This is an artist’s conception of SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, which the research team determined is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. Credit: Image is courtesy of NASA/JPL, slightly modified by Jonathan Gagné.

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet – or planet-like anyway. A team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal, the American Museum of Natural History, and University of California San Diego, discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object.

Smaller than stars, but bigger than giant planets, brown dwarfs are too small...

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have decreased physical fitness because of a decrease in the way oxygen moves through the body, according to a Kansas State University kinesiology study.

Astronauts aboard ISS have decreased physical fitness because of a decrease in the way oxygen moves through the body, according to a Kansas State University kinesiology study. Carl Ade, assistant professor of exercise physiology, and collaborators partnered with the Johnson Space Center to find that astronauts’ exercise capacity decreases between 30 and 50% in long-duration spaceflight because the heart and small blood vessels are not as effective at transporting oxygen to the working muscle.

“It is a dramatic decrease,” Ade said...

Vitamin D production

Vitamin D supplementation is unlikely to reduce the risk of asthma in children or adults, atopic dermatitis, or allergies according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine by Brent Richards, of McGill University, Canada, and the Lady Davis Institute at the Jewish General Hospital, Canada, and colleagues. Some previous epidemiological studies have suggested that low vitamin D levels are associated with increased rates of asthma, atopic dermatitis and elevated levels of IgE. In the new work, researchers looked at genetic and health data on more than 100,000 individuals from previous large studies to determine whether genetic alterations that are associated with vitamin D levels predispose people to asthma, dermatitis, or high IgE levels.

The researchers found no statis...

Compared with a control (left), treatment with a miR-223 mimetic (right) reduces inflammation in mouse intestine. Credit: Neudecker et al., 2017

An international team has discovered that a microRNA produced by certain white blood cells can prevent excessive inflammation in the intestine. The study, “Myeloid-derived miR-223 regulates intestinal inflammation via repression of the NLRP3 inflammasome,” shows that synthetic versions of this microRNA can reduce intestinal inflammation in mice and suggests a new therapeutic approach to treating patients with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects almost 2 million people in the US...