Amazing Science

Two new species that live off manganese found in a laboratory sink

For more than 100 years, scientists have predicted the existence of manganese-eating bacteria. But none has been found—until now, Science News reports. Two environmental microbiologists left a jar covered in manganese carbonate, a pink metal compound, in the sink to soak. Ten weeks later, they returned to something remarkable. The jar’s contents had been replaced with a new substance, dark and crusty.

And two new species of bacteria were responsible, according to a study the researchers published last week in Nature. The bacteria, tentatively christened Candidatus Manganitrophus nodulliformans and Ramlicbacter lithotrophicus, can borrow electrons from metals like manganese and use them as fuel for growth. When metals lose electrons, they oxidize; in the case of the dirty jar, this caused the contents to transform from manganese carbonate into manganese oxide (above). Because both species likely came from tap water, the findings could help control manganese oxide pollution in drinking water, the researchers say.

Metal-organic frameworks with added nitrogen compounds efficiently trap carbon dioxide from emissions, allowing them to be sequestered underground.

A big advance in carbon capture technology could provide an efficient and inexpensive way for natural gas power plants to remove carbon dioxide from their flue emissions, a necessary step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming and climate change.

Developed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and ExxonMobil, the new technique uses a highly porous material called a metal-organic framework, or MOF, modified with nitrogen-containing amine molecules to capture the CO2 and low temperature steam to flush out the CO2 for other uses or to sequester it underground.

In experiments, the technique showed a six times greater capacity for removing CO2 from flue gas than current amine-based technology, and it was highly selective, capturing more than 90% of the CO2 emitted. The process uses low temperature steam to regenerate the MOF for repeated use, meaning less energy is required for carbon capture.

For CO2 capture, steam stripping — where you use direct contact with steam to take off the CO2 — has been a sort of holy grail for the field. It is rightly seen as the cheapest way to do it,” said senior researcher Jeffrey Long, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and of chemical and biomolecular engineering and senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab. “These materials, at least from the experiments we have done so far, look very promising.”

Because there’s little market for most captured CO2, power plants would likely pump most of it back into the ground, or sequester it, where it would ideally turn into rock. The cost of scrubbing the emissions would have to be facilitated by government policies, such as carbon trading or a carbon tax, to incentivize CO2 capture and sequestration, something many countries have already implemented.

The work was funded by ExxonMobil, which is working with both the Berkeley group and Long’s start-up, Mosaic Materials Inc., to develop, scale up and test processes for stripping CO2 from emissions.

Just how old is the Universe? Astrophysicists have been debating this question for decades. In recent years, new scientific measurements have suggested the universe may be hundreds of millions of years younger than its previously estimated age of approximately 13.8 billions of years.

Now new research published in a series of papers by an international team of astrophysicists, including Neelima Sehgal, PhD, from Stony Brook University, suggest the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. By using observations from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, their findings match the measurements of the Planck satellite data of the same ancient light.

The ACT research team is an international collaboration of scientists from 41 institutions in seven countries. The Stony Brook team from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, led by Professor Sehgal, plays an essential role in analyzing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- the afterglow light from the Big Bang.

"In Stony Brook-led work we are restoring the 'baby photo' of the universe to its original condition, eliminating the wear and tear of time and space that distorted the image," explains Professor Sehgal, a co-author on the papers. "Only by seeing this sharper baby photo or image of the universe, can we more fully understand how our universe was born."

Obtaining the best image of the infant universe, explains Professor Sehgal, helps scientists better understand the origins of the universe, how we got to where we are on Earth, the galaxies, where we are going, how the universe may end, and when that ending may occur.

The ACT team estimates the age of the universe by measuring its oldest light. Other scientific groups take measurements of galaxies to make universe age estimates. The new ACT estimate on the age of the universe matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe and measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite. This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, says Simone Aiola, first author of one of the new papers on the findings posted to arXiv.org.

"Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree," says Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. "It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable."

In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

The age of the universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant. The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That means an object 1 megaparsec (around 3.26 million light-years) from Earth is moving away from us at 67.6 kilometers per second due to the expansion of the universe. This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec by the Planck satellite team, but it's slower than the 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec inferred from the measurements of galaxies.

