We’ve now been living with COVID for well over four years. Although there’s still much to learn about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) at least one thing seems clear: it’s here to stay.

From the original Wuhan variant, to delta, to omicron, and several others in between, the virus has continued to evolve.

New variants have driven repeated waves of infection and challenged doctors and scientists seeking to understand this changing virus’ behavior.

Now, we are faced with a new group of variants, the so-called “FLiRT” variants, which appear to be contributing to a rising wave of COVID infections around Australia and elsewhere...

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said...

Using observations by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and many other facilities, two international teams of astronomers have discovered a planet between the sizes of Earth and Venus only 40 light-years away. Multiple factors make it a candidate well-suited for further study using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

TESS stares at a large swath of the sky for about a month at a time, tracking the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars at intervals ranging...

Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and Open Targets together with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, and Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, U.K., uncovered mechanisms driving regeneration of the liver during chronic liver disease. This regenerative process allows the liver to repair itself when chronically injured but could also result in progression toward cancer.

The researchers were able to demonstrate this first by performing single-cell analyses on many biopsies obtained from patients with progressive metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).

The results obtained in vivo were validated using cultured organoids in the laboratory...