Eating more plant foods may lower heart disease risk in young adults, older women

Eating more nutritious, plant-based foods is heart-healthy at any age, according to two research studies published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association.

In two separate studies analyzing different measures of healthy plant food consumption, researchers found that both young adults and postmenopausal women had fewer heart attacks and were less likely to develop cardiovascular disease when they ate more healthy plant foods.

The American Heart Association Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations suggest an overall healthy dietary pattern that emphasizes a variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy products, skinless poultry and fish, nuts and legumes and non-tropical vegetable oils. It also advises limited consumption of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, red meat, sweets and sugary drinks.

One study, titled "A Plant-Centered Diet and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease during Young to Middle Adulthood," evaluated whether long-term consumption of a plant-centered diet and a shift toward a plant-centered diet starting in young adulthood are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in midlife.

"Earlier research was focused on single nutrients or single foods, yet there is little data about a plant-centered diet and the long-term risk of cardiovascular disease," said Yuni Choi, Ph.D., lead author of the young adult study and a postdoctoral researcher in the division of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis.

Choi and colleagues examined diet and the occurrence of heart disease in 4,946 adults enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. Participants were 18- to 30-years-old at the time of enrollment (1985-1986) in this study and were free of cardiovascular disease at that time. Participants included 2,509 Black adults and 2,437 white adults (54.9% women overall) who were also analyzed by education level (equivalent to more than high school vs. high school or less). Participants had eight follow-up exams from 1987-88 to 2015-16 that included lab tests, physical measurements, medical histories and assessment of lifestyle factors. Unlike randomized controlled trials, participants were not instructed to eat certain things and were not told their scores on the diet measures, so the researchers could collect unbiased, long-term habitual diet data.

After detailed diet history interviews, the quality of the participants diets was scored based on the A Priori Diet Quality Score (APDQS) composed of 46 food groups at years 0, 7 and 20 of the study. The food groups were classified into beneficial foods (such as fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and whole grains); adverse foods (such as fried potatoes, high-fat red meat, salty snacks, pastries and soft drinks); and neutral foods (such as potatoes, refined grains, lean meats and shellfish) based on their known association with cardiovascular disease.

Participants who received higher scores ate a variety of beneficial foods, while people who had lower scores ate more adverse foods. Overall, higher values correspond to a nutritionally rich, plant-centered diet.

"As opposed to existing diet quality scores that are usually based on small numbers of food groups, APDQS is explicit in capturing the overall quality of diet using 46 individual food groups, describing the whole diet that the general population commonly consumes. Our scoring is very comprehensive, and it has many similarities with diets like the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Healthy Eating Index (from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service), the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet and the Mediterranean diet," said David E. Jacobs Jr., Ph.D., senior author of the study and Mayo Professor of Public Health in the division of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis.

Researchers found:
 

• During 32 years of follow-up, 289 of the participants developed cardiovascular disease (including heart attack, stroke, heart failure, heart-related chest pain or clogged arteries anywhere in the body).
• People who scored in the top 20% on the long-term diet quality score (meaning they ate the most nutritionally rich plant foods and fewer adversely rated animal products) were 52% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease, after considering several factors (including age, sex, race, average caloric consumption, education, parental history of heart disease, smoking and average physical activity).
• In addition, between year 7 and 20 of the study when participants ages ranged from 25 to 50, those who improved their diet quality the most (eating more beneficial plant foods and fewer adversely rated animal products) were 61% less likely to develop subsequent cardiovascular disease, in comparison to the participants whose diet quality declined the most during that time.
• There were few vegetarians among the participants, so the study was not able to assess the possible benefits of a strict vegetarian diet, which excludes all animal products, including meat, dairy and eggs.

"A nutritionally rich, plant-centered diet is beneficial for cardiovascular health. A plant-centered diet is not necessarily vegetarian," Choi said. "People can choose among plant foods that are as close to natural as possible, not highly processed. We think that individuals can include animal products in moderation from time to time, such as non-fried poultry, non-fried fish, eggs and low-fat dairy."

Because this study is observational, it cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship between diet and heart disease.

Other co-authors are Nicole Larson, Ph.D.; Lyn M. Steffen, Ph.D.; Pamela J. Schreiner, Ph.D.; Daniel D. Gallaher, Ph.D.; Daniel A. Duprez, M.D., Ph.D.; James M. Shikany, Dr.P.H.; and Jamal S. Rana, M.D., Ph.D.

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health; Healthy Food Healthy Lives Institute at the University of Minnesota; and the MnDrive Global Food Ventures Professional Development Program at the University of Minnesota.

In another study, "Relationship Between a Plant-Based Dietary Portfolio and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: Findings from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) Prospective Cohort Study," researchers, in collaboration with WHI investigators led by Simin Liu, M.D., Ph.D., at Brown University, evaluated whether or not diets that included a dietary portfolio of plant-based foods with U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved health claims for lowering "bad" cholesterol levels (known as the "Portfolio Diet") were associated with fewer cardiovascular disease events in a large group of postmenopausal women.

The "Portfolio Diet" includes nuts; plant protein from soy, beans or tofu; viscous soluble fiber from oats, barley, okra, eggplant, oranges, apples and berries; plant sterols from enriched foods and monounsaturated fats found in olive and canola oil and avocadoes; along with limited consumption of saturated fats and dietary cholesterol. Previously, two randomized trials demonstrated that reaching high target levels of foods included in the Portfolio Diet resulted in significant lowering of "bad" cholesterol or low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), more so than a traditional low-saturated-fat National Cholesterol and Education Program diet in one study and on par with taking a cholesterol-lowering statin medication in another.

The study analyzed whether postmenopausal women who followed the Portfolio Diet experienced fewer heart disease events. The study included 123,330 women in the U.S. who participated in the Women's Health Initiative, a long-term national study looking at risk factors, prevention and early detection of serious health conditions in postmenopausal women. When the women in this analysis enrolled in the study between 1993 and 1998, they were between 50-79 years old (average age of 62) and did not have cardiovascular disease. The study group was followed until 2017 (average follow-up time of 15.3 years). Researchers used self-reported food-frequency questionnaires data to score each woman on adherence to the Portfolio Diet.

The researchers found:
 

• Compared to women who followed the Portfolio Diet less frequently, those with the closest alignment were 11% less likely to develop any type of cardiovascular disease, 14% less likely to develop coronary heart disease and 17% less likely to develop heart failure.
• There was no association between following the Portfolio Diet more closely and the occurrence of stroke or atrial fibrillation.

"These results present an important opportunity, as there is still room for people to incorporate more cholesterol-lowering plant foods into their diets. With even greater adherence to the Portfolio dietary pattern, one would expect an association with even less cardiovascular events, perhaps as much as cholesterol-lowering medications. Still, an 11% reduction is clinically meaningful and would meet anyone's minimum threshold for a benefit. The results indicate the Portfolio Diet yields heart-health benefits," said John Sievenpiper, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study at St. Michael's Hospital, a site of Unity Health Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and associate professor of nutritional sciences and medicine at the University of Toronto.

The researchers believe the results highlight possible opportunities to lower heart disease by encouraging people to consume more foods in the Portfolio Diet.

"We also found a dose response in our study, meaning that you can start small, adding one component of the Portfolio Diet at a time, and gain more heart-health benefits as you add more components," said Andrea J. Glenn, M.Sc., R.D., lead author of the study and a doctoral student at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and in nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto.

Although the study was observational and cannot directly establish a cause-and-effect relation between diet and cardiovascular events, researchers feel it provides a most reliable estimate for the diet-heart relation to-date due to its study design (included well-validated food frequency questionnaires administered at baseline and year three in a large population of highly dedicated participants). Nevertheless, the investigators report that these findings need to be further investigated in additional populations of men or younger women.

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Giraffes are as socially complex as elephants, study finds

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered evidence that giraffes are a highly socially complex species.

Traditionally, giraffes were thought to have little or no social structure, and only fleeting, weak relationships. However in the last ten years, research has shown that giraffe social organisation is much more advanced than once thought.

In a paper published in today in the journal Mammal Review, Zoe Muller, of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, has demonstrated that giraffes spend up to 30% of their lives in a post-reproductive state. This is comparable to other species with highly complex social structures and cooperative care, such as elephants and killer-whales which spend 23% and 35% of their lives in a post-reproductive state respectively. In these species, it has been demonstrated that the presence of post-menopausal females offers survival benefits for related offspring. In mammals -- and including humans -- this is known as the 'Grandmother hypothesis' which suggests that females live long past menopause so that they can help raise successive generations of offspring, thereby ensuring the preservation of their genes. Researchers propose that the presence of post-reproductive adult female giraffes could also function in the same way, and supports the author's assertion that giraffes are likely to engage in cooperative parenting, along matrilines, and contribute to the shared parental care of related kin.

Muller said: "It is baffling to me that such a large, iconic and charismatic African species has been understudied for so long. This paper collates all the evidence to suggest that giraffes are actually a highly complex social species, with intricate and high-functioning social systems, potentially comparable to elephants, cetaceans and chimpanzees.