"I didn't have a particular preference for any specific value -- it was going to be interesting one way or another," says Steve Choi of Cornell University, first author of another paper posted to arXiv.org. "We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universe's oldest light."

A “mental model” developed at MIT aims to give robots human-like spatial perception.

Wouldn't we all appreciate a little help around the house, especially if that help came in the form of a smart, adaptable, uncomplaining robot? Sure, there are the one-trick Roombas of the appliance world. But MIT engineers are envisioning robots more like home helpers, able to follow high-level, Siri-type commands, such as "Go to the kitchen and fetch me a coffee cup." To carry out such high-level tasks, researchers believe robots will have to be able to perceive their physical environment as humans do.

"In order to make any decision in the world, you need to have a mental model of the environment around you," says Luca Carlone, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "This is something so effortless for humans.

But for robots it's a painfully hard problem, where it's about transforming pixel values that they see through a camera, into an understanding of the world." Now Carlone and his students have developed a representation of spatial perception for robots that is modeled after the way humans perceive and navigate the world.

The new model, which they call 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs, enables a robot to quickly generate a 3D map of its surroundings that also includes objects and their semantic labels (a chair versus a table, for instance), as well as people, rooms, walls, and other structures that the robot is likely seeing in its environment.

After China imposed a restrictive national security law on Hong Kong, tech companies find themselves at a crossroads. Giants like Google and Facebook stopped responding to requests for user data in the city, but they may eventually have to pull out altogether.

One marquee name to exit Hong Kong already is TikTok, which remains eager to prove its distance from its China-based parent company. TikTok also found itself embroiled in a confusing episode on Friday, when an internal Amazon email indicated that the company was ordering employees to remove the app from their phones; hours later, Amazon stated that the email was sent in error. Hate it when the drafts go live, especially when they cause an international furor.

The world of Super Smash Bros. was also thrown into turmoil this week, as dozens of members of the community came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. Elsewhere, Russian criminal gangs are getting into "business email compromise"—a fancy term for phishing scams—which can only end badly. And hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in BIG-IP networking equipment, which will only end worse.

It wasn't all bad news. Microsoft seized a bunch of domains tied to BEC activity. The robo-lawyer DoNotPay added a new service that not only unsubscribes you from marketing emails but also signs you up for any class action lawsuits against the company that was spamming you. We also walked through how to passcode-lock any app on your phone.

And there's more! Much more! Every Saturday we round up the security and privacy stories that we didn’t break or report on in depth but think you should know about. Click on the headlines to read them, and stay safe out there.

It's no secret that hacker forums on the dark web are teeming with stolen credentials. But a recent audit from security firm Digital Shadows has put a number on just how large a problem that's become. The data-loss-detection firm found 15 billion login pairs—user names and passwords—stemming from 100,000 breaches. Five billion of those were unique. The survey also details pricing, which varies widely based on how recent the breach is and what type of site it accesses. Financial services and banking passwords, unsurprisingly, command a much higher sum than file-sharing or videogame accounts. As always, WIRED recommends using a password manager to minimize the fallout when a company coughs up your sign-in info.

Radiologists improved their diagnoses of brain aneurysms with the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm developed by medical experts and computer scientists.

Doctors could soon get some help from an artificial intelligence tool when diagnosing brain aneurysms – bulges in blood vessels in the brain that can leak or burst open, potentially leading to stroke, brain damage or death.

The AI tool, developed by researchers at Stanford University and detailed in a paper published June 7, 2020 in JAMA Network Open, highlights areas of a brain scan that are likely to contain an aneurysm.

“There’s been a lot of concern about how machine learning will actually work within the medical field,” said Allison Park, a Stanford graduate student in statistics and co-lead author of the paper. “This research is an example of how humans stay involved in the diagnostic process, aided by an artificial intelligence tool.”

