A research team, led by the astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered the most lithium-rich giant ever known to date, with lithium abundance 3,000 times higher than normal giants. It is in the direction of Ophiuchus, north side of the Galactic disk, with a distance of 4,500 light years to Earth.

The findings were realized with the help of The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), a special quasi-meridian reflecting Schmidt telescope located in Xinglong Observatory of NAOC in northern China. The telescope can observe about 4,000 celestial bodies at one time and has made a massive contribution to the study of the structure of the Galaxy.

Their result of the study was published online in Nature Astronomy on August 6th, 2018.

Lithium, atomic number 3, is considered one of the three elements synthesized in the Big Bang, together with Hydrogen and Helium. The abundance of the three elements was regarded as the strongest evidence of the Big Bang.

The evolution of lithium has been widely studied in modern astrophysics, however, a few giants were found to be lithium-rich in the past three decades. This makes the lithium study remarkably challenging.

"The discovery of this star has largely increased the upper limit of the observed lithium abundance, and provides a potential explanation to the extremely lithium-rich case," said Prof. ZHAO Gang.

Detailed information of the star was obtained by a follow-up observation from the Automated Planet Finder (APF) telescope at Lick Observatory.

Besides measuring the anomalously high lithium abundance, the research team also proposed a possible explanation to the lithium-rich phenomenon by the nuclear network simulation with the up-to-date atomic data as an input.

The research team was led by Dr. YAN Hongliang, Prof. SHI Jianrong and Prof. ZHAO Gang from NAOC. Scientists from other five institutions, including China Institute of Atomic Energy and Beijing Normal University, also joined the team.

Finished in 2008 and began regular survey mission in 2012, LAMOST has helped Chinese scientists with a final catalogue of about 10 million spectra after its six-year regular survey, and establish the world's largest databank of stellar spectra this June.

Henipaviruses are among the deadliest viruses known to man and have no effective treatments. The viruses include Hendra, lethal to humans and horses, and the Nipah virus, a serious threat in East and Southeast Asia. They are on the World Health Organization Blueprint list of priority diseases needing urgent research and development action.

Now Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) researchers have identified a new mechanism used by Henipaviruses in infection, and potential new targets for antivirals to treat them. Their findings may also apply to other dangerous viruses.

The research was published today in Nature Communications.

A collaboration of scientists, led by Monash BDI's Dr Gregory Moseley, found that Henipaviruses hijack a mechanism used by cells to counter DNA damage and prevent harmful mutations, important in diseases such as cancer.

Dr Moseley said it was already known that the viruses send a particular protein into a key part of a cell's nucleus called the nucleolus, but it wasn't known why it did this.

He said the researchers showed that this protein interacted with a cell protein that is an important part of the DNA-damage response machinery, called 'Treacle'. This inhibited Treacle function, which appears to enhance henipavirus production.

(Treacle is, incidentally, involved in a craniofacial disorder called Treacher Collins syndrome, aired in the popular US movie Wonder in 2017.)

"What the virus seems to be doing is imitating part of the DNA damage response," Dr Moseley said.

"It is using a mechanism your cells have to protect you against things like ageing and mutations that lead to cancer. This appears to make the cell a better place for the virus to prosper," he said.

According to Dr Moseley, it is possible that blocking the virus from doing this may lead to the development of new anti-viral therapies.

Both Hendra and Nipah, which spread from bats to other animals and humans, emerged in the 1990s; Hendra in an outbreak in Brisbane in 1994 and Nipah in Malaysia in 1998. The viruses, which share outcomes including inflammation of the brain and severe respiratory symptoms, have since caused multiple outbreaks of disease. Nipah has killed several hundred people, including at least 17 people in the Indian state of Kerala in June.

"Nipah is not so important in Australia but it's the one people are concerned about internationally," Dr Moseley said.

"Like Ebola, if you get a really big outbreak and it's not containable, it could be disastrous," he said.

He said the study's findings add insights into how viruses behave more generally.

"We identified a new way that viruses change the cell, by using the very same machinery that the cell normally uses to protect itself from diseases like cancer," he said.

"This seems to be heading towards exciting possibilities about what viruses might be doing," joint first author, Dr Stephen Rawlinson said.

"We are now trying to work out exactly how changing the DNA damage response through Treacle is useful to this and other dangerous viruses," he said.

"To be or not to be?" Hamlet asked aloud as he pondered the meaning of life.

Maybe he was a liberal.

