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"With new cases in children in the U.S. continuing to be at a high level, this submission is an important step in our ongoing effort against #COVID19," the pharmaceutical giant said. (Image credit: Jill Connelly/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Clown School According to scientists, that class clown from seventh grade may have been the brightest kid in the room. It turns out that humor ability and overall intelligence are tightly linked in middle-school-aged children, according to research published in the International Journal of Humor Research . "We were particularly interested in the quality of humor made by children but evaluated by
I s it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything? I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They'd been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. "We're out of those too," he said. "Try Walgreens." I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told
Fryer Starter Fast-food chain Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers is facing a rather bizarre situation: the ongoing labor shortage is so severe, Bloomberg reports , that it's resorted to sending its corporate staff to work in its restaurants. Half of the chain's office employees will be frying chicken fingers, working cash registers, and, of course, helping with recruiting. However, it's unclear if Ra
Instead of relying on vaccines alone, countries such as France and Germany are using extra measures to keep cases and deaths low Only two months after being forced at the last minute to "cancel Christmas" in 2020, Boris Johnson committed to a " cautious and prudent " roadmap out of lockdown that recognised the evolving epidemiology of the virus. But memories are short. On 19 July, all social dist
Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin C onsider the dressing room . The concept began its mass-market life as an amenity in Gilded Age department stores, a commercial sanctuary of pedestals and upholstered furniture on which to swoon over the splendid future of your wardrobe. Now, unless you're rich enough to sip gratis champagne in the apartment-size private shopping suites of European luxury brands,
Health authorities in both countries announced that people under certain age cutoffs are now ineligible for the Spikevax COVID-19 shot due to its association with heart inflammation.
Researchers are struggling to figure out why people don't get their Covid shots, and what language might persuade them. Saying "You gotta" seems to work.
A team from the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stanford University and Purdue University developed and demonstrated a novel, fully functional quantum local area network, or QLAN, to enable real-time adjustments to information shared with geographically isolated systems at ORNL using entangled photons passing through optical fiber.
Usually, the electrical resistance of a material depends very much on its physical dimensions and fundamental properties. Under special circumstances, however, this resistance can adopt a fixed value that is independent of the basic material properties and "quantised" (meaning that it changes in discrete steps rather than continuously). This quantisation of electrical resistance normally occurs wi
The universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, comes to us from every direction in the sky uniformly … or so it first seemed. In the last decades ast
The agency has promised to move quickly on the request and tentatively plans to meet on Oct. 26 to consider it. A decision could come soon after Halloween.
President Biden is restoring Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah and a marine monument off the New England coast, all severely reduced by former President Donald J. Trump.
New research adds to growing concern over zero-calorie drinks. Consuming artificial sweeteners may confuse our body, leading to increased hunger and weight gain. (Image credit: Pornchai Jaito / EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm)
Americans love their gas stoves, but they pollute homes and are connected to a supply system that leaks methane. That's part of a battle as more people face a decision about switching to electric. (Image credit: Meredith Miotke for NPR)
Research into the evolution of tardigrades has been severely hindered by a lack of fossils. This new discovery could offer researchers insight into how the creatures lived millions of years ago. (Image credit: Holly Sullivan/Harvard/NJIT)
Millions of miles away, on the surface of Mars, inside an enormous crater, a little NASA rover is taking some pictures. The view is quite stunning there—miles of undisturbed cinnamon terrain scattered with pebbles and boulders, with silky dunes where the craggy bedrock doesn't peek through. But when the rover, named Perseverance, sent the photos back home from the crater, known as Jezero, scienti
A new study has revealed that a landlocked mangrove forest in the Yucatán Peninsula migrated there from the coast when sea levels were much higher, around 125,000 years ago.