"I hope that this study draws a line in the sand, from which point forwards, giraffes will be regarded as intelligent, group-living mammals which have evolved highly successful and complex societies, which have facilitated their survival in tough, predator-filled ecosystems."

For scientists to recognise giraffes as a socially complex species, Muller has suggested eight key areas for future research, including the need to understand the role that older, post-reproductive adults play in society and what fitness benefits they bring for group survival.

Muller added: "Recognising that giraffes have a complex cooperative social system and live in matrilineal societies will further our understanding of their behavioural ecology and conservation needs.

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Highest-resolution measurements of asteroid surface temperatures ever obtained from Earth

A close examination of the millimeter-wavelength emissions from the asteroid Psyche, which NASA intends to visit in 2026, has produced the first temperature map of the object, providing new insight into its surface properties. The findings, described in a paper published in Planetary Science Journal (PSJ) on August 5, are a step toward resolving the mystery of the origin of this unusual object, which has been thought by some to be a chunk of the core of an ill-fated protoplanet.

Psyche orbits the sun in the asteroid belt, a donut-shaped region of space between Earth and Jupiter that contains more than a million rocky bodies that range in size from 10 meters to 946 kilometers in diameter.

With a diameter of more than 200 km, Psyche is the largest of the M-Type asteroids, an enigmatic class of asteroids that are thought to be metal rich and therefore potentially may be fragments of the cores of proto-planets that broke up as the solar system formed.

"The early solar system was a violent place, as planetary bodies coalesced and then collided with one another while settling into orbits around the sun," says Caltech's Katherine de Kleer, assistant professor of planetary science and astronomy and lead author of the PSJarticle. "We think that fragments of the cores, mantles, and crusts of these objects remain today in the form of asteroids. If that's true, it gives us our only real opportunity to directly study the cores of planet-like objects."

Studying such relatively tiny objects that are so far away from Earth (Psyche drifts at a distance that ranges between 179.5 and 329 million km from Earth) poses a significant challenge to planetary scientists, which is why NASA plans to send a probe to Psyche to examine it up close. Typically, thermal observations from Earth -- which measure the light emitted by an object itself rather than light from the sun reflected off of that object -- are in infrared wavelengths and can produce only 1-pixel images of asteroids. That one pixel does, however, reveal a lot of information; for example, it can be used to study the asteroid's thermal inertia, or how fast it heats up in sunlight and cools down in darkness.

"Low thermal inertia is typically associated with layers of dust, while high thermal inertia may indicate rocks on the surface," says Caltech's Saverio Cambioni, postdoctoral scholar in planetary science and co-author of the PSJ article. "However, discerning one type of landscape from the other is difficult." Data from viewing each surface location at many times of day provide much more detail, leading to an interpretation that is subject to less ambiguity, and which provide a more reliable prediction of landscape type prior to a spacecraft's arrival.

De Kleer and Cambioni, together with co-author Michael Shepard of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, took advantage of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, which became fully operational in 2013, to obtain such data. The array of 66 radio telescopes enabled the team to map the thermal emissions from Psyche's entire surface at a resolution of 30 km (where each pixel is 30 km by 30 km) and generate an image of the asteroid composed of about 50 pixels.

This was possible because ALMA observed Psyche at millimeter wavelengths, which are longer (ranging from 1 to 10 millimeters) than the infrared wavelengths (typically between 5 and 30 microns). The use of longer wavelengths allowed the researchers to combine the data collected from the 66 telescopes to create a much larger effective telescope; the larger a telescope, the higher the resolution of the images it produces.

The study confirmed that Psyche's thermal inertia is high compared to that of a typical asteroid, indicating that Psyche has an unusually dense or conductive surface. When de Kleer, Cambioni, and Shepard analyzed the data, they also found that Psyche's thermal emission -- the amount of heat it radiates -- is just 60 percent of what would be expected from a typical surface with that thermal inertia. Because surface emission is affected by the presence of metal on the surface, their finding indicates that Psyche's surface is no less than 30 percent metal. An analysis of the polarization of the emission helped the researchers to roughly determine what form that metal takes. A smooth solid surface emits well-organized polarized light; the light emitted by Psyche, however, was scattered, suggesting that rocks on the surface are peppered with metallic grains.

"We've known for many years that objects in this class are not, in fact, solid metal, but what they are and how they formed is still an enigma," de Kleer says. The findings reinforce alternative proposals for Psyche's surface composition, including that Psyche could be a primitive asteroid that formed closer to the sun than it is today instead of a core of a fragmented protoplanet.

The techniques described in this study provide a new perspective on asteroid surface compositions. The team is now expanding its scope to apply these techniques to other large objects in the asteroid belt.

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Lunar samples solve mystery of the moon's supposed magnetic shield

In 2024, a new age of space exploration will begin when NASA sends astronauts to the moon as part of their Artemis mission, a follow-up to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Some of the biggest questions that scientists hope to explore include determining what resources are found in the moon's soil and how those resources might be used to sustain life.

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, researchers at the University of Rochester, leading a team of colleagues at seven other institutions, report their findings on a major factor that influences the types of resources that may be found on the moon: whether or not the moon has had a long-lived magnetic shield at any point in its 4.53 billion-year history.

The presence or absence of a shield matters because magnetic shields protect astronomical bodies from harmful solar radiation. And the team's findings contradict some longstanding assumptions.

"This is a new paradigm for the lunar magnetic field," says first author John Tarduno, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and dean of research for Arts, Sciences & Engineering at Rochester.

Did the Moon Ever Have a Magnetic Field?

For years, Tarduno has been a leader in the field of paleomagnetism, studying the development of Earth's magnetic shield as a means to understanding planetary evolution and environmental change.

Earth's magnetic shield originates deep within the planet's core. There, swirling liquid iron generates electric currents, driving a phenomenon called the geodynamo, which produces the shield. The magnetic shield is invisible, but researchers have long recognized that it is vital for life on Earth's surface because it protects our planet from solar wind -- streams of radiation from the sun.

But has Earth's moon ever had a magnetic shield?

While the moon has no magnetic shield now, there has been debate over whether or not the moon may have had a prolonged magnetic shield at some point in its history.

"Since the Apollo missions, there has been this idea that the moon had a magnetic field that was as strong or even stronger than Earth's magnetic field at around 3.7 billion years ago," Tarduno says.

The belief that the moon had a magnetic shield was based on an initial dataset from the 1970s that included analyses of samples collected during the Apollo missions. The analyses showed that the samples had magnetization, which researchers believed was caused by the presence of a geodynamo.

But a couple of factors have since given researchers pause.

"The core of the moon is really small and it would be hard to actually drive that kind of magnetic field," Tarduno explains. "Plus, the previous measurements that record a high magnetic field were not conducted using heating experiments. They used other techniques that may not accurately record the magnetic field."

When Lunar Samples Meet Lasers

Tarduno and his colleagues tested glass samples gathered on previous Apollo missions, but used CO2 lasers to heat the lunar samples for a short amount of time, a method that allowed them to avoid altering the samples. They then used highly sensitive superconducting magnetometers to more accurately measure the samples' magnetic signals.

"One of the issues with lunar samples has been that the magnetic carriers in them are quite susceptible to alteration," Tarduno says. "By heating with a laser, there is no evidence of alteration in our measurements, so we can avoid the problems people may have had in the past."

The researchers determined that the magnetization in the samples could be the result of impacts from objects such as meteorites or comets -- not the result of magnetization from the presence of a magnetic shield. Other samples they analyzed had the potential to show strong magnetization in the presence of a magnetic field, but didn't show any magnetization, further indicating that the moon has never had a prolonged magnetic shield.

"If there had been a magnetic field on the moon, the samples we studied should all have acquired magnetization, but they haven't," Tarduno says. "That's pretty conclusive that the moon didn't have a long-lasting dynamo field."

Lack of Magnetic Shield Means an Abundance of Elements

Without the protection of a magnetic shield, the moon was susceptible to solar wind, which may have caused a variety of volatiles -- chemical elements and compounds that can be easily evaporated -- to become implanted in the lunar soil. These volatiles may include carbon, hydrogen, water, and helium 3, an isotope of helium that is not present in abundance on Earth.

"Our data indicates we should be looking at the high end of estimates of helium 3 because a lack of magnetic shield means more solar wind reaches the lunar surface, resulting in much deeper reservoirs of helium 3 than people thought previously," Tarduno says.

The research may help inform a new wave of lunar experiments based on data that will be gathered by the Artemis mission. Data from samples gathered during the mission will allow scientists and engineers to study the presence of volatiles and better determine if these materials can be extracted for human use. Helium 3, for instance, is currently used in medical imaging and cryogenics and is a possible future fuel source.

A lack of magnetic shielding also means that ancient lunar soils may hold records of past solar wind emissions. Analyzing cores of soil samples could therefore provide scientists with a better understanding of the evolution of the sun.

Read more at Science Daily

Fasting may help ward off infections, study in mice suggests

Fasting before and during exposure to Salmonella enterica bacteria protects mice from developing a full-blown infection, in part due to changes in the animals' gut microbiomes,according to new research published in PLOS Pathogens by Bruce Vallance and colleagues at University of British Columbia, Canada.