This tool, which is built around an algorithm called HeadXNet, improved clinicians’ ability to correctly identify aneurysms at a level equivalent to finding six more aneurysms in 100 scans that contain aneurysms. It also improved consensus among the interpreting clinicians. While the success of HeadXNet in these experiments is promising, the team of researchers – who have expertise in machine learning, radiology and neurosurgery – cautions that further investigation is needed to evaluate generalizability of the AI tool prior to real-time clinical deployment given differences in scanner hardware and imaging protocols across different hospital centers. The researchers plan to address such problems through multi-center collaboration.

A baby girl in Texas—born prematurely to a mother with COVID-19—is the strongest evidence to date that intrauterine (in the womb) transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can occur, reports The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, the official journal of The European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases.

The findings "suggest in utero transmission" of COVID-19 from an infected mother to her infant, according to the case report by Julide Sisman, MD, and colleagues of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

"Numerous infants have now been delivered to pregnant women diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2, with the majority of these infants without respiratory illness or positive molecular evidence for SARS-CoV-2," comments Amanda S. Evans, MD, one of the lead authors of the new study. "Our study is the first to document intrauterine transmission of the infection during pregnancy, based on immunohistochemical and ultrastructural evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the fetal cells of the placenta."

First Documented Intrauterine Transmission of COVID-19

The authors report on an infant delivered to a mother diagnosed with COVID-19, who also had type 2 diabetes. The infant was born at 34 weeks' gestation after the mother had premature rupture of the membranes. The baby was born "large for gestational age" (LGA) - an important complication in infants of diabetic mothers. She was treated in the neonatal ICU due to prematurity and possible SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

The infant appeared initially healthy, with normal breathing and other vital signs. On the second day of life, she developed fever and relatively mild breathing problems. "It is unlikely that the respiratory distress observed in this infant was due to prematurity since it did not start until the second day of life," the researchers write.

The baby tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection at 24 and 48 hours after birth. She was treated with supplemental oxygen for several days but did not need mechanical ventilation. COVID-19 tests remained positive for up to 14 days. At 21 days, the mother and infant were sent home in good condition.

The researchers examined the placenta, which showed signs of tissue inflammation. In addition, specialized tests documented the presence of coronavirus particles as well as a protein (SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein) specific for the COVID-19 virus in fetal cells of the placenta. Together, these findings confirmed that the infection was transmitted in the womb, rather than during or after birth.

An Indiana University Kelley School of Business study of users with coronavirus symptoms shows that chatbots can be an effective screening tool, which could ease the burden for medical providers.

COVID-19 has placed tremendous pressure on health care systems, not only for critical care but also from an anxious public looking for answers. Research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business found that chatbots -- software applications that conduct online chats via text or text-to-speech -- working for reputable organizations can ease the burden on medical providers and offer trusted guidance to those with symptoms.

Researchers conducted an online experiment with 371 participants who viewed a COVID-19 screening session between a hotline agent -- chatbot or human -- and a user with mild or severe symptoms. They studied whether chatbots were seen as being persuasive, providing satisfying information that likely would be followed. Their results showed a slight negative bias against chatbots' ability, perhaps due to recent press reports. When the perceived ability is the same, however, participants reported that they viewed chatbots more positively than human agents, which is good news for health care organizations struggling to meet user demand for screening services.

"The primary factor driving user response to screening hotlines -- human or chatbot -- is perceptions of the agent's ability," said Alan Dennis, the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems at Kelley and corresponding author of the paper, "User reactions to COVID-19 screening chatbots from reputable providers." "When ability is the same, users view chatbots no differently or more positively than human agents."

Other authors on the paper, forthcoming in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, are Antino Kim, assistant professor of operations and decision technologies at Kelley; and Sezgin Ayabakan, assistant professor of management information systems, and doctoral candidate Mohammad Rahimi, both at Temple University's Fox School of Business.

Even before the pandemic, chatbots were identified as a technology that could speed up how people interact with researchers and find medical information online. "Chatbots are scalable, so they can meet an unexpected surge in demand when there is a shortage of qualified human agents," Dennis, Kim and their co-authors wrote, adding that chatbots "can provide round-the-clock service at a low operational cost.

Staring at a deep red light for three minutes a day can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a new UCL-led study, the first of its kind in humans.