A man who was hospitalized and placed on a ventilator for COVID-19, and whose wife later filed suit to force the hospital to treat him with ivermectin, has died. The man, Jeffrey Smith, was first admitted to the intensive care unit at West Chester Hospital in July. In August, his wife sued the hospital to force it to treat then-intubated husband with ivermectin, a horse dewormer that's become the
Getting Impatient NASA gave a routine astronaut assignment announcement on Wednesday. But reading between the lines, it seems that the space agency is throwing some serious shade at one of its top contractors. Astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada were reassigned and will now serve as commander and pilot, respectively, of the Crew-5 SpaceX launch next year, according to NASA . That's routine en
Cheapest Tesla Tesla recently increased the price of its Model 3 and Model Y, with prices starting at a respective $54,990 and $41,990 before incentives. Strangely enough, that makes the entry level Cybertruck , a much bigger vehicle starting at $39,990, the cheapest Tesla customers can order today, as Teslarati points out . Even the Model 3 Standard Range Plus variant, which is the second cheape
Aerial Archaeological Mapping Explorer will allow users to see landscapes from England's past A digital aerial archaeology tool will allow people to discover previously unknown details about local landscapes, including prehistoric hill forts, Roman settlements and cold war military installations, through virtual flights over England. The virtual map is like a "huge archaeological jigsaw puzzle,"
Montero Lamar Hill, much better known as "Old Town Road" musician Lil Nas X, sure likes to look at himself in the mirror. In fact, according to a recent tweet , the highly successful musician would love to go all the way with himself. "I'm so sick of it," Lil Nas X wrote in the tweet. "I'm sick of pretending I don't wanna clone myself and then make love to my hot sexy body." It's almost certainly
Scientists have created detailed maps of the brain area that controls movement in mice, monkeys and people. The maps could help explain human ailments like Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's disease. (Image credit: Allen Institute for Brain Science)
Two years into the pandemic , we've gotten a lot better at tackling the coronavirus at the extremes of infection. We have preventives—including masks, distancing, ventilation, and our MVP vaccines —that can be deployed in advance of a viral encounter. We have regimens of last resort: drugs, such as dexamethasone , that do their best, lifesaving work in hospitals with trained health-care workers,
Hell World Ever since astronomers discovered the exoplanet WASP-76b about 640 light years from Earth, they've known it was a hellish world with temperatures so extreme that it rains molten iron every day. But new research shows that conditions on the distant planet are even more extreme than researchers imagined. Scientists led by a team from Cornell University probed the atmosphere of WASP-76b a
A data scientist and economics student joined forces in search of the real pandemic death toll – and the results are startling Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage For the past 18 months, hunkered down in his Tel Aviv apartment, Ariel Karlinsky has scoured the web for data that could help him calculate the true death toll of Covid-19. Continue reading…
People have been advised to reduce consumption by 30% for health and environmental reasons Britons have cut their meat consumption by 17% over the past decade but will need to double these efforts if they are to meet targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production set out in the national food strategy earlier this year. Meat production is a major contributor to global heating and land d
Abuse and Harassment A new National Geographic documentary sheds light on the abuse top US infectious diseases specialist Anthony Fauci has had to endure since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. "These fucking dark web people are really, really getting bad," he told AIDS activist Peter Staley last year in the documentary, as quoted by Insider . "I mean, they're really, really harassing Chris
Pictures taken by Perseverance rover show how water helped shape planet's landscape billions of years ago Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the red planet's landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, according to a new study. In February, Nasa's Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater , where scientists suspected a l
At long last, the World Health Organization has declared that the world's first malaria vaccine is ready for widespread use. Doctors and researchers have been trying and failing to develop a vaccine for malaria — one of the deadliest diseases in human history — for over a century, the BBC reports . Finally having one that's safe and effective enough for use represents an astonishing achievement i
Mathematician and astrologer John Dee, a confidant of England's Queen Elizabeth I, was also an avid occultist and allegedly used this obsidian mirror to talk to spirits.
Highlights of the Royal Society of Biology's photography competition 2021, from ants feasting on honeydew to zebras drinking in the savannah Continue reading…
California's farmers, the country's biggest producers of fruits and vegetables, are facing a major shakeup. A new law limits their access to water from the state's depleted aquifers. (Image credit: Dan Charles/NPR)
Health officials released a survey showing that nearly one in four people at higher risk for flu-related complications indicated they did not intend to get the flu vaccine.
New research has confirmed that an obsidian mirror used by John Dee, confidante to Queen Elizabeth I, to contact otherworldly spirits in his occult practices has Aztec origins.