A new USC Dornsife-led psychology study shows that conservatives, more so than liberals, report feeling that their lives are meaningful or have purpose.

"Finding meaning in life is related to the sense or feeling that things are the way they should be, and that there is a sense of order," said David Newman, a doctoral candidate at USC Dornsife's Mind and Society Center. "If life feels chaotic, then that would likely dampen your sense that life is meaningful."

The results, published on June 15 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, were based on five studies examining how strongly conservatives and liberals feel that their lives have purpose.

Belief in God

The scientists analyzed results from two nationally-representative samples and three additional samples in which well-being was assessed in various forms. Altogether, these studies encompassed thousands of participants from 16 countries and spanned four decades.

Participants usually ranked their political ideology on a scale from one to seven, ranging from "extremely conservative" to "extremely liberal." They also rated how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as "my life has a real purpose" and "I understand my life's meaning."

The psychologists were aware that religious belief may be a factor and adjusted the results to account for it. Even then, the association between political leanings and sense of purpose held strong.

The results suggest "that there is some unique aspect of political conservatism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life," the scientists wrote.

What does your lean mean?

Newman cautioned against making conclusions about anyone's state of mind and overall well-being based solely on their political leanings.

"It doesn't mean that every conservative finds a lot of meaning in their life and that every liberal is depressed," Newman said.

Other factors may influence whether someone feels that his or her life is meaningful. "These factors range from various personal characteristics such as how religious someone is to situational influences such as one's current mood," Newman said.

When sea creatures first began crawling and slithering onto land about 385 million years ago, they carried with them their body armor: scales. Fossil evidence shows that the earliest land animals retained scales as a protective feature as they evolved to flourish on terra firma.

But as time passed, and species diversified, animals began to shed the heavy scales from their ocean heritage and replace them with fur, hair and feathers.

Today the molecular mechanisms of scale development in fish remain remarkably similar to the mechanisms that also produce feathers on birds, fur on dogs and hair on humans - suggesting a common evolutionary origin for countless vastly different skin appendages.

A new study, scheduled for online publication Tuesday in the journal eLife, examines the process as it occurs in a common laboratory genetics model, the zebrafish.

"We've found that the molecular pathways that underlie development of scales, hairs and feathers are strikingly similar," said the study's lead author, Andrew Aman, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the University of Virginia.

Aman and his co-authors, including UVA undergraduate researcher Alexis Fulbright, now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah, used molecular tools to manipulate and visualize scale development in zebrafish and tease out the details of how it works. It turns out, as the researchers suspected, skin appendages seen today originated hundreds of millions of years ago in primitive vertebrate ancestors, prior to the origin of limbs, jaws, teeth or even the internal skeleton.

While zebrafish have been studied for decades in wide-ranging genetic experiments, their scale development has mostly been overlooked, according to Aman.

"Zebrafish skin, including the bony scales, is largely transparent and researchers probably have simply looked past the scales to the internal structures," he said. "This is an area ripe for investigation, so we got the idea to look at the molecular machinery that drives the development of patterning in surface plating. We discovered profound similarities in the development of all skin appendages, whether scales, hair, fur or feathers."

Aman works in the lab of David Parichy, the study's senior author and the Pratt-Ivy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Morphogenesis in UVA's Department of Biology. Parichy's lab investigates developmental genetics of adult morphology, stem cell biology and evolution, using zebrafish and related species as models. A high percentage of the genes in these common aquarium fish are the same as in humans - reflecting a common ancestry going back to the earliest common vertebrates that populated the ancient seas.

Developmental patterning - such as how scales take shape and form in slightly overlapping layers (in the case of zebrafish, there are more than 200 round scales on each side of the fish) - is a critical part of all development, including how stem cells differentiate and become, for example, bone cells, skin cells and any of the hundreds of kinds of cells that comprise the 37 trillion or so cells in the human body.

How cells differentiate and organize into precise shapes (and sometimes develop into misshapen forms that can result in congenital diseases, cancers and other abnormalities) is of utmost interest to developmental biologists like Parichy and Aman. Understanding the process provides insights into birth defects, cancer and genetic disease, and how the process might be fixed when gone awry.

As an example, teeth, which are actually an epidermal appendage, sometimes are subject to developmental problems. "Defects we find in fish scale development are reminiscent of the developmental problems that can occur with teeth," Parichy said. "Since scales regenerate, maybe there is a way to get teeth to regenerate."

"This research helps us make important links between the natural history of life on Earth, the evolutionary process and human disease," Aman said.