Scientists believe the discovery, published in the Journals of Gerontology, could signal the dawn of new affordable home-based eye therapies, helping the millions of people globally with naturally declining vision.

In the UK there are currently around 12 million people aged over 65: in 50 years this will increase to around 20 million and all will have some degree of visual decline because of retinal aging.  

Lead author, Professor Glen Jeffery (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) said: “As you age your visual system declines significantly, particularly once over 40.

“Your retinal sensitivity and your color vision are both gradually undermined, and with an aging population, this is an increasingly important issue. “To try to stem or reverse this decline, we sought to reboot the retina’s aging cells with short bursts of longwave light.”

In humans around 40 years-old, cells in the eye’s retina begin to age, and the pace of this aging is caused, in part, when the cell’s mitochondria, whose role is to produce energy (known as ATP) and boost cell function, also start to decline.

Mitochondrial density is greatest in the retina’s photoreceptor cells, which have high energy demands. As a result, the retina ages faster than other organs, with a 70% ATP reduction over life, causing a significant decline in photoreceptor function as they lack the energy to perform their normal role.

Researchers built on their previous findings in mice, bumblebees and fruit flies, which all found significant improvements in the function of the retina’s photoreceptors when their eyes were exposed to 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light.

“Mitochondria have specific light absorbance characteristics influencing their performance: longer wavelengths spanning 650 to 1000nm are absorbed and improve mitochondrial performance to increase energy production,” said Professor Jeffery. The retina’s photoreceptor population is formed of cones, which mediate color vision and rods, which provide peripheral vision and adapt vision in low/dim light.

Especially activities in the field of artificial intelligence, like teaching robots to walk or precise automatic image recognition, demand ever more powerful, yet at the same time more economical computer chips. While the optimization of conventional microelectronics is slowly reaching its physical limits, nature offers us a blueprint how information can be processed and stored quickly and efficiently: our own brain. For the very first time, scientists at TU Dresden and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now successfully imitated the functioning of brain neurons using semiconductor materials. They have published their research results in the journal Nature Electronics.

Today, enhancing the performance of microelectronics is usually achieved by reducing component size, especially of the individual transistors on the silicon computer chips. "But that can't go on indefinitely -- we need new approaches," Larysa Baraban asserts. The physicist, who has been working at HZDR since the beginning of the year, is one of the three primary authors of the international study, which involved a total of six institutes. One approach is based on the brain, combining data processing with data storage in an artificial neuron.

"Our group has extensive experience with biological and chemical electronic sensors," Baraban continues. "So, we simulated the properties of neurons using the principles of biosensors and modified a classical field-effect transistor to create an artificial neurotransistor." The advantage of such an architecture lies in the simultaneous storage and processing of information in a single component. In conventional transistor technology, they are separated, which slows processing time and hence ultimately also limits performance.

A groundbreaking study using molecular genetic techniques and field studies brings together decades of research into the complex relationships among beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) that spans 10 locations across the Arctic from Alaska to Canada and Russia to Norway. The behavior of these highly gregarious whales, which include sophisticated vocal repertoires, suggest that this marine mammal lives in complex societies. Like killer whales (Orcinus orca) and African elephants (Loxodonta Africana), belugas were thought to form social bonds around females that primarily comprise closely related individuals from the same maternal lineage. However, this hypothesis had not been formally tested.

The study, led by Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, is the first to analyze the relationship between group behaviors, group type, group dynamics, and kinship in beluga whales. Findings, just published in Scientific Reports, reveal several unexpected results. Not only do beluga whales regularly interact with close kin, including close maternal kin, they also frequently associate with more distantly related and unrelated individuals.

Findings indicate that evolutionary explanations for group living and cooperation in beluga whales must expand beyond strict inclusive fitness arguments to include other evolutionary mechanisms. Belugas likely form multi-scale societies from mother-calf dyads to entire communities. From these perspectives, beluga communities have similarities to human societies where social networks, support structures, cooperation and cultures involve interactions between kin and non-kin. Given their long lifespan (approximately 70 years) and tendency to remain within their natal community, these findings reveal that beluga whales may form long-term affiliations with unrelated as well as related individuals.