After the Taliban took over Kabul in mid-August, a black-bearded man with a Kalashnikov appeared on the streets. He visited former politicians and gave a sermon during Friday prayers at the capital's historic Pul-e-Khishti mosque. But the man, passionate and seemingly victorious, was no mere Taliban fighter among tens of thousands of others: he was Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani, a Taliban leader promi
Scientists thought asteroid Bennu's surface would be like a sandy beach, abundant in fine sand and pebbles, which would have been perfect for collecting samples. Past telescope observations from Earth's orbit had suggested the presence of large swaths of fine-grain material called fine regolith that's smaller than a few centimeters.
We look at where to get the jab, parental consent and the impact of natural infection Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage As concerns grow about the slow deployment of Covid jabs to older children in England we take a look at who is eligible and where the vaccinations can be given. Which children are now eligible for vaccination? Continue reading…
Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts In the first episode of The Review , our Culture staff writers David Sims, Megan Garber, and Sophie Gilbert discuss the unlikely hit that is Ted Lasso . Its Emmy-winning first season—and its smart writing and heartwarming positivity—connected with pandemic audiences. As the sitcom's much-discussed second season complicates t
Delayed Reaction Last weekend, a leak in an oil pipeline off the coast of Orange County, California spilled about 144,000 gallons of crude oil into the ocean and onto beaches and wetlands. The leak already prompted California officials to declare a state of emergency in the area and launch a criminal investigation. Now, NBC News reports that a lot of the damage could have been avoided altogether.
Electric Jet SpaceX CEO Elon Musk admitted that he is "so dying to do a supersonic, electric VTOL jet" in a recent tweet . But there's one big problem: "adding more work will make my brain explode," Musk added, including emojis of a brain and a firecracker to illustrate his point. After all, he is the CEO of a space, electric car, and brain interface company — plenty to keep himself busy around t
Eco-Warriors China is in the process of building at least 119 silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles in the northwest area of the country — an alarming display of militarization that could lead to increased tensions around the world. But fret not! In an astonishingly bold act of greenwashing, China seems to be building the facilities with the environment in mind, SpaceNews reports . So if
T he Dutch molecular biologist Alex van der Eb had been studying viruses and vaccines for nearly two decades when, in 1973, he was met with what he took to be an exhilarating opportunity. Three years into their studies, van der Eb and his research partner Frank L. Graham had succeeded in isolating the genes in adenovirus 5 responsible for turning mammalian cells into tumor cells, and they were cu
A Bitcoin mining operation in the Canadian province of Alberta tried to tap a nearby unused natural gas well for power — and got busted after neighbors started complaining about the noise it was producing, CBC News reported in August. But in an email to Gizmodo , the CEO of the company called Link Global is now trying to downplay the incident. "We run on abandoned gas sites and have been working
Keeping global temperatures from dangerous levels means China must pivot away from coal immediately. Its soaring energy demand and rolling blackouts mean it probably won't.
Jabs could begin within weeks if US government approves request, with children getting a third of dose given to adults A Covid vaccine for kids aged five to 11 just got another step closer to authorization, with Pfizer-BioNTech announcing on Twitter that the full application has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Experts say authorization of the vaccine for children will
By analyzing the data from 2MASS and Gaia-EDR3 surveys, as well as images from NASA's WISE spacecraft, a Brazilian astronomer has inspected a galactic open cluster (OC) known as NGC 1605. The study, presented in a paper published September 29 on arXiv.org, reveals that NGC 1605 is not a single open cluster as was previously thought but a pair of OCs.
Students—many from lower-income households—were likely to use school-issued devices for remote learning. But the devices often contained monitoring software.
Follow the sun . That's the advice to Democrats from a leading party fundraising organization in an exhaustive analysis of the electoral landscape released today. The study, from the group Way to Win, provided exclusively to The Atlantic , argues that to solidify their position in Congress and the Electoral College, Democrats must increase their investment and focus on Sun Belt states that have b
Get It Off Me Researchers at Caltech have opened the doors to hell and allowed a creepy robot that can walk on two spindly feet and even fly to enter our world. The terrifying biped, called LEONARD (LEgs ONboARD drone), or LEO for short, is basicically the bottom half of a humanoid robot strapped to a flying drone. The researchers' goal wasn't to come up with the next mass-marketable invention, b
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the widespread use of a malaria vaccine — a breakthrough in the long fight against the deadly disease.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic In September, The Wall Street Journal published a report, based on leaked documents, describing Facebook's awareness of the harmful effects one of its platforms was having on young people. "Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," the company's internal research revealed. "Comparisons on Instagram
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a method to determine the orientation of mechanical stress in the earth's crust without relying on data from earthquakes or drilling. This method is less expensive that current approaches, could have broad applicability in geophysics and provide insight into continental regions lacking historical geologic information.