When people or animals develop an infection, they often lose their appetite. However it remains controversial whether fasting protects a host from infection, or increases their susceptibility. In the new study, mice were fasted for 48 hours before and during oral infection with the bacteria Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, a common cause of foodborne illness in people.

Fasting decreased the signs of bacterial infection compared to fed mice, including nearly eliminating all intestinal tissue damage and inflammation. When fasted animals were re-fed for a day after their fast, there was a dramatic increase in Salmonella numbers and invasion into the intestinal walls, although the associated inflammation was still attenuated compared to normal. The results did not hold true when mice were exposed to Salmonella intravenously instead of orally, and analyses of the microbiomes of mice showed significant changes associated with fasting and protection against infection. Moreover, fasting did not fully protect germ-free mice -- bred to lack a normal microbiome -- from Salmonella, suggesting that some of the protection was due to fasting's effect on the microbiome. Experiments using the bacteria Campylobacter jejuni confirmed that the effect of fasting was not limited to Salmonella, with similar results seen.

"These data suggest that therapeutic fasting or calorie restriction has the potential to beneficially modulate infectious and potentially non-infectious gastrointestinal diseases," the researchers conclude.

The researchers add, "Our research highlights the important role that food plays in regulating interactions between the host, enteric pathogens and the gut microbiome. When food is limited, the microbiome appears to sequester the nutrients that remain, preventing pathogens from acquiring the energy they need to infect the host. While more research is needed, fasting or otherwise adjusting food intake could be exploited therapeutically to modulate infectious diseases in the future."

From Science Daily

Leaping squirrels! Parkour is one of their many feats of agility

Videos of squirrels leaping from bendy branches across impossibly large gaps, parkouring off walls, scrambling to recover from tricky landings.

Just more YouTube content documenting the crazy antics of squirrels hell-bent on reaching peanuts?

No, these videos are part of a research study to understand the split-second decisions squirrels make routinely as they race through the tree canopy, jumping from branch to branch, using skills honed to elude deadly predators.

The payoff to understanding how squirrels learn the limits of their agility could be robots with better control to nimbly move through varied landscapes, such as the rubble of a collapsed building in search of survivors or to quickly access an environmental threat.

Biologists like Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown over the last few decades how animals like geckos, cockroaches and squirrels physically move and how their bodies and limbs help them in sticky situations -- all of which have been applied to making more agile robots. But now they are tackling a harder problem: How do animals decide whether or not to take a leap? How do they assess their biomechanical abilities to know whether they can stick the landing?

"I see this as the next frontier: How are the decisions of movement shaped by our body? This is made far more challenging, because you also must assess your environment," said Full, a professor of integrative biology. "That's an important fundamental biology question. Fortunately, now we can understand how to embody control and explain innovation by creating physical models, like the most agile smart robots ever built."

In a paper appearing this week in the journal Science, Full and former UC Berkeley doctoral student Nathaniel Hunt, now an assistant professor of biomechanics at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, report on their most recent experiments on free-ranging squirrels, quantifying how they learn to leap from different types of launching pads -- some bendy, some not -- in just a few attempts, how they change their body orientation in midair based on the quality of their launch, and how they alter their landing maneuvers in real-time, depending on the stability of the final perch.

"As a model organism to understand the biological limits of balance and agility, I would argue that squirrels are second to none," Hunt said. "If we try to understand how squirrels do this, then we may discover general principles of high performance locomotion in the canopy and other complex terrains that apply to the movements of other animals and robots."

The experiments were conducted in a eucalyptus grove on the UC Berkeley campus, where Hunt enticed fox squirrels that roam the campus into sketchy situations where they had to decide whether to leap for a peanut or let it go.

Hunt and Full found that, as expected, the flimsier or more compliant the branch from which squirrels have to leap, the more cautious they are. But it took squirrels just a few attempts to adjust to different compliances.

"When they leap across a gap, they decide where to take off based on a tradeoff between branch flexibility and the size of the gap they must leap," Hunt said. "And when they encounter a branch with novel mechanical properties, they learn to adjust their launching mechanics in just a few jumps. This behavioral flexibility that adapts to the mechanics and geometry of leaping and landing structures is important to accurately leaping across a gap to land on a small target."

But they don't balance the bendiness of the launching branch and the gap distance equally. In fact, the compliance of the branch was six times more critical than the gap distance in deciding whether to jump.

This may be because squirrels know that their sharp claws will save them if they miscalculate. Their claws are so failproof, Hunt said, that none of the squirrels ever fell, despite wobbly leaps and over- or undershot landings.

"They're not always going to have their best performance -- they just have to be good enough," he said. "They have redundancy. So, if they miss, they don't hit their center of mass right on the landing perch, they're amazing at being able to grab onto it. They'll swing underneath, they'll swing over the top. They just don't fall."

That's where exploration and innovation come into play as squirrels search for the best leaping strategy.

"If they leap into the air with too much speed or too little speed, they can use a variety of landing maneuvers to compensate," Hunt said. "If they jump too far, they roll forward around the branch. If they jump short, they will land with their front legs and swing underneath before pulling themselves up on top of the perch. This combination of adaptive planning behaviors, learning control and reactive stabilizing maneuvers helps them move quickly through the branches without falling."

One unsuspected innovation was that during tricky jumps, squirrels would often reorient their bodies to push off a vertical surface, like in human parkour, to adjust their speed and insure a better landing. Parkour is a sport in which people leap, vault, swing or use other movements to quickly traverse obstacles without the use of equipment.

Full and Hunt continue to explore the interaction between biomechanical abilities and cognition as squirrels learn new gap-leaping strategies.

Read more at Science Daily

Lab-grown beating heart cells identify potential drug to prevent COVID-19-related heart damage

Cambridge scientists have grown beating heart cells in the lab and shown how they are vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection. In a study published in Communications Biology, they used this system to show that an experimental peptide drug called DX600 can prevent the virus entering the heart cells.

The heart is one the major organs damaged by infection with SARS-CoV-2, particularly the heart cells, or 'cardiomyocytes', which contract and circulate blood. It is also thought that damage to heart cells may contribute to the symptoms of long COVID.

Patients with underlying heart problems are more than four times as likely to die from COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. The case fatality rate in patients with COVID-19 rises from 2.3% to 10.5% in these individuals.

To gain entry into our cells, SARS-CoV-2 hijacks a protein on the surface of the cells, a receptor known as ACE2. Spike proteins on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 -- which give it its characteristic 'corona'-like appearance -- bind to ACE2. Both the spike protein and ACE2 are then cleaved, allowing genetic material from the virus to enter the host cell. The virus manipulates the host cell's machinery to allow itself to replicate and spread.

A team of scientists at the University of Cambridge has used human embryonic stem cells to grow clusters of heart cells in the lab and shown that these cells mimic the behaviour of the cells in the body, beating as if to pump blood. Crucially, these model heart cells also contained the key components necessary for SARS-CoV-2 infection -- in particular, the ACE2 receptor.

Working in special biosafety laboratories and using a safer, modified synthetic ('pseudotyped') virus decorated with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the team mimicked how the virus infects the heart cells. They then used this model to screen for potential drugs to block infection.

Dr Sanjay Sinha from the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute said: "Using stem cells, we've managed to create a model which, in many ways, behaves just like a heart does, beating in rhythm. This has allowed us to look at how the coronavirus infects cells and, importantly, helps us screen possible drugs that might prevent damage to the heart."

The team showed that some drugs that targeted the proteins involved in SARS-CoV-2 viral entry signi?cantly reduced levels of infection. These included an ACE2 antibody that has been shown previously to neutralise pseudotyped SARS-CoV-2 virus, and DX600, an experimental drug.

DX600 is an ACE2 peptide antagonist -- that is, a molecule that specifically targets ACE2 and inhibits the activity of peptides that play a role in allowing the virus to break into the cell.

DX600 was around seven times more effective at preventing infection compared to the antibody, though the researchers say this may be because it was used in higher concentrations. The drug did not affect the number of heart cells, implying that it would be unlikely to be toxic.

Professor Anthony Davenport from the Department of Medicine and a fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge said: "The spike protein is like a key that fits into the 'lock' on the surface of the cells -- the ACE2 receptor -- allowing it entry. DX600 acts like gum, jamming the lock's mechanism, making it much more difficult for the key to turn and unlock the cell door.

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Ocean world: Rocky exoplanet has just half the mass of Venus

A team of astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile to shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L 98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System. Amongst the findings are a planet with half the mass of Venus -- the lightest exoplanet ever to be measured using the radial velocity technique -- an ocean world, and a possible planet in the habitable zone.

"The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life," says María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and one of the authors of the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The results are an important step in the quest to find life on Earth-sized planets outside the Solar System. The detection of biosignatures on an exoplanet depends on the ability to study its atmosphere, but current telescopes are not large enough to achieve the resolution needed to do this for small, rocky planets. The newly studied planetary system, called L 98-59 after its star, is an attractive target for future observations of exoplanet atmospheres. Its orbits a star only 35 light-years away and has now been found to host rocky planets, like Earth or Venus, which are close enough to the star to be warm.