"This research will improve our understanding of why some species are social, how individuals learn from group members and how animal cultures emerge," said Greg O'Corry-Crowe, Ph.D., lead author and a research professor at FAU's Harbor Branch. "It also has implications for traditional explanations based on matrilineal care for a very rare life-history trait in nature, menopause, which has only been documented in a handful of mammals, including beluga whales and humans."

A new study reveals that changes in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field may take place 10 times faster than previously thought.

A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Stanford University has tested the viability of using a type of fungus found growing in some of the destroyed nuclear reactors at the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant site to shield astronauts from radiation. They have written a paper describing their work and have uploaded it to the bioRxiv preprint site.

Virginia Tech researchers have proven that a single gene can convert female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into fertile male mosquitoes and identified a gene needed for male mosquito flight.

Male mosquitoes do not bite and are unable to transmit pathogens to humans. Female mosquitoes, on the other hand, are able to bite.

The first images from Solar Orbiter, a new Sun-observing mission by ESA and NASA, have revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires', near the surface of our closest star.

According to the scientists behind the mission, seeing phenomena that were not observable in detail before hints at the enormous potential of Solar Orbiter, which has only just finished its early phase of technical verification known as commissioning.

"These are only the first images and we can already see interesting new phenomena," says Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter Project Scientist. "We didn't really expect such great results right from the start. We can also see how our ten scientific instruments complement each other, providing a holistic picture of the Sun and the surrounding environment."

Solar Orbiter, launched on 10 February 2020, carries six remote-sensing instruments, or telescopes, that image the Sun and its surroundings, and four in-situ instruments that monitor the environment around the spacecraft. By comparing the data from both sets of instruments, scientists will get insights into the generation of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the Sun that influences the entire Solar System.

The unique aspect of the Solar Orbiter mission is that no other spacecraft has been able to take images of the Sun's surface from a closer distance.

In a new study, Johns Hopkins researchers found that testing people for SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- too early in the course of infection is likely to result in a false negative test, even though they may eventually test positive for the virus.

The processor that powers the latest iPhones and iPads is smaller than a fingernail; even the beefy devices used in cloud servers aren’t much bigger than a postage stamp. Then there’s this new chip from a startup called Cerebras: It’s bigger than an iPad all by itself.

The silicon monster is almost 22 centimeters—roughly 9 inches—on each side, making it likely the largest computer chip ever, and a monument to the tech industry’s hopes for artificial intelligence. Cerebras plans to offer it to tech companies trying to build smarter AI more quickly.

Eugenio Culurciello, a fellow at chipmaker Micron who has worked on chip designs for AI but was not involved in the project, calls the scale and ambition of Cerebras’ chip “crazy.” He also believes that it makes sense, because of the intense computing power demanded by large scale AI projects such as virtual assistants and self-driving cars. “It will be expensive, but some people will probably use it,” he says.

The current boom in all things AI is driven by a technology called deep learning. AI systems built on it are developed using a process called training, in which algorithms optimize themselves to a task by analyzing example data.

The training data might be medical scans annotated to mark tumors or a bot’s repeated attempts to win a videogame. Software made this way is generally more powerful when it has more data to learn from or the learning system itself is larger and more complex.

Computing power has become a limiting factor for some of the most ambitious AI projects. A recent study on the energy consumption of deep-learning training found it could cost $350,000 to develop a single piece of language-processing software. The for-profit AI lab OpenAI has estimated that between 2012 and 2018, the amount of computing power expended on the largest published AI experiments doubled roughly every three and a half months.

AI experts yearning for more oomph typically use graphics processors, or GPUs. The deep-learning boom originated in the discovery that GPUs are well suited to the math underpinning the technique, a coincidence that has boosted the stock price of leading GPU supplier Nvidia eight-fold in the past five years. More recently, Google has developed its own AI chips customized to deep learning called TPUs, and a raft of startups have begun work on their own AI hardware.