At least for the moment , the U.S. Senate has averted a crisis over the federal debt ceiling , after some Republicans in the chamber grudgingly agreed yesterday to help Democrats put off a reckoning until December. That the United States has endured confrontation after confrontation in Congress over the issue—and will almost certainly do so again mere weeks from now—is, as many other commentators
Scientists studying the evolution of birth in lizards, from egg-laying to live births, have pinpointed the evolutionary genes from which the species is evolving to 'build' a new mode of reproduction.
During the pandemic, it has become evident that people with cardiovascular disease and obesity are at much higher risk of developing very severe, even fatal COVID-19 disease. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have identified some metabolic processes that SARS-CoV-2 uses to attack lung tissue. The results, which are published in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics, could one day be used to treat COV
Microbiology researchers at Oregon State University have shed new light on the mechanisms of carbon cycling in the ocean, using a novel approach to track which microbes are consuming different types of organic carbon produced by common phytoplankton species.
A clinical psychiatrist, she showed that suicide was often a result of mental illness, and that it could be avoided with the right treatment and public education.
Sixty-three percent. That's the proportion of mammal species that vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, after Earth's climate shifted from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about it now.
The prestigious award finally recognizes work that helped scientists understand climate change and, more broadly, find order in disorder — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
One of New York City's newest skyscrapers, One Vanderbilt, stands 1,401 feet (427 meters) above the streets of midtown Manhattan. The top four floors consist of an immersive experience and observation deck named "Summit," with mirrored walls and floors, an outdoor terrace, a glass elevator on the exterior of the building, glass-floored booths overlooking Madison Avenue, and more. Summit is set to
We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to 'tipping points': irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing. These cautions often refer to spatial patterns as early-warning signals of tipping points. An international team of ecologists and mathematicians has studied these patterns and come to a surprisin
The moon may have been more volcanically active than we realized. Lunar samples that China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft brought to Earth are revealing new clues about volcanoes and lava plains on the moon's surface. In a study published today in Science, researchers describe the youngest lava samples ever collected on the moon. The samples were taken from Oceanus Procellarum, a region known for having
Prank Y'alls The hit Netflix show "Squid Game" committed a major faux pas. When a character in the show hands out their business card, the show's creators either forgot or decided not to use a fake phone number on it. The result, The Wall Street Journal reports , has been a "prank-call apocalypse," as real-life Koreans with either the same phone number or one that varies by a digit or two have be
The rage we all feel today will create the politics of tomorrow. I'm not sure we're ready for that Every chapter of this pandemic has had its attendant emotions – and since we're all in this together, it's possible to sense a collective emotional experience along with the physical experience of lockdowns and restrictions. Initially there was confusion, then deep fear and anxiety, then when lockdo
When Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his Ninth Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his 10th Symphony but, due to deteriorating health , wasn't able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches. Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what co
Geochemical and geological records provide key insights into Earth's tectonic history, but in the case of mountains during the Proterozoic eon, records conflict with each other: Geochemical evidence says that the crust was thin and hot, which generally indicates that mountains would not have been able to form, but rocks left behind from that time period suggest that mountains were present.
Countless astrophysicists and astronomers are actively searching for unobserved celestial bodies in the universe, as detecting these bodies could improve our understanding of space and help to address unanswered astrophysical questions. Among these elusive objects are exoplanets, planets that orbit a star other than the sun, thus outside of the solar system.
A scientific explanation for those battles over the air conditioning remote control: Researchers at Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology offer a new, evolutionary explanation for the familiar scenario in which women bring a sweater into work, while their male counterparts feel comfortable wearing short sleeves in an air-conditioned office. The researchers concluded that this phenomenon is not u
NASA's Lucy spacecraft will launch in October 2021 on a 12-year journey to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. The Lucy mission will include three Earth gravity assists and visits to eight asteroids.