With the contribution of ESO's VLT, the team was able to infer that three of the planets may contain water in their interiors or atmospheres. The two planets closest to the star in the L 98-59 system are probably dry, but might have small amounts of water, while up to 30% of the third planet's mass could be water, making it an ocean world.

Furthermore, the team found "hidden" exoplanets that had not previously been spotted in this planetary system. They discovered a fourth planet and suspect there is a fifth, in a zone at the right distance from the star for liquid water to exist on its surface. "We have hints of the presence of a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of this system," explains Olivier Demangeon, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, University of Porto in Portugal and lead author of the new study.

The study represents a technical breakthrough, as astronomers were able to determine, using the radial velocity method, that the innermost planet in the system has just half the mass of Venus. This makes it the lightest exoplanet ever measured using this technique, which calculates the wobble of the star caused by the tiny gravitational tug of its orbiting planets.

The team used the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on ESO's VLT to study L 98-59. "Without the precision and stability provided by ESPRESSO this measurement would have not been possible," says Zapatero Osorio. "This is a step forward in our ability to measure the masses of the smallest planets beyond the Solar System."

The astronomers first spotted three of L 98-59's planets in 2019, using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This satellite relies on a technique called the transit method -- where the dip in the light coming from the star caused by a planet passing in front of it is used to infer the properties of the planet -- to find the planets and measure their sizes. However, it was only with the addition of radial velocity measurements made with ESPRESSO and its predecessor, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the ESO La Silla 3.6-metre telescope, that Demangeon and his team were able to find extra planets and measure the masses and radii of the first three. "If we want to know what a planet is made of, the minimum that we need is its mass and its radius," Demangeon explains.

The team hopes to continue to study the system with the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) , while ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and set to start observations in 2027, will also be ideal for studying these planets. "The HIRES instrument on the ELT may have the power to study the atmospheres of some of the planets in the L 98-59 system, thus complementing the JWST from the ground," says Zapatero Osorio.

Read more at Science Daily

Mathematician reveals world’s oldest example of applied geometry

A UNSW mathematician has revealed the origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet that has been hiding in plain sight in a museum in Istanbul for over a century.

The tablet -- known as Si.427 -- was discovered in the late 19th century in what is now central Iraq, but its significance was unknown until the UNSW scientist's detective work was revealed today.

Most excitingly, Si.427 is thought to be the oldest known example of applied geometry -- and in the study released today in Foundations of Science, the research also reveals a compelling human story of land surveying.

"Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB) period -- 1900 to 1600 BCE," says lead researcher Dr Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's School of Mathematics and Statistics.

"It's the only known example of a cadastral document from the OB period, which is a plan used by surveyors define land boundaries. In this case, it tells us legal and geometric details about a field that's split after some of it was sold off."

This is a significant object because the surveyor uses what are now known as "Pythagorean triples" to make accurate right angles.

"The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics," Dr Mansfield says. "For instance, this is over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born."

Hot on the heels of another world-first find

In 2017, Dr Mansfield conjectured that another fascinating artefact from the same period, known as Plimpton 322, was a unique kind of trigonometric table.

"It is generally accepted that trigonometry -- the branch of maths that is concerned with the study of triangles -- was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky in the second century BCE," says Dr Mansfield.

"But the Babylonians developed their own alternative 'proto-trigonometry' to solve problems related to measuring the ground, not the sky."

The tablet revealed today is thought to have existed even before Plimpton 322 -- in fact, surveying problems likely inspired Plimpton 322.

"There is a whole zoo of right triangles with different shapes. But only a very small handful can be used by Babylonian surveyors. Plimpton 322 is a systematic study of this zoo to discover the useful shapes," says Dr Mansfield.

Tablet purpose revealed: surveying land

Back in 2017, the team speculated about the purpose of the Plimpton 322, hypothesizing that it was likely to have had some practical purpose, possibly used to construct palaces and temples, build canals or survey fields.

"With this new tablet, we can actually see for the first time why they were interested in geometry: to lay down precise land boundaries," Dr Mansfield says.

"This is from a period where land is starting to become private -- people started thinking about land in terms of 'my land and your land', wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighbourly relationships. And this is what this tablet immediately says. It's a field being split, and new boundaries are made."

There are even clues hidden on other tablets from that time period about the stories behind these boundaries.

"Another tablet refers to a dispute between Sin-bel-apli -- a prominent individual mentioned on many tablets including Si.427 -- and a wealthy female landowner," Dr Mansfield says.

"The dispute is over valuable date palms on the border between their two properties. The local administrator agrees to send out a surveyor to resolve the dispute. It is easy to see how accuracy was important in resolving disputes between such powerful individuals."

Dr Mansfield says the way these boundaries are made reveals real geometric understanding.

"Nobody expected that the Babylonians were using Pythagorean triples in this way," Dr Mansfield says. "It is more akin to pure mathematics, inspired by the practical problems of the time."

Creating right angles -- easier said than done

One simple way to make an accurate right angle is to make a rectangle with sides 3 and 4, and diagonal 5. These special numbers form the 3-4-5 "Pythagorean triple" and a rectangle with these measurements has mathematically perfect right angles. This is important to ancient surveyors and still used today.

"The ancient surveyors who made Si.427 did something even better: they used a variety of different Pythagorean triples, both as rectangles and right triangles, to construct accurate right angles," Dr Mansfield says.

However, it is difficult to work with prime numbers bigger than 5 in the base 60 Babylonian number system.

"This raises a very particular issue -- their unique base 60 number system means that only some Pythagorean shapes can be used," Dr Mansfield says.

"It seems that the author of Plimpton 322 went through all these Pythagorean shapes to find these useful ones.

"This deep and highly numerical understanding of the practical use of rectangles earns the name 'proto-trigonometry' but it is completely different to our modern trigonometry involving sin, cos, and tan."

Hunting down Si.427

Dr Mansfield first learned about Si.427 when reading about it in excavation records -- the tablet was dug up during the Sippar expedition of 1894, in what's the Baghdad province in Iraq today.

"It was a real challenge to trace the tablet from these records and physically find it -- the report said that the tablet had gone to the Imperial Museum of Constantinople, a place that obviously doesn't exist anymore.

"Using that piece of information, I went on a quest to track it down, speaking to many people at Turkish government ministries and museums, until one day in mid 2018 a photo of Si.427 finally landed in my inbox.

"That's when I learned that it was actually on display at the museum. Even after locating the object it still took months to fully understand just how significant it is, and so it's really satisfying to finally be able to share that story."

Next, Dr Mansfield hopes to find what other applications the Babylonians had for their proto-trigonometry.

There's just one mystery left that Dr Mansfield hasn't unlocked: on the back of the tablet, at the very bottom, it lists the sexagesimal number '25:29' in big font -- think of it as 25 minutes and 29 seconds.

Read more at Science Daily

New mothers’ sleep loss linked to accelerated aging

When new mothers complain that all those sleepless nights caring for their newborns are taking years off their life, they just might be right, UCLA research published this summer in the journal Sleep Health suggests.

Scientists studied 33 mothers during their pregnancies and the first year of their babies' lives, analyzing the women's DNA from blood samples to determine their "biological age," which can differ from chronological age. They found that a year after giving birth, the biological age of mothers who slept less than seven hours a night at the six-month mark was three to seven years older than those who logged seven hours or more.

Mothers who slept less than seven hours also had shorter telomeres in their white blood cells. These small pieces of DNA at the ends of chromosomes act as protective caps, like the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. Shortened telomeres have been linked to a higher risk of cancers, cardiovascular and other diseases, and earlier death.

"The early months of postpartum sleep deprivation could have a lasting effect on physical health," said the study's first author, Judith Carroll, UCLA's George F. Solomon Professor of Psychobiology. "We know from a large body of research that sleeping less than seven hours a night is detrimental to health and increases the risk of age-related diseases."

While participants' nightly sleep ranged from five to nine hours, more than half were getting less than seven hours, both six months and one year after giving birth, the researchers report.

"We found that with every hour of additional sleep, the mother's biological age was younger," said Carroll, a member of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA's Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "I, and many other sleep scientists, consider sleep health to be just as vital to overall health as diet and exercise."

Carroll urged new mothers take advantage of opportunities to get a little extra sleep, like taking naps during the day when their baby is asleep, accepting offers of assistance from family and friends, and, when possible, asking their partner to help with the baby during the night or early morning. "Taking care of your sleep needs will help you and your baby in the long run," she said.

Co-author Christine Dunkel Schetter, a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at UCLA, said the study results "and other findings on maternal postpartum mental health provide impetus for better supporting mothers of young infants so that they can get sufficient sleep -- possibly through parental leave so that both parents can bear some of the burden of care, and through programs for families and fathers."

Dunkel Schetter added that while accelerated biological aging linked to sleep loss may increase women's health risks, it doesn't automatically cause harm to their bodies. "We don't want the message to be that mothers are permanently damaged by infant care and loss of sleep," she emphasized. "We don't know if these effects are long lasting."

