432 articles from THURSDAY 29.10.2020

A wave of ransomware hits US hospitals as coronavirus spikes

American hospitals are being targeted in a wave of ransomware attacks as covid-19 infections in the US break records and push the country’s health infrastructure to the brink. As reports emerge of attacks that interrupted healthcare in at least six US hospitals, experts and government officials say they expect the impact to worsen—and warn that the attacks could potentially threaten...

NorthStar satellite system to monitor threat of space debris

Space-based service will alert users to potential collisions between satellites and orbital junkThe Canadian company NorthStar Earth and Space has contracted Thales Alenia Space to build the first three satellites of its Skylark space traffic monitoring system, with LeoStella, a Seattle-based firm, overseeing the final assembly. This will make NorthStar the first commercial company to monitor...

Tuning biomolecular receptors for affinity and cooperativity

Our biological processes rely on a system of communications -- cellular signals -- that set off chain reactions in and between target cells to produce a response. The first step in these often complex communications is the moment a molecule binds to a receptor on or in a cell, prompting changes that can trigger further signals that propagate across systems. From food tasting and blood oxygenation...

Models show how COVID-19 cuts a neighborhood path

Researchers have created a new model of how the coronavirus can spread through a community. The model factors in network exposure -- whom one interacts with -- and demographics to simulate at a more detailed level both where and how quickly the coronavirus could spread through Seattle and 18 other major cities.

World's first agreed guidance for people with diabetes to exercise safely

An academic has helped draw up a landmark agreement amongst international experts, setting out the world's first standard guidance on how people with diabetes can use modern glucose monitoring devices to help them exercise safely. The guidance will be a crucial resource for healthcare professionals around the world, so they can help people with type 1 diabetes.

Fungal species naturally suppresses cyst nematodes responsible for major sugar beet losses

The plant pathogenic nematode Heterodera schachtii infects more than 200 different plants, including sugar beets, and causes significant economic losses. Over the past 50 years, the primary management tool in California has been crop rotation. When the number of H. schachtii in a soil exceeds a threshold, growers are contractually required by the local sugar factory to plant crops that do not...

Researchers develop a method for tuning biomolecular receptors for affinity and cooperativity

Our biological processes rely on a system of communications—cellular signals—that set off chain reactions in and between target cells to produce a response. The first step in these often complex communications is the moment a molecule binds to a receptor on or in a cell, prompting changes that can trigger further signals that propagate across systems. From food tasting and blood oxygenation...

Losing ground in biodiversity hotspots worldwide

Between 1992 and 2015, the world's most biologically diverse places lost an area more than three times the size of Sweden when the land was converted to other uses, mainly agriculture, or gobbled up by urban sprawl.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Successfully Stows Sample of Asteroid Bennu

Portal origin URL: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Successfully Stows Sample of Asteroid BennuPortal origin nid: 465895Published: Thursday, October 29, 2020 - 15:48Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has successfully stowed the spacecraft’s Sample...

Experiment uses smart city lighting to measure streetlight emissions

When satellites take pictures of Earth at night, how much of the light that they see comes from streetlights? A team of scientists from Germany, the U.S., and Ireland have answered this question for the first time, thanks to "smart city" lighting technology that allows cities to dim their lights. The results were published today in the journal Lighting Research & Technology.

How many habitable planets are out there?

Thanks to new research using data from the Kepler space telescope, it's estimated that there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. Some could even be pretty close, with several likely within 30 light-years of our Sun. The findings will be published in The Astronomical Journal, and research was a collaboration of scientists from NASA, the SETI Institute, and...

A groundbreaking genetic screening tool for human organoids

Many of the fundamental principles in biology and essentially all pathways regulating development were identified in so-called genetics screens. Originally pioneered in the fruit fly Drosophila and the nematode C. elegans, genetic screens involve inactivation of many genes one by one. By analyzing the consequences of gene loss, scientists can draw conclusions about its function. This way, for...

Citizen astronomers reshape asteroids from their backyard

There are nearly one million catalogued asteroids, but we don't know much about many of them. Now Unistellar and its scientific partner, the SETI Institute, can count on a network of nearly 3,000 amateurs capable of observing thousands of asteroids and providing an estimate of their size and shape. With mobile stations located in Asia, North America and Europe, the Unistellar network, the largest...

Asteroid Ryugu shaken by Hayabusa2's impactor

Professor Arakawa Masahiko (Graduate School of Science, Kobe University, Japan) and members of the Hayabusa2 mission discovered more than 200 boulders ranging from 30 cm to 6m in size, which either newly appeared or moved as a result of the artificial impact crater created by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2's Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) on April 5th, 2019. Some boulders were disturbed even in...

Using better colours in science

Colors are often essential to convey scientific data, from weather maps to the surface of Mars. But did you ever consider that a combination of colors could be "unscientific?" Well, that's the case with color scales that use rainbow-like and red–green colors, because they effectively distort data. And if that was not bad enough, they are unreadable to those with any form of color blindness....

Density fluctuations in amorphous silicon discovered

For the first time, a team at HZB has identified the atomic substructure of amorphous silicon with a resolution of 0.8 nanometres using X-ray and neutron scattering at BESSY II and BER II. Such a-Si:H thin films have been used for decades in solar cells, TFT displays, and detectors. The results show that three different phases form within the amorphous matrix, which dramatically influences the...

Violent cosmic explosion revealed by ALMA: The merging of massive protostars?

The phenomenon of molecular outflow was first discovered in the 1980's. Very high velocity motions were detected in the line wings of the carbon monoxide (CO) molecule, seen towards young forming stars. The high velocity motions obviously could not be gravitationally bound motions (such as infall or rotation) because of the required large gravitating masses. The first detections were in fact in...