Updated at 4:45 p.m. ET on October 7, 2021. The title of the journalist Robert Kolker's cunning essay in The New York Times Magazine, " Who Is the Bad Art Friend? " is a bit of misdirection: There are no friends here. The article's URL, which ends "dorland-v-larson," is more revealing. The story swiftly became an obsession among the very online, as readers debated its moral and meaning. Kolker's
Certain invasive, non-native species can disrupt lakes to the point of rapid ecosystem collapse, contaminating water for drinking, aquaculture and recreation, a new study has found.
Our powers of reason have undoubtedly made the world a better place. So why are we so in thrall to fake news? 'Rationality ought to be the lodestar of everything we think or do." This is the opening sentence of Steven Pinker's call for a return to reason at a time when critical thinking and the grounding of belief in evidence is in short supply. Everyone, he argues, should want to be rational, ye
Princeton professor David MacMillan on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for his work developing a new tool to scale up chemical reactions in an environmentally friendly way, known as "organocatalysis."
Media Crackdown Last week, Russia passed a new law that's already severely restricting the waning freedom of the press within the country. The law expanded previous press restrictions to ban any independent coverage of Roscosmos , Russia's space agency, and the space industry at large. Now, any media organizations or writers who continue to write about the space industry will be declared "foreign
When planarian flatworms want to reproduce, some have sex. Others, more straightforwardly, tear themselves in two. The latter option is fast and violent. The planarian begins as a small, flattened, sluglike creature with a spade-shaped head and two googly eyes. After a few minutes of stretching and ripping, it separates into two halves—a head and a tail. Within days, the head piece grows a tail.
" How to Build a Life " is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life . B y now, nearly everyone knows we can be addicted to our digital devices. In the words of Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and an addiction specialist at Stanford, "Just about all of us have a digit
Whether birds get caged in the eye of a hurricane may depend on the intensity and totality of the chaos beyond the calm, says a novel study from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Matthew Van Den Broeke.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso . In an episode halfway through the new season of Ted Lasso , Apple's sweet and strange series about an optimistic American coach thrown into the cesspool of British soccer, the three AFC Richmond fans who compose the show's dim-witted Greek chorus get ready to watch the FA Cup quarterfinal in a pub. "I swear, if we actually
The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from meteorites derived from Vesta to resolve the "missing mantle problem" and push back our knowledge of the solar system to just a couple of million years after it began to form. The papers
New research from experts at the George Washington University and funded by the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute shows a close link between the decision of older Americans to purchase annuities and four factors—financial knowledge, leveraged assets, debt obligations, and liquidity constraints.
New research led by Georgia Tech's College of Engineering finds that honey bees have developed a way to transform pollen particles into a viscoelastic pellet, allowing them to transport pollen efficiently, quickly, and reliably to their hive. The study also suggests the insects remove pollen from their bodies at speeds 2–10 times slower than their typical grooming speeds.
Eighteen-hour workdays with no lunch breaks. Car accidents caused by sleep deprivation. A crew member who returned to set the day after a miscarriage. For months, members of a union representing more than 150,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the entertainment industry have shared hundreds of these stories on social media —anonymous testimonies about the grueling conditions on TV and film sets. Th
New research from the University of Illinois shows sweet corn, when planted at high densities, has steadily increased in yield since the 1930s. The historical view underscores the importance of planting modern density-tolerant hybrids at their optimal densities, and suggests an opportunity to improve density tolerance even more.
During fire season at the National Interagency Fire Center, a complex of buildings housing the top level of support for U.S. wildfire response, the coordination center looks about how you might expect. It features, most prominently, a massive digital clock and a projector screen filled with maps of fire risk and weather forecasts. But unless you're well versed in wildfire suppression , a sight in
A new study showing how the explosion of a stripped massive star in a supernova can lead to the formation of a heavy neutron star or a light black hole resolves one of the most challenging puzzles to emerge from the detection of neutron star mergers by the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo.
