid disease, and other health disorders....

New results challenge the current model of how the brain can reorganize in the aftermath of stroke damage. A study from UCLA neurologists challenges the idea that the brain recruits existing neurons to take over for those that are lost from stroke. It shows that in mice, undamaged neurons do not change their function after a stroke to compensate for damaged ones. A stroke occurs when the blood supply to a certain part of the brain is interrupted, such as by a blood clot....

Science speaks of “convergent evolution” in such cases, when animal, but also plant species independently develop features that have the same shape and function. There are many examples of this: Fish, for example, have fins, as do whales, although they are mammals. Birds and bats have wings, and when it comes to using poisonous substances to defend themselves against attackers, many creatures, from jellyfish to scorpions to insects, have all evolved the same instrument: the venomous sting....

‘I was curious how that evolved,’ says Croft, adding, ‘I wondered if the springiness of the poles allowed them to transport the load more efficiently.’ However, he also knew that the benefits of carrying loads on flexible poles was a bone of contention; some studies suggested the poles are beneficial, while others did not. Croft realized that many of the previous investigations had been carried out with pole-carrying novices, whereas the villagers that he had observed were true professionals, sometimes with decades of experience....

Hubble also surprised astronomers by revealing a few young stars and clusters in Messer 105, which was thought to be a “dead” galaxy incapable of star formation. Messier 105 is now thought to form roughly one Sun-like star every 10,000 years. Star-forming activity has also been spotted in a vast ring of hydrogen gas encircling both Messier 105 and its closest neighbor, the lenticular galaxy NGC 3384. Messier 105 was discovered in 1781, lies about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), and is the brightest elliptical galaxy within the Leo I galaxy group....

Recent theoretical predictions indicate that these dwarf satellite galaxies must be protected by a pervasive shield that prevents the Milky Way from removing their essential star-forming gas. This so-called Magellanic Corona, made of supercharged gas with temperatures of half a million degrees, would act as a sort of cosmic crash zone around the Magellanic Clouds, keeping the disk and stars relatively unscathed during collisions. Even though simulations show that the Magellanic Corona should exist, observational evidence has remained elusive....

Just like fog curling around a street lamp, reflection nebulae like NGC 1999 only shine because of the light from an embedded source. In the case of NGC 1999, this source is the aforementioned newborn star which is visible at the center of this image. Named V380 Orionis, this star is thought to be somewhere between 1 and 3 million years old. The most notable aspect of NGC 1999’s appearance, however, is the conspicuous hole in its center, which resembles an inky-black keyhole of cosmic proportions....

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of 1.5 billion miles from the Sun (beyond Saturn’s orbit). Slightly warmed by the remote Sun, it has already begun to develop an 80,000-mile-wide fuzzy cloud of dust, called a coma, enveloping a tiny, solid nucleus of frozen gas and dust. These observations represent the earliest signs of activity ever seen from a comet entering the solar system’s planetary zone for the first time....

Galaxies like our Milky Way are islands of stars that typically contain several hundred billion suns and at least a comparable number of planets. Gas and dust clouds permeate the space between the stars and are constantly stirred up by supernova explosions and radiation outbursts of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. Most of the matter is however contained in a puzzling invisible component, the dark matter, which holds the galaxies together as some kind of cosmic glue....

This region is known to be covered by large lava deposits probably from the nearby Tharsis Montes volcanoes. In this image, three medium-sized impact craters take center stage, with many smaller impacts pockmarking the scene. Zooming into the larger craters it is possible to see layers in the inner rim that could represent the successive accumulation of lava flows in this area. TGO’s full science mission began in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations....

Estimates of DNA’s mutation rate work like a molecular clock that underpins genetic dating. It’s compelling to have a link between genetics and archeology. The number of differences between the sequences of two species indicates how much time has elapsed since their last common ancestor was alive. In order to correctly estimate the amount of time that has passed, geneticists need the pace at which DNA changed. These rates were previously estimated by comparing the human genome with sequences of other primates....