Newly produced spermatozoa within the testis are not fully functional until they mature in the epididymis, a duct that helps to transport and store sperm. Male infertility may arise from lack of communication between the testis and the epididymis and new research has uncovered a mechanism of this communication.

Dr. Martin Matzuk at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Masahito Ikawa with Osaka University and their colleagues have discovered a novel testicular luminal protein, NELL2, that triggers in the epididymis a chain of events that matures the sperm and enables each one to be motile in females.

Sperm production

Sperm are produced in the seminiferous tubules of the testis and move through the epididymis, a long, convoluted tube linked to the vas deferens, the duct that moves sperm from the testicle to the urethra. When the sperm enter the epididymis, they are not motile and are incapable of fertilization. However, in their passage through the epididymis, the sperm are provided an appropriate environment for maturation and storage pending ejaculation.

It has been hypothesized that proteins released by the testis earlier in this process could act on the epididymis to mature the sperm as they arrive in the epididymis.

"Until now the proteins working through the lumicrine system of signaling have remained elusive. While it was known that the orphan receptor tyrosine kinase ROS1 expressed in the initial segment of the epididymis is necessary for its differentiation, neither the testicular factors that regulate initial segment differentiation nor the process of sperm maturation had been fully understood," said Matzuk, professor and director of the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor.

Identifying NELL2

The researchers zeroed in on NELL2, a protein factor secreted by testicular germ cells, as a possible lumicrine regulator of fertility."Using innovative genome editing technology, we generated knockout mice lacking the NELL2 gene and showed that these knockout males are sterile due to a defect in sperm motility," explains lead author Dr. Daiji Kiyozum. "Moreover, their infertility could be rescued with a germ-cell-specific transgene, thus excluding other sites of expression. We also illustrated lumicrine signaling by demonstrating tagged NELL2 in the epididymal lumen."

The research team observed that spermatogenesis proceeds normally in NELL2 knockout mouse testes but their epididymis was poorly differentiated, similar to Ros1 knockout mice. Following mating, neither NELL2 knockout nor Ros1 knockout spermatozoa can enter the uterine tubes or fertilize an egg. Further investigation showed that the Nell2 knockout epididymis is incapable of processing a specific sperm surface protein essential for male fertility.

Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.

Neurologists are now publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom. The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.

A dozen patients had inflammation of the central nervous system, 10 had brain disease with delirium or psychosis, eight had strokes and a further eight had peripheral nerve problems, mostly diagnosed as Guillain-Barré syndrome, an immune reaction that attacks the nerves and causes paralysis. It is fatal in 5% of cases.

“We’re seeing things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we haven’t seen before with other viruses,” said Michael Zandi, a senior author on the study and a consultant at the institute and University College London Hospitals NHS foundation trust.

“What we’ve seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is you can have severe neurology, you can be quite sick, but actually have trivial lung disease,” he added. “Biologically, Adem has some similarities with multiple sclerosis, but it is more severe and usually happens as a one-off. Some patients are left with long-term disability, others can make a good recovery.”

The cases add to concerns over the long-term health effects of Covid-19, which have left some patients breathless and fatigued long after they have cleared the virus, and others with numbness, weakness and memory problems.

Physicists at the University of Rochester have demonstrated quantum teleportation using electrons, an important advance in quantum computing.

"Beam me up" is one of the most famous catchphrases from the Star Trek series. It is the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise.

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics -- albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons. In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

The premiere of the movie Scent of Mystery in 1960 marked a singular event in the annals of cinema: the first, and last, motion picture debut "in glorious Smell-O-Vision." Hoping to wow moviegoers with a dynamic olfactory experience alongside the familiar spectacles of sight and sound, select theaters were outfitted with a Rube Goldberg-esque device that piped different scents directly to seats.

Audiences and critics quickly concluded that the experience stunk. Fraught with technical issues, Smell-O-Vision was panned and became a running gag that holds a unique place in entertainment history. The flop of Smell-O-Vision, however, failed to deter entrepreneurs from continuing to chase the dream of delivering smells to consumers, particularly in recent years, through digital scent technologies.