An immersive Goya exhibit in Madrid, Comic Con 2021 in New York City, a robot block party in Boston, rally racing in Finland, oil-spill cleanup in California, kite flying in Rio de Janeiro, a massive pumpkin in Belgium, a COVID-19 memorial in São Paulo, and much more
Polymer science has made possible rubber tires, Teflon and Kevlar, plastic water bottles, nylon jackets among many other ubiquitous features of daily life. Elastic polymers, known as elastomers, can be stretched and released repeatedly and are used in applications such as gloves and heart valves, where they need to last a long time without tearing. But a conundrum has long stumped polymer scientis
New analysis of bones in the Tomb of Nestor's Cup revealed a surprising discovery: Long thought to be the burial of a child, the tomb instead held the remains of at least three adults.
After 12 years at the helm of the top biomedical research agency, the geneticist will return to running his lab by year's end — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Understanding structure-property relations is a key goal of materials research, according to Joshua Agar, a faculty member in Lehigh University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. And yet currently no metric exists to understand the structure of materials because of the complexity and multidimensional nature of structure.
New results from the mission reveal that its landing site of Jezero Crater has a surprisingly dynamic and complex hydrologic history — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Could photons, light particles, really condense? And how will this "liquid light" behave? Condensed light is an example of a Bose-Einstein condensate: The theory has been there for 100 years, but University of Twente researchers have now demonstrated the effect even at room temperature. For this, they created a micro-size mirror with channels in which photons actually flow like a liquid. In these
Mathematical models have been widely used to guide government decisions on the COVID-19 pandemic, from forecasting outcomes to even testing potential interventions.
A new method improves the extraction and separation of rare earth elements—a group of 17 elements critical for technologies such as smart phones and electric car batteries—from unconventional sources. New research led by scientists at Penn State and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) demonstrates how a protein isolated from bacteria can provide a more environmentally friendly way to
For many marine animals, like the Dungeness crab, seasonality and timing are components of complex life cycles, where disruptions can have serious implications for the population. Understanding how climate change will impact each life stage is no small undertaking when considering all variables and moving parts in a changing environment. Despite these challenges, this information is vital for sust
Satellite images released by NASA's Earth Observatory show concentric rings of clouds forming above the erupting volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
It's called eco-anxiety, a completely natural response to a world gone haywire. And it's way more prevalent than you think, especially among young adults.
Years ago, for a story and in an attempt to be more successful, I read a bunch of "how to be a woman at work" books. Because women face backlash for behaving assertively in the workplace, these books mostly advise pretending to be nicer while subtly trying to get what you want. (This being the innocent springtime of the pre-Trump era, "what you want" was typically imagined to be a promotion.) "Wh
Coughs and colds spread quickly within wild mountain gorilla groups but appear less likely to spread between neighboring groups, a new study published in Scientific Reports shows.
Forensic teams challenged with identifying skeletal remains may benefit from a new method of determining age in child remains when traditional methods, such as dental records, aren't available. New research from SFU archeologists finds that measuring cranial bones can provide one of the most comprehensive methods of estimating juvenile age.
In a paper published in Scientific Reports, academics at the University of Surrey have discovered that biological cells generate an electric field voltage that appears outside and not just within, meaning each cell acts as a tiny electrode. Since this voltage impacts how cells interact with their environment, including the way cells stick to one another, this has significant potential implications
Participants in trials of unapproved vaccines such as Novavax have had ability to travel abroad restricted Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Thousands of Britons who took part in Covid-19 vaccine trials are to be offered approved vaccines so they can travel abroad, the government has announced. Trial participants have described being "trapped" and "in limbo" because th
A 70-year-old model used to predict the microstructure of materials doesn't work for today's materials, say Carnegie Mellon University researchers in Science. A microscopy technique developed by Carnegie Mellon and Argonne National Laboratory yields evidence that contradicts the conventional model and points the way towards the use of new types of characterizations to predict properties—and theref
Levitation of both large objects and of single atoms has become a widely used technique in science and engineering. In the last years, many researchers have started to explore a new horizon: the levitation of nano- and micro-particles—still smaller than the diameter of a single hair, but composed of billions of atoms—in vacuum.
Tim Lahan T o start with , you probably deserve it. Not for this —not for whatever it is you're being yelled at about—but for the other stuff. You know what I'm talking about. The innumerable tiny offenses. All the evasions, hedgings, dodgings, half-assings, bloodless ill-doings, accumulated in darkness. In the present moment, the present state of yelled-at-ness, you may be the victim of a misund
Western Australia's homegrown spacecraft, Binar-1, has been shot into the vacuum of space- deployed into Low Earth Orbit from the International Space Station (ISS), five weeks after blasting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
In a new paper in the journal Science, researchers uncover the evolution of the hepatitis B virus since the Early Holocene by analyzing the largest dataset of ancient viral genomes produced to date.