'This aisle is closed': Using epigenetics to determine biological age

The study used the latest scientific methods of analyzing changes in DNA to assess biological aging -- also known as epigenetic aging, Dunkel Schetter said. DNA provides the code for making proteins, which carry out many functions in the cells of our body, and epigenetics focuses on whether regions of this code are "open" or "closed."

"You can think of DNA as a grocery store," Carroll said, "with lots of basic ingredients to build a meal. If there is a spill in one aisle, it may be closed, and you can't get an item from that aisle, which might prevent you from making a recipe. When access to DNA code is 'closed,' then those genes that code for specific proteins cannot be expressed and are therefore turned off."

Because specific sites within DNA are turned on or off with aging, the process acts as a sort of clock, Carroll said, allowing scientists to estimate individuals' biological age. The greater an individual's biological, or epigenetic, age, the greater their risk of disease and earlier death.

The study's cohort -- which included women who ranged in age from 23 to 45 six months after giving birth -- is not a large representative sample of women, the authors said, and more studies are needed to better understand the long-term impact of sleep loss on new mothers, what other factors might contribute to sleep loss and whether the biological aging effects are permanent or reversible.

Carroll and Dunkel Schetter reported last year that a mother's stress prior to giving birth may accelerate her child's biological aging, which is a form of "intergenerational transfer of health risk," Dunkel Schetter said.

Read more at Science Daily

Major Atlantic ocean current system might be approaching critical threshold

The major Atlantic ocean current, to which also the Gulf stream belongs, may have been losing stability in the course of the last century. This is shown in a new study published in Nature Climate Change. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, transports warm water masses from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom, which is most relevant for the relatively mild temperatures in Europe. Further, it influences weather systems worldwide. A potential collapse of this ocean current system could therefore have severe consequences.

"The Atlantic Meridional Overturning really is one of our planet's key circulation systems," says the author of the study, Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Freie Universität Berlin and Exeter University. "We already know from some computer simulations and from data from Earth's past, so-called paleoclimate proxy records, that the AMOC can exhibit -- in addition to the currently attained strong mode -- an alternative, substantially weaker mode of operation. This bi-stability implies that abrupt transitions between the two circulation modes are in principle possible."

Loss of dynamical stability could ultimately lead to collapse

It has been shown previously that the AMOC is currently at its weakest in more than a 1000 years. However, so far it has remained an open question whether the observed weakening corresponds to a change in the mean circulation state, or whether it is associated with an actual loss of dynamical stability. "The difference is crucial," says Niklas Boers, "because the loss of dynamical stability would imply that the AMOC has approached its critical threshold, beyond which a substantial and in practice likely irreversible transition to the weak mode could occur."

Long-term observational data of the strength of the AMOC does unfortunately not exist, but the AMOC leaves so-called fingerprints in sea-surface temperature and salinity patterns of the Atlantic ocean. "A detailed analysis of these fingerprints in eight independent indices now suggests that the AMOC weakening during the last century is indeed likely to be associated with a loss of stability," says Boers. "The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse."

In addition to global warming, freshwater inflow is a factor -- which is also linked to climate change

A number of factors are likely important for the phenomenon -- factors that add to the direct effect that the warming of the Atlantic ocean has on its circulation. These include freshwater inflow from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, melting sea-ice, increasing precipitation and river run-off. Freshwater is lighter than saltwater and reduces the tendency of the water to sink from the surface to greater depths, which is one of the drivers of the overturning.

Read more at Science Daily

Promoting biodiversity-friendly landscapes - beyond organic farming

Is organic farming the only alternative to conventional agriculture to promote biodiversity in agricultural landscapes? An international research team led by the University of Göttingen questions this. According to the authors, a landscape mosaic of natural habitats and small-scale and diverse cultivated areas is the key to promoting biodiversity on a large scale in both conventional and organic agriculture. They state that political decision-makers will have to recognise this in order to achieve a corresponding paradigm shift in agriculture. The statement was published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Organic certification largely focusses on banning synthetic agrochemicals, the research team criticises. This leads to limited benefits for biodiversity, but to high losses in yield, even though agriculture is becoming more intensive and specialised. "Areas cultivated under organic certification have a third more species, but do not reach the yield level of conventional cultivation. This means that more land is needed for the same yield," explains first author Professor Teja Tscharntke, Agroecology Group at the University of Göttingen. However, as a larger area is needed, the advantages for biodiversity disappear. Moreover, it is a myth that organic farming never uses pesticides. "Pesticides are allowed as long as they are considered natural. For example, grape, orchards and also vegetables are sprayed extensively and repeatedly, mainly with copper products, even though these products accumulate in the soil," says Tscharntke. "In addition, much organic farming has moved far away from the ideals of its early years: organic farming is not always done on idyllic family farms; organic monocultures are often similar in size to conventional farms; and vegetables are often grown under glass, at the expense of biodiversity." In the Mediterranean region, covering crops with plastic sheets for vegetable cultivation is ruining entire landscapes, and yet an ever-increasing proportion of farming here is none-the-less achieving organic certification.

"Landscapes with high crop diversity, small fields, and at least one fifth near-natural habitats can promote biodiversity significantly more than just organic certification," emphasises the agroecologist. "Landscapes with small fields and long edges have many times more species than landscapes with large fields, and are equally feasible both in organic and conventional agriculture." As an example, he cites landscapes where fields are one hectare instead of six: "These can be home to six times as many plant and insect species. Variety in cultivation can also double the number of species and greatly increase biological pest control as well as successful pollination."

Read more at Science Daily

Space scientists reveal secret behind Jupiter’s ‘energy crisis’

New research published in Nature has revealed the solution to Jupiter's 'energy crisis', which has puzzled astronomers for decades.

Space scientists at the University of Leicester worked with colleagues from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), Boston University, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) to reveal the mechanism behind Jupiter's atmospheric heating.

Now, using data from the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i, astronomers have created the most-detailed yet global map of the gas giant's upper atmosphere, confirming for the first time that Jupiter's powerful aurorae are responsible for delivering planet-wide heating.

Dr James O'Donoghue is a researcher at JAXA and completed his PhD at Leicester, and is lead author for the research paper. He said:

"We first began trying to create a global heat map of Jupiter's uppermost atmosphere at the University of Leicester. The signal was not bright enough to reveal anything outside of Jupiter's polar regions at the time, but with the lessons learned from that work we managed to secure time on one of the largest, most competitive telescopes on Earth some years later.

"Using the Keck telescope we produced temperature maps of extraordinary detail. We found that temperatures start very high within the aurora, as expected from previous work, but now we could observe that Jupiter's aurora, despite taking up less than 10% of the area of the planet, appear to be heating the whole thing.

"This research started in Leicester and carried on at Boston University and NASA before ending at JAXA in Japan. Collaborators from each continent working together made this study successful, combined with data from NASA's Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter and JAXA's Hisaki spacecraft, an observatory in space."

Dr Tom Stallard and Dr Henrik Melin are both part of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. Dr Stallard added:

"There has been a very long-standing puzzle in the thin atmosphere at the top of every Giant Planet within our solar system. With every Jupiter space mission, along with ground-based observations, over the past 50 years, we have consistently measured the equatorial temperatures as being much too hot.

"This 'energy crisis' has been a long standing issue -- do the models fail to properly model how heat flows from the aurora, or is there some other unknown heat source near the equator?

"This paper describes how we have mapped this region in unprecedented detail and have shown that, at Jupiter, the equatorial heating is directly associated with auroral heating."

Aurorae occur when charged particles are caught in a planet's magnetic field. These spiral along the field lines towards the planet's magnetic poles, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere to release light and energy.

On Earth, this leads to the characteristic light show that forms the Aurora Borealis and Australis. At Jupiter, the material spewing from its volcanic moon, Io, leads to the most powerful aurora in the Solar System and enormous heating in the polar regions of the planet.

Although the Jovian aurorae have long been a prime candidate for heating the planet's atmosphere, observations have previously been unable to confirm or deny this until now.

Previous maps of the upper atmospheric temperature were formed using images consisting of only several pixels. This is not enough resolution to see how the temperature might be changed across the planet, providing few clues as to the origin of the extra heat.

Researchers created five maps of the atmospheric temperature at different spatial resolutions, with the highest resolution map showing an average temperature measurement for squares two degrees longitude 'high' by two degrees latitude 'wide'.

The team scoured more than 10,000 individual data points, only mapping points with an uncertainty of less than five per cent.

Models of the atmospheres of gas giants suggest that they work like a giant refrigerator, with heat energy drawn from the equator towards the pole, and deposited in the lower atmosphere in these pole regions.

These new findings suggest that fast-changing aurorae may drive waves of energy against this poleward flow, allowing heat to reach the equator.

Observations also showed a region of localised heating in the sub-auroral region that could be interpreted as a limited wave of heat propagating equatorward, which could be interpreted as evidence of the process driving heat transfer.

Planetary research at the University of Leicester spans the breadth of Jovian system, from the planet's magnetosphere and atmosphere, out to its diverse collection of satellites.

Read more at Science Daily

Nearby star resembles ours in its youth

New research led by NASA provides a closer look at a nearby star thought to resemble our young Sun. The work allows scientists to better understand what our Sun may have been like when it was young, and how it may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth.