Such efforts have generated news headlines but scant success, due in part to a limited understanding of how the brain translates odor chemistry into perceptions of smell -- a phenomenon that in many ways remains opaque to scientists.

A study by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School now provides new insights into the mystery of scent. Reporting in Nature on July 1, the researchers describe for the first time how relationships between different odors are encoded in the olfactory cortex, the region of brain responsible for processing smell.

By delivering odors with carefully selected molecular structures and analyzing neural activity in awake mice, the team showed that neuronal representations of smell in the cortex reflect chemical similarities between odors, thus enabling scents to be placed into categories by the brain. Moreover, these representations can be rewired by sensory experiences. The findings suggest a neurobiological mechanism that may explain why individuals have common but highly personalized experiences with smell.

"All of us share a common frame of reference with smells. You and I both think lemon and lime smell similar and agree that they smell different from pizza, but until now, we didn't know how the brain organizes that kind of information," said senior study author Sandeep Robert Datta, associate professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

The results open new avenues of study to better understand how the brain transforms information about odor chemistry into the perception of smell. "This is the first demonstration of how the olfactory cortex encodes information about the very thing that it's responsible for, which is odor chemistry, the fundamental sensory cues of olfaction," Datta said.

The pandemic has tugged carbon emissions down, temporarily. But levels of the powerful heat-trapping gas methane continue to climb, dragging the world further away from a path that skirts the worst effects of global warming.

Global emissions of methane have reached the highest levels on record. Increases are being driven primarily by growth of emissions from coal mining, oil and natural gas production, cattle and sheep ranching, and landfills.

Between 2000 and 2017, levels of the potent greenhouse gas barreled up toward pathways that climate models suggest will lead to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of this century. This is a dangerous temperature threshold at which scientists warn that natural disasters, including wildfires, droughts and floods, and social disruptions such as famines and mass migrations become almost commonplace.

The findings are outlined in two papers published July 14, 2020 in Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters by researchers with the Global Carbon Project, an initiative led by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson.

In 2017, the last year when complete global methane data are available, Earth's atmosphere absorbed nearly 600 million tons of the colorless, odorless gas that is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 100-year span. More than half of all methane emissions now come from human activities. Annual methane emissions are up 9 percent, or 50 million tons per year, from the early 2000s, when methane concentrations in the atmosphere were relatively stable.

In terms of warming potential, adding this much extra methane to the atmosphere since 2000 is akin to putting 350 million more cars on the world's roads or doubling the total emissions of Germany or France. "We still haven't turned the corner on methane," said Jackson, a professor of Earth system science in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

In Italy, a team of scientists is using a highly sophisticated detector to hunt for dark matter. The team observed an ultra-rare particle interaction that reveals the half-life of a xenon-124 atom​ to be 18 sextillion years. The half-life of a process is how long it takes for half of the radioactive nuclei present in a sample to decay.

Though Pluto is now famously frigid, it may have started off as a hot world that formed rapidly and violently, a new study finds.

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Though Pluto is now famously frigid, it may have started off as a hot world that formed rapidly and violently, a new study finds. This result suggests Pluto may have possessed an underground ocean since early on in its life, potentially improving its chances of hosting life, researchers said.

Previous work assumed Pluto originated from cold and icy rock clumping together in the distant Kuiper Belt, the ring of objects beyond Neptune's orbit. Although there is evidence that Pluto currently possesses a liquid ocean beneath its thick frozen shell, researchers have suggested this subsurface ocean developed long after Pluto formed, after ice melted due to heat from radioactive elements in Pluto's core. 

Now scientists argue that instead of a cold formation, Pluto had a hot start, one full of explosive force. "When we look at Pluto today, we see a very cold frozen world, with a surface temperature of about 45 Kelvin [minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit, and minus 228 degrees Celsius]," study lead author Carver Bierson, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. "I find it amazing that by looking at the geology recorded in that surface, we can infer Pluto had a rapid and violent formation that warmed the interior enough to form a subsurface water ocean." The researchers analyzed so-called "extensional features" on Pluto's surface. Water expands as it freezes, so as Pluto's interior cooled, Pluto's surface stretched, generating recognizable structures.