The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of light years from Earth. These extrasolar planets are a veritable menagerie, from rocky super-Earths and miniature Neptunes, to colossal gas giants. Among the more confounding planets discovered to date are "hot Jupiters" – massive balls of gas that are about the size of our own Jovian planet but that zing around their stars in less than 10 days, in...
A team of researchers led by the University of Zurich (UZH) has discovered another component that contributes to SARS-CoV-2 immunity – previous antibody responses to other, harmless coronaviruses. "People who have had strong immune responses to other human coronaviruses also have some protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection," says Alexandra Trkola, head of the Institute of Medical Virology at UZH. In their study, the researchers used a specially developed assay to analyse antibody levels against four...
Plans to roll out end-to-end encryption on Facebook and Instagram have been delayed amid a row over child safety, reports the BBC. Meta, Facebook's parent company, said messaging encryption on the apps would come in 2023. The process would see only the sender and receiver able to read messages. Law enforcement and Meta would not. However, child protection groups and politicians have warned that it could hamper police investigating child abuse. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty...
Cross-protective antibodies from dengue and Zika last far longer than previously thought, scientists have found in a study involving more than 4,000 children in Nicaragua, reports Medical Xpress. The 11-year longitudinal analysis unexpectedly revealed that antibodies from either dengue or Zika – which naturally protect against infections caused by either virus – remain stable for years and do not precipitously wane. Solving scientific mysteries about old foes such as dengue, and an emerging infection...
The world's first fully electric autonomous cargo vessel was unveiled in Norway, reports Tech Xplore. By shipping up to 120 containers of fertilizer from a plant in the southeastern town of Porsgrunn to the Brevik port a dozen kilometres away, the much-delayed Yara Birkeland, will reportedly eliminate the need for around 40,000 truck journeys a year that are now fuelled by diesel. "Electricity has a 'niche' use, in particular for ferries, as these are...
A team of researchers has found evidence of natural-selection-based evolutionary changes to people living in Europe over the past 2,000 to 3,000 years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes their comparative study of people living in the U.K. today, with those living across Europe over the past several thousand years. Noting that few studies have been conducted with the goal of learning more about evolutionary changes in...
It started as a desire to spend less time on social media. Hyunsung Cho, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, noticed she was spending more and more time looking at apps including Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. She would initially open the app with a purpose such as messaging a friend or scrolling through posts of accounts she follows. "But sometimes I would get sucked into this randomly recommended content," Cho said....
Young children's ability to laugh and make jokes has been mapped by age for the first time using data from a study involving nearly 700 children from birth to 4 years of age, from around the world. The findings, led by University of Bristol researchers and published in Behavior Research Methods, identifies the earliest age humour emerges and how it typically builds in the first years of life. Researchers from Bristol's School of Education sought...
Lung autopsy and plasma samples from people who died of COVID-19 have provided a clearer picture of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads and damages lung tissue, Medical Xpress reports. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and their collaborators say the information, published in Science Translational Medicine, could help predict severe and prolonged COVID-19 cases, particularly among high-risk people, and inform effective treatments. Although the study was small – lung samples from 18 cases and plasma samples from six of...
A team of scientists has identified an additional force that likely contributed to a mass extinction event 250 million years ago. Its analysis of minerals in southern China indicate that volcano eruptions produced a "volcanic winter" that drastically lowered earth's temperatures – a change that added to the environmental effects resulting from other phenomena at the time, reports Phys.org. The research, which appears in the journal Science Advances, examined the end-Permian mass extinction (EPME), which was...