Many people dream of meeting with a younger version of themselves to exchange advice, identify the origins of their defining traits, and share hopes for the future. At 4.65 billion years old, our Sun is a middle-aged star. Scientists are often curious to learn exactly what properties enabled our Sun, in its younger years, to support life on nearby Earth.

Without a time machine to transport scientists back billions of years, retracing our star's early activity may seem an impossible feat. Luckily, in the Milky Way galaxy -- the glimmering, spiraling segment of the universe where our solar system is located -- there are more than 100 billion stars. One in ten share characteristics with our Sun, and many are in the early stages of development.

"Imagine I want to reproduce a baby picture of an adult when they were one or two years old, and all of their pictures were erased or lost. I would look at a photo of them now, and their close relatives' photos from around that age, and from there, reconstruct their baby photos," said Vladimir Airapetian, senior astrophysicist in the Heliophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and first author on the new study. "That's the sort of process we are following here -- looking at characteristics of a young star similar to ours, to better understand what our own star was like in its youth, and what allowed it to foster life on one of its nearby planets."

Kappa 1 Ceti is one such solar analogue. The star is located about 30 light-years away (in space terms, that's like a neighbor who lives on the next street over) and is estimated to be between 600 to 750 million years old, around the same age our Sun was when life developed on Earth. It also has a similar mass and surface temperature to our Sun, said the study's second author, Meng Jin, a heliophysicist with the SETI Institute and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California. All of those factors make Kappa 1 Ceti a "twin" of our young Sun at the time when life arose on Earth, and an important target for study.

Airapetian, Jin, and several colleagues have adapted an existing solar model to predict some of Kappa 1 Ceti's most important, yet difficult to measure, characteristics. The model relies on data input from a variety of space missions including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and NICER missions, and ESA's XMM-Newton. The team published their study today in The Astrophysical Journal.

Star Power

Like human toddlers, toddler stars are known for their high bursts of energy and activity. For stars, one way this pent-up energy is released is in the form of a stellar wind.

Stellar winds, like stars themselves, are mostly made up of a superhot gas known as plasma, created when particles in a gas have split into positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. The most energetic plasma, with the help of a star's magnetic field, can shoot off away from the outermost and hottest part of a star's atmosphere, the corona, in an eruption, or stream more steadily toward nearby planets as stellar wind. "Stellar wind is continuously flowing out from a star toward its nearby planets, influencing those planets' environments," Jin said.

Younger stars tend to generate hotter, more vigorous stellar winds and more powerful plasma eruptions than older stars do. Such outbursts can affect the atmosphere and chemistry of planets nearby, and possibly even catalyze the development of organic material -- the building blocks for life -- on those planets.

Stellar wind can have a significant impact on planets at any stage of life. But the strong, highly dense stellar winds of young stars can compress the protective magnetic shields of surrounding planets, making them even more susceptible to the effects of the charged particles.

Our Sun is a perfect example. Compared to now, in its toddlerhood, our Sun likely rotated three times faster, had a stronger magnetic field, and shot out more intense high-energy radiation and particles. These days, for lucky spectators, the impact of these particles is sometimes visible near the planet's poles as aurora, or the Northern and Southern Lights. Airapetian says 4 billion years ago, considering the impact of our Sun's wind at that time, these tremendous lights were likely often visible from many more places around the globe.

That high level of activity in our Sun's nascence may have pushed back Earth's protective magnetosphere, and provided the planet -- not close enough to be torched like Venus, nor distant enough to be neglected like Mars -- with the right atmospheric chemistry for the formation of biological molecules.

Similar processes could be unfolding in stellar systems across our galaxy and universe.

"It's my dream to find a rocky exoplanet in the stage that our planet was in more than 4 billion years ago, being shaped by its young, active star and nearly ready to host life," Airapetian said. "Understanding what our Sun was like just as life was beginning to develop on Earth will help us to refine our search for stars with exoplanets that may eventually host life."

A Solar Twin

Though solar analogues can help solve one of the challenges of peeking into the Sun's past, time isn't the only complicating factor in studying our young Sun. There's also distance.

We have instruments capable of accurately measuring the stellar wind from our own Sun, called the solar wind. However, it's not yet possible to directly observe the stellar wind of other stars in our galaxy, like Kappa 1 Ceti, because they are too far away.

When scientists wish to study an event or phenomenon that they cannot directly observe, scientific modeling can help fill in the gaps. Models are representations or predictions of an object of study, built on existing scientific data. While scientists have previously modeled the stellar wind from this star, Airapetian said, they used more simplified assumptions.

"Every model needs input to get output," Airapetian said. "To get useful, accurate output, the input needs to be solid data, ideally from multiple sources across time. We have all that data from Kappa 1 Ceti, but we really synthesized it in this predictive model to move past previous purely observational studies of the star."

Airapetian likens his team's model to a doctor's report. To get a full picture of how a patient is doing, a doctor is likely to talk to the patient, gather markers like heart rate and temperature, and if needed, conduct several more specialized tests, like a blood test or ultrasound. They are likely to formulate an accurate assessment of patient well-being with a combination of these metrics, not just one.

Similarly, by using many pieces of information about Kappa 1 Ceti gathered from different space missions, scientists are better able to predict its corona and the stellar wind. Because stellar wind can affect a nearby planet's magnetic shield, it plays an important role in habitability. The team is also working on another project, looking more closely at the particles that may have emerged from early solar flares, as well as prebiotic chemistry on Earth.

Our Sun's Past, Written in the Stars

The researchers hope to use their model to map the environments of other Sun-like stars at various life stages.

Specifically, they have eyes on the infant star EK Dra -- 111 light-years away and only 100 million years old -- which is likely rotating three times faster and shooting off more flares and plasma than Kappa 1 Ceti. Documenting how these similar stars of various ages differ from one another will help characterize the typical trajectory of a star's life.

Their work, Airapetian said, is all about "looking at our own Sun, its past and its possible future, through the lens of other stars."

To learn more about our Sun's stormy youth, watch this video and see how energy from our young Sun -- 4 billion years ago -- aided in creating molecules in Earth's atmosphere, allowing it to warm up enough to incubate life.

The basis for the new model of Kappa 1 Ceti by Airapetian, Jin, and colleagues is the Alfvén Wave Solar Model, which is within the Space Weather Modeling Framework developed by the University of Michigan. The model works by inputting known information about a star, including its magnetic field and ultraviolet emission line data, to predict stellar wind activity. When the model has been tested on our Sun, it has been validated and checked against observed data to verify that its predictions are accurate.

"It's capable of modeling our star's winds and corona with high fidelity," Jin said. "And it's a model we can use on other stars, too, to predict their stellar wind and thereby investigate habitability. That's what we did here."

Read more at Science Daily

The waste product which could help mitigate climate change

A product made from urban, agriculture and forestry waste has the added benefit of reducing the carbon footprint of modern farming, an international review involving UNSW has found.

Visiting Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at UNSW Science, Stephen Joseph, says the study published in GCB Bioenergy provides strong evidence that biochar can contribute to climate change mitigation.

"Biochar can draw down carbon from the atmosphere into the soil and store it for hundreds to thousands of years," the lead author says."This study also found that biochar helps build organic carbon in soil by up to 20 per cent (average 3.8 per cent) and can reduce nitrous oxide emissions from soil by 12 to 50 per cent, which increases the climate change mitigation benefits of biochar."

The findings are supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent Special Report on Climate Change and Land, which estimated there was important climate change mitigation potential available through biochar. "The intergovernmental panel found that globally, biochar could mitigate between 300 million to 660 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050," Prof. Joseph says. "Compare that to Australia's emissions last year -- an estimated 499 million tonnes of carbon dioxide -- and you can see that biochar can absorb a lot of emissions. We just need a will to develop and use it."

Biochar is the product of heating biomass residues such as wood chips, animal manures, sludges, compost and green waste, in an oxygen-starved environment -- a process called pyrolysis. The result is stable charcoal which can cut greenhouse emissions, while boosting soil fertility. The GCB Bioenergystudy reviewed approximately 300 papers including 33 meta-analyses that examined many of the 14,000 biochar studies that have been published over the last 20 years.

"It found average crop yields increased from 10 to 42 per cent, concentrations of heavy metals in plant tissue were reduced by 17 to 39 per cent and phosphorus availability to plants increased too," Prof. Joseph says. "Biochar helps plants resist environmental stresses, such as diseases, and helps plants tolerate toxic metals, water stress and organic compounds such as the herbicide atrazine." The study details for the first time how biochar improves the root zone of a plant. In the first three weeks, as biochar reacts with the soil it can stimulate seed germination and seedling growth. During the next six months, reactive surfaces are created on biochar particles, improving nutrient supply to plants. After three to six months, biochar starts to 'age' in the soil and forms microaggregates that protect organic matter from decomposition.

