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The Guardian's research was based on monitoring six popular pages that posted anti-vaccine messages.

20 Sep 2020 2:47pm GMT

Thousands of starfish washed up on Navarre Beach after Hurricane Sally, a grim parting gift from the tropical cyclone that devastated the Florida Panhandle earlier this week.

20 Sep 2020 2:00pm GMT

The fall equinox happens on Tuesday. Here's how the equinox works, according to a planetary scientist.

20 Sep 2020 1:34pm GMT

Once sunlight hit the ground, the seeds and rootstock of native grasses and wildflowers that had lain dormant for decades began to spring to life. The area was originally part of vast patchwork of Southern grasslands that today hang on only in tiny remnants, many times in rights-of-way next to roads or under power lines. In Tennessee, where the pine trees were cleared, wildlife officials now maintain about 4,000 acres of grassland in the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area with controlled low-temperature burns.

20 Sep 2020 1:08pm GMT

The median length of time that patients given the drug sotorasib lived before their disease worsened was 6.3 months for lung cancer patients and 4 months for colorectal cancer patients, the company said. Patients in the Phase I trial involving several types of cancer were treated with once daily sotorasib. The oral medication is designed to target a mutated form of a gene known as KRAS that occurs in about 13% of non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC), the most common type of lung cancer.

20 Sep 2020 12:55pm GMT

Aurorae happen on other planets, too, as charged particles from the sun surge through the solar system.

20 Sep 2020 12:09pm GMT

In August, the CDC reported that 94% of Americans who died of COVID-19 had underlying conditions. But that doesn't mean the virus only killed 6%.

20 Sep 2020 11:53am GMT

The head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, also said the country plans to send its own mission to Venus.

19 Sep 2020 1:22pm GMT

America's worsening climate change problem is as polarized as its politics. The already parched West is getting drier and suffering deadly wildfires because of it, while the much wetter East keeps getting drenched in mega-rainfall events, some hurricane related and others not. Climate change is magnifying both extremes, but it may not be the only factor, several scientists told The Associated Press.

19 Sep 2020 1:06pm GMT

Space Hero, Inc., a US-based production company, has announced plans to produce a reality show that would send one person into space in 2023.

19 Sep 2020 12:47pm GMT

Bristol Myers Squibb Co's cancer immunotherapy Opdivo in combination with Exelixis Inc's Cabometyx reduced the risk of death by 40% in previously untreated patients with advanced kidney cancer, according to data from a late-stage study to be presented on Saturday. The drug combination also doubled patients' median length of time before their cancer began to worsen to 16.6 months compared to progression-free survival of 8.3 months for patients treated with the chemotherapy sunitinib, an older Pfizer Inc drug sold under the brand name Sutent. "There is no doubt in my mind that this will be a major player" as an initial treatment for advanced kidney cancer, said lead researcher Dr. Toni Choueiri from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

19 Sep 2020 5:03am GMT

Bristol Myers Squibb Co's cancer immunotherapy Opdivo in combination with Exelixis Inc's Cabometyx reduced the risk of death by 40% in previously untreated patients with advanced kidney cancer, according to data from a late-stage study to be presented on Saturday. The drug combination also doubled patients' median length of time before their cancer began to worsen to 16.6 months compared to progression-free survival of 8.3 months for patients treated with the chemotherapy sunitinib, an older Pfizer Inc drug sold under the brand name Sutent. "There is no doubt in my mind that this will be a major player" as an initial treatment for advanced kidney cancer, said lead researcher Dr. Toni Choueiri from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

18 Sep 2020 10:25pm GMT

Coronavirus "long-haulers" are still experiencing symptoms like fevers, brain fog, memory loss, nosebleeds, shortness of breath, and blurry vision.

18 Sep 2020 8:45pm GMT

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong famously had to dodge a boulder-strewn crater just seconds before the first moon landing in 1969 - but for future lunar touchdowns, NASA expects robotic eyes to see such missions to safe landings. And Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture is helping to make it so. Today NASA talked up a precision landing system known as SPLICE (which stands for Safe and Precise Landing - Integrated Capabilities Evolution). The system makes use of an onboard camera, laser sensors and computerized firepower to identify and avoid hazards such as craters and boulders. NASA says… Read More

18 Sep 2020 7:26pm GMT

Peering through a microscope in 2016, Dania Albini gazed at an algae-eating water flea. Its gut appeared full and green with all the ingested teeny-tiny Chlorella vulgaris algae. But she also observed bright green blobs of this phytoplankton in an unexpected place: the herbivore's brood pouch."I was really surprised to see them there," said Albini, an aquatic ecologist then at Swansea University in Wales.As the colonization continued, the algae enveloped the tiny creature's eggs, killing some eggs and resulting in fewer newborns, according to a study led by Albini and published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science. With the algae still alive, the researchers suspect that Chlorella deploy an offense strategy as opposed to a typical defense to protect themselves from herbivory."You don't expect a food to attack a predator in this way," Albini said. "You expect it from a parasite, but not food. It's fascinating."Phytoplankton are typically single-celled photosynthetic organisms that form the foundation of aquatic food chains. Among them are microalgae like Chlorella vulgaris that float on surfaces of ponds and lakes, making them easy meals for widespread zooplankton like Daphnia magna. To keep grazers at bay, some microalgae form spines, release toxins or aggregate to a size that's larger than a predator can swallow.But sometimes Chlorella make their way inside a grazer's body -- not in the belly as food, but into the chamber housing the zooplankton's offspring. Water circulates through this brood chamber and supplies oxygen and nutrients to the young, and seems to pull in some algal cells. While in this chamber, the researchers found during lab experiments mimicking some natural conditions, the algae were alive and able to double in abundance.When algae managed to colonize a brood chamber, the zooplankton barely produced any viable eggs. Kam Tang, a plankton ecologist also at Swansea and co-author of the study, reckons that the "biological glue" that Chlorella cells produce helped them stick to each other and possibly to the brood chamber and the eggs, smothering most of the zooplankton's next generation.This unexpected occurrence of Chlorella cells inside its herbivores' reproductive chambers was surprising to Thomas Kiørboe, a marine ecologist at the Technical University of Denmark, who wasn't involved in the study. "But maybe no one really looked for it previously," he said.Why do Chlorella engage in this harmful intrusion? The researchers suggest that this offense strategy might protect algae cells from being grazed upon and trigger a reduction in zooplankton populations in lakes in the long run.But what remains unknown is whether the live Chlorella inside Daphnia brood chambers actually make their way out into the water or remain trapped."There is no reason to assume that this is beneficial for the algae," said Dieter Ebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who wasn't involved in the study. "They have no chance to get out."Kiørboe is also skeptical that this is a Chlorella survival strategy. Unless it's known that the individual Chlorella cells inside brood chambers themselves reap the benefits, "their interpretation can be challenged," he said.The researchers plan to do a long-term experiment to see if the algal cells escape when Daphnia die, for instance."It's tricky to study a phenomenon which is out of the ordinary," Tang said, "especially when it goes against what a lot of people think."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

18 Sep 2020 7:19pm GMT

A lower supply of a certain type of immune cell in older people that is critical to fighting foreign invaders may help explain their vulnerability to severe COVID-19, scientists say. When germs enter the body, the initial "innate" immune response generates inflammation not specifically targeted at the bacteria or virus. Within days, the more precise "adaptive" immune response starts generating antibodies against the invader along with T cells that either assist in antibody production or seek out and attack infected cells.

18 Sep 2020 6:42pm GMT