Prof. Joseph says the study found the greatest responses to biochar were in acidic and sandy soils where biochar had been applied together with fertiliser. "We found the positive effects of biochar were dose dependent and also dependent on matching the properties of the biochar to soil constraints and plant nutrient requirements," Prof. Joseph says. "Plants, particularly in low-nutrient, acidic soils common in the tropics and humid subtropics, such as the north coast of NSW and Queensland, could significantly benefit from biochar. "Sandy soils in Western Australia, Victoria and South Australia, particularly in dryland regions increasingly affected by drought under climate change, would also greatly benefit."

Prof. Joseph AM is an expert in producing engineered stable biochar from agriculture, urban and forestry residues. He has been researching the benefits of biochar in promoting healthy soils and addressing climate change since he was introduced to it by Indigenous Australians in the seventies. He says biochar has been used for production of crops and for maintaining healthy soils by Indigenous peoples in Australia, Latin America (especially in the Amazon basin) and Africa for many hundreds of years.

Biochar has also been recorded in the 17th Century as a feed supplement for animals. But while Australian researchers have studied biochar since 2005, it has been relatively slow to take off as a commercial product, with Australia producing around 5000 tonnes a year. "This is in part due to the small number of large-scale demonstration programs that have been funded, as well as farmers' and government advisors' lack of knowledge about biochar, regulatory hurdles, and lack of venture capital and young entrepreneurs to fund and build biochar businesses," Prof. Joseph says.

In comparison, the US is producing about 50,000 tonnes a year, while China is producing more than 500,000 tonnes a year. Prof. Joseph, who has received an Order of Australia for his work in renewable energy and biochar, says to enable widespread adoption of biochar, it needs to be readily integrated with farming operations and be demonstrated to be economically viable. "We've done the science, what we don't have is enough resources to educate and train people, to establish demonstrations so farmers can see the benefits of using biochar, to develop this new industry," he says.

However this is slowly changing as large corporations are purchasing carbon dioxide reduction certificates (CORC's) to offset their emissions, which is boosting the profile of biochar in Australia. Biochar has potential in a range of applications. Prof. Joseph co-authored a recent study in International Materials Reviews which detailed the less well-known uses of biochar, such as a construction material, to reduce toxins in soil, grow microorganisms, in animal feed and soil remediation. UNSW has a collaborative grant with a company and a university in Norway to develop a biochar based anti-microbial coating to kill pathogens in water and find use in air filtration systems, he says.

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How landscapes of fear affect the songbirds in our backyards

A team of researchers headquartered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently discovered that fear plays an important, unrecognized role in the underdevelopment, and increased vulnerability, of backyard songbirds.

Scientists have long known that urban songbirds face a host of increased challenges, from habitat loss to altered food sources and a larger population of predators, such as skunks, rats, squirrels and, especially, house cats, compared to their rural cousins. In particular, urban nestlings weigh significantly less than those born in the country and have a decreased chance of surviving to adulthood, as a result. New research, published in the journal Ecosphere, helps to tease out exactly why.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out why urban nestlings struggle is due to what biologists call the "predation paradox:" though there are increased numbers of predators in urban areas, there is actually a lower per-capita rate of predation. "The key," says Aaron Grade, the paper's lead author who completed this research as a graduate student in UMass Amherst's program in organismic and evolutionary biology, "has been hiding in plain sight. We haven't been paying enough attention to fear itself."

To arrive at this conclusion, Grade, along with his co-authors Susannah B. Lerman, research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station; and Paige S. Warren, professor in the department of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst; built 38 nest boxes for house wrens and placed them in participants' backyards. The participants lived in a variety of landscapes, all in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, from the urban (Springfield, with a population density of 4,775 people per square mile), to low-density suburban (Amherst, 1,445 people per square mile) to the rural (Whately, 72 people per square mile).

Grade and his colleagues then played the cries of screech owls and Cooper's hawks, both of which feed upon house wrens in Massachusetts, from speakers installed in each participant's yard. "The participants were wonderful," says Grade. "They put up with this noise in their backyards and were very invested in the experiment." The nestlings in each box were then weighed every three days until they left the nest.

The authors discovered that, due to a variety of 'urban effects,' including availability of food, habitat loss and predation, urban nestlings all weighed about 10% less than the rural nestlings -- an expected finding that is consistent with previous studies showing the effects of urban development on wildlife. But the authors also discovered that all the nestlings, both rural and urban, subjected to the owl and hawk cries saw a 10% decrease in weight as well.

"This is a largely unexplored component of human/wildlife interaction," says Grade. "Birds are very in-tune with what's going on, and if they see, or in this case hear, a predator, they'll change their behavior." For instance, the parent birds might spend less time finding food for their nestlings to avoid predation. "These landscapes of fear," says Grade, "can have a greater effect on behavior and survival than the actual predator itself."

In general, hobbyist birders should avoid using recordings of predators because they can cause unintended responses and undue stress in birds, as Grade's research shows. These experiments were carried out with approval by the UMass Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and followed best practices for playback experiments to reduce any potential harm.

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Why is this weird, metallic star hurtling out of the Milky Way?

About 2,000 light-years away from Earth, there is a star catapulting toward the edge of the Milky Way. This particular star, known as LP 40?365, is one of a unique breed of fast-moving stars -- remnant pieces of massive white dwarf stars -- that have survived in chunks after a gigantic stellar explosion.

"This star is moving so fast that it's almost certainly leaving the galaxy…[it's] moving almost two million miles an hour," says JJ Hermes, Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of astronomy. But why is this flying object speeding out of the Milky Way? Because it's a piece of shrapnel from a past explosion -- a cosmic event known as a supernova -- that's still being propelled forward.

"To have gone through partial detonation and still survive is very cool and unique, and it's only in the last few years that we've started to think this kind of star could exist," says Odelia Putterman, a former BU student who has worked in Hermes' lab.

In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Hermes and Putterman uncover new observations about this leftover "star shrapnel" that gives insight to other stars with similar catastrophic pasts.

Putterman and Hermes analyzed data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which surveys the sky and collects light information on stars near and far. By looking at various kinds of light data from both telescopes, the researchers and their collaborators found that LP 40?365 is not only being hurled out of the galaxy, but based on the brightness patterns in the data, is also rotating on its way out.

"The star is basically being slingshotted from the explosion, and we're [observing] its rotation on its way out," says Putterman, who is second author on the paper.

"We dug a little deeper to figure out why that star [was repeatedly] getting brighter and fainter, and the simplest explanation is that we're seeing something at [its] surface rotate in and out of view every nine hours," suggesting its rotation rate, Hermes says. All stars rotate -- even our sun slowly rotates on its axis every 27 days. But for a star fragment that's survived a supernova, nine hours is considered relatively slow.

Supernovas occur when a white dwarf gets too massive to support itself, eventually triggering a cosmic detonation of energy. Finding the rotation rate of a star like LP 40?365 after a supernova can lend clues into the original two-star system it came from. It's common in the universe for stars to come in close pairs, including white dwarfs, which are highly dense stars that form toward the end of a star's life. If one white dwarf gives too much mass to the other, the star being dumped on can self-destruct, resulting in a supernova. Supernovas are commonplace in the galaxy and can happen in many different ways, according to the researchers, but they are usually very hard to see. This makes it hard to know which star did the imploding and which star dumped too much mass onto its star partner.

Based on LP 40?365's relatively slow rotation rate, Hermes and Putterman feel more confident that it is shrapnel from the star that self-destructed after being fed too much mass by its partner, when they were once orbiting each other at high speed. Because the stars were orbiting each other so quickly and closely, the explosion slingshotted both stars, and now we only see LP 40-365.

"This [paper] adds one more layer of knowledge into what role these stars played when the supernova occurred," and what can happen after the explosion, Putterman says. "By understanding what's happening with this particular star, we can start to understand what's happening with many other similar stars that came from a similar situation."

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Exercise improves health through changes on DNA

While it is widely known that regular physical exercise decreases the risk of virtually all chronic illnesses, the mechanisms at play are not fully known. Now scientists at the University of Copenhagen have discovered that the beneficial effects of physical exercise may in part result from changes to the structure of our DNA. These changes are referred as 'epigenetic'.

DNA is the molecular instruction manual found in all our cells. Some sections of our DNA are genes, which are instructions for building proteins -- the body's building blocks -- while other sections are called enhancers that regulate which genes are switched on or off, when, and in which tissue. The scientists found, for the first time, that exercise rewires the enhancers in regions of our DNA that are known to be associated with the risk to develop disease.

"Our findings provide a mechanism for the known beneficial effects of exercise. By connecting each enhancer with a gene, we further provide a list of direct targets that could mediate this effect," says Professor Romain Barrès from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, the senior author of the research, which was published in Molecular Metabolism.

Exercise improves health of organs including the brain

The team of scientists hypothesized that endurance exercise training remodels the activity of gene enhancers in skeletal muscle. They recruited healthy young men and put them through a six-week endurance exercise program. The scientists collected a biopsy of their thigh muscle before and after the exercise intervention and examined if changes in the epigenetic signature of their DNA occurred after training.

The scientists discovered that after completing the endurance training program, the structure of many enhancers in the skeletal muscle of the young men had been altered. By connecting the enhancers to genetic databases, they discovered that many of the regulated enhancers have already been identified as hotspots of genetic variation between individuals -- hotspots that have been associated with human disease.

The scientists speculate that the beneficial effects of exercise on organs distant from muscle, like the brain, may largely be mediated by regulating the secretion of muscle factors. In particular, they found that exercise remodels enhancer activity in skeletal muscle that are linked to cognitive abilities, which opens for the identification of exercise training-induced secreted muscle factors targeting the brain.

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Learning foreign languages can affect the processing of music in the brain

Research has shown that a music-related hobby boosts language skills and affects the processing of speech in the brain. According to a new study, the reverse also happens -- learning foreign languages can affect the processing of music in the brain.

Research Director Mari Tervaniemi from the University of Helsinki's Faculty of Educational Sciences investigated, in cooperation with researchers from the Beijing Normal University (BNU) and the University of Turku, the link in the brain between language acquisition and music processing in Chinese elementary school pupils aged 8-11 by monitoring, for one school year, children who attended a music training programme and a similar programme for the English language. Brain responses associated with auditory processing were measured in the children before and after the programmes. Tervaniemi compared the results to those of children who attended other training programmes.

"The results demonstrated that both the music and the language programme had an impact on the neural processing of auditory signals," Tervaniemi says.

Learning achievements extend from language acquisition to music

Surprisingly, attendance in the English training programme enhanced the processing of musically relevant sounds, particularly in terms of pitch processing.

"A possible explanation for the finding is the language background of the children, as understanding Chinese, which is a tonal language, is largely based on the perception of pitch, which potentially equipped the study subjects with the ability to utilise precisely that trait when learning new things. That's why attending the language training programme facilitated the early neural auditory processes more than the musical training."

Tervaniemi says that the results support the notion that musical and linguistic brain functions are closely linked in the developing brain. Both music and language acquisition modulate auditory perception. However, whether they produce similar or different results in the developing brain of school-age children has not been systematically investigated in prior studies.

At the beginning of the training programmes, the number of children studied using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings was 120, of whom more than 80 also took part in EEG recordings a year later, after the programme.

In the music training, the children had the opportunity to sing a lot: they were taught to sing from both hand signs and sheet music. The language training programme emphasised the combination of spoken and written English, that is, simultaneous learning. At the same time, the English language employs an orthography that is different from Chinese. The one-hour programme sessions were held twice a week after school on school premises throughout the school year, with roughly 20 children and two teachers attending at a time.

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New study details enzyme that allows coronavirus to resist antiviral medications

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has demonstrated a stubborn ability to resist most nucleoside antiviral treatments, but a new study led by an Iowa State University scientist could help to overcome the virus's defenses.

The study, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Science, details the structure of a critical enzyme present in SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This enzyme, known as the proofreading exoribonuclease (or ExoN), removes nucleoside antiviral medications from the virus's RNA, rendering most nucleoside analogs-based antiviral treatments ineffective. The new study presents the atomic structures of the ExoN enzyme, which could lead to the development of new methods for deactivating the enzyme and opening the door to better treatments for patients suffering from COVID-19.

"If we could find a way to inhibit this enzyme, maybe we can achieve better results to kill the virus with existing nucleoside antiviral treatments. Understanding this structure and the molecular details of how ExoN works can help guide further development of antivirals," said Yang Yang, lead author of the study and assistant professor in the Roy J. Carver Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University.

SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, which means its genetic material is composed of ribonucleic acid. When the virus replicates, it must synthesize RNA. But the virus's genome is unusually large when compared to other RNA viruses, which creates a relatively high likelihood that errors arise during RNA synthesis. These errors take the form of mismatched nucleotides, and too many errors can prevent the virus from propagating.

But the ExoN enzyme acts as a proofreader, recognizing mismatches in the virus RNA and correcting errors that occur during RNA synthesis, Yang said. The enzyme is present only in coronaviruses and a few other closely related virus families, he said.

The same process that eliminates replication errors also eliminates antiviral agents delivered by the treatments commonly used to fight other RNA viruses, such as HIV, HCV and Ebola virus, which partially explains why SARS-CoV-2 has proven so difficult to treat, Yang said.

But Yang and his colleagues utilized cryogenic electron microscopy, a technique in which samples are flash cooled to cryogenic temperatures in vitreous ice to preserve their native structures, to detail the structure of the enzyme. Understanding that structure could allow for the development of molecules that bind to the enzyme and disable it. Yang said that's the next step for his laboratory and his colleagues. Finding such a molecule could make the virus more susceptible to newly developed antivirals, Yang said. Or, it could allow for the optimization of current antivirals, such as Remdesivir.

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Astronomers probe layer-cake structure of brown dwarf’s atmosphere

Maunakea, Hawaii -- Jupiter may be the bully planet of our solar system because it's the most massive planet, but it's actually a runt compared to many of the giant planets found around other stars.

These alien worlds, called super-Jupiters, weigh up to 13 times Jupiter's mass. Astronomers have analyzed the composition of some of these monsters, but it has been difficult to study their atmospheres in detail because these gas giants get lost in the glare of their parent stars.

Researchers, however, have a substitute: the atmospheres of brown dwarfs, so-called failed stars that are up to 80 times Jupiter's mass. These hefty objects form out of a collapsing cloud of gas, as stars do, but lack the mass to become hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores, which powers stars.

Instead, brown dwarfs share a kinship with super-Jupiters. Both types of objects have similar temperatures and are extremely massive. They also have complex, varied atmospheres. The only difference, astronomers think, is their pedigree. Super-Jupiters form around stars; brown dwarfs often form in isolation.

A team of astronomers, led by Elena Manjavacas of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, has tested a new way to peer through the cloud layers of these nomadic objects. The researchers used an instrument at W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii to study in near-infrared light the colors and brightness variations of the layer-cake cloud structure in the nearby, free-floating brown dwarf known as 2MASS J22081363+2921215.

The Keck Observatory instrument, called the Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE), also analyzed the spectral fingerprints of various chemical elements contained in the clouds and how they change with time. This is the first time astronomers have used MOSFIRE in this type of study.

These measurements offered Manjavacas a holistic view of the brown dwarf's atmospheric clouds, providing more detail than previous observations of this object. Pioneered by Hubble observations, this technique is difficult for ground-based telescopes to do because of contamination from Earth's atmosphere, which absorbs certain infrared wavelengths. This absorption rate changes due to the weather.

"The only way to do this from the ground is by using Keck's high-resolution MOSFIRE instrument because it allows us to observe multiple stars simultaneously with our brown dwarf," said Manjavacas, a former staff astronomer at Keck Observatory and the lead author of the study. "This allows us to correct for the contamination introduced by the Earth's atmosphere and measure the true signal from the brown dwarf with good precision. So, these observations are a proof-of-concept that MOSFIRE can do these types of studies of brown dwarf atmospheres."

She decided to study this particular brown dwarf because it is very young and therefore extremely bright. It has not cooled off yet. Its mass and temperature are similar to those of the nearby giant exoplanet Beta Pictoris b, discovered in 2008 near-infrared images taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.

"We don't have the ability yet with current technology to analyze in detail the atmosphere of Beta Pictoris b," Manjavacas said. "So, we're using our study of this brown dwarf's atmosphere as a proxy to get an idea of what the exoplanet's clouds might look like at different heights of its atmosphere."

Both the brown dwarf and Beta Pictoris b are young, so they radiate heat strongly in the near-infrared. They are both members of a flock of stars and sub-stellar objects called the Beta Pictoris moving group, which shares the same origin and a common motion through space. The group, which is about 33 million years old, is the closest grouping of young stars to Earth. It is located roughly 115 light-years away.

While they're cooler than bona fide stars, brown dwarfs are still extremely hot. The brown dwarf in Manjavacas' study is a sizzling 2,780 degrees Fahrenheit (1,527 degrees Celsius).

The giant object is about 12 times heavier than Jupiter. As a young body, it is spinning incredibly fast, completing a rotation every 3.5 hours, compared to Jupiter's 10-hour rotation period. So, clouds are whipping around the planet, creating a dynamic, turbulent atmosphere.

Keck Observatory's MOSFIRE instrument stared at the brown dwarf for 2.5 hours, watching how the light filtering up through the atmosphere from the dwarf's hot interior brightens and dims over time. Bright spots that appeared on the rotating object indicate regions where researchers can see deeper into the atmosphere, where it is hotter. Infrared wavelengths allow astronomers to peer deeper into the atmosphere. The observations suggest the brown dwarf has a mottled atmosphere with scattered clouds. If viewed close-up, the planet might resemble a carved Halloween pumpkin, with light escaping from the hot interior.

Its spectrum reveals clouds of hot sand grains and other exotic elements. Potassium iodide traces the object's upper atmosphere, which also includes magnesium silicate clouds. Moving down in the atmosphere is a layer of sodium iodide and magnesium silicate clouds. The final layer consists of aluminum oxide clouds. The atmosphere's total depth is 446 miles (718 kilometers). The elements detected represent a typical part of the composition of brown dwarf atmospheres, Manjavacas said.

She and her team used computer models of brown dwarf atmospheres to determine the location of the chemical compounds in each cloud layer.

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