Material retrieved by China's Chang'e-5 spacecraft sheds new light on the moon at a time when it was thought to be cooling down Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing Analysis of the youngest lunar material ever retrieved suggests that the moon was volcanically active for longer than previously expected. China's Chang'e-5 spacecraft retrieved 1.7kg of lunar material when it landed
Our DNA is very similar to that of the chimpanzee, which in evolutionary terms is our closest living relative. Stem cell researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now found a previously overlooked part of our DNA, so-called non-coded DNA, that appears to contribute to a difference which, despite all our similarities, may explain why our brains work differently. The study is published in the jo
The plummeting costs of renewables, the growing strength of the clean energy sector, and the rising influence of activists have begun to shift the politics of climate action in the US, panelists argued during MIT Technology Review's annual EmTech conference last week. Those forces allowed President Joe Biden to put climate change at the center of his campaign and helped build momentum behind the
An international agreement to protect the ozone layer is expected to prevent 443 million cases of skin cancer and 63 million cataract cases for people born in the United States through the end of this century, according to new research.
WIRED spoke to creators at Ubisoft to find out how they shot the AAA title's crucial opening scene—when actors and engineers couldn't work in the same space.
Proteins are the molecular machines of all living cells and have been exploited for use in many applications, including therapeutics and industrial catalysts. To overcome the limitations of naturally occurring proteins, protein engineering is used to improve protein characteristics such as stability and functionality. In a new study, researchers demonstrate a machine learning algorithm that accele
Outdoor nature-based activities are effective for improving mental health in adults, including those with pre-existing mental health problems, a new study has found.
Even the most supermassive of the supermassive black holes aren't very large, making it extremely difficult to measure their sizes. However, astronomers have recently developed a new technique that can estimate the mass of a black hole based on the movement of hot gas around them—even when the black hole itself it smaller than a single pixel.
A project to map the motor cortex used the widest range of tools for probing brain cells ever deployed in a single, coordinated effort — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Spin torque provides convenient electric means to efficiently control magnetizations. It can usually be produced by spin-polarized current or pure spin current via spin Hall effect. The former and the latter are named as spin transfer torque (STT) and spin orbit torque (SOT), respectively. Utilizing these tools, people have developed the second generation STT-MRAM (Magnetic Random-Access Memory) w
Six quarters were all you needed, in the 1990s, to laugh until your belly hurt at a series of slapstick shenanigans, or to escape, for a few seconds, from your quiet Illinois town and travel the world with a glamorous ace reporter. I can't count how many mornings I spent with my stomach on the floor, feet in the air, balancing my weight on my arms as I pored over the vibrant colors of the Chicago
Nature is full of repeating patterns that are part of the beauty of our world. An international team, including a researcher from the University of Washington, used modern tools to explain repeating patterns of stones that form in cold landscapes.
Planck's constant helps us understand atomic-sized things. One of the best ways to grok it is through this experiment involving different colors of light.
A new work published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, led by the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) in collaboration with the Centre National de Recherches Préhistoriques, Anthropologiques et Historiques (CNRPAH) (Algeria), describes the most recent advances in the current investigation performed in the valley of Oued Boucherit, located about 20 km east o
A new kind of concrete could reduce emissions from the construction industry. Calcium carbonate concrete is made from waste concrete and carbon dioxide from the air or industrial exhaust gasses. It shows promise as a future construction material, especially in places where natural resources are limited.
A new study looks at the causal relationship between outdoor air pollution levels on nationwide university entry examination day and students' cognitive performance in Brazil.
Care for the 15 most prevalent types of cancer in the U.S. cost approximately $156.2 billion in 2018, according to a team researchers. The team also found that medication was the biggest expense and that medication expense for breast, lung, lymphoma and colorectal cancers incurred the most costs.
Details are deficient, scientific analysis contentious and expert voices missing in Markson's thesis about 'what really happened' in China, which establishes a crime scene around the Wuhan Institute of Virology With 4.55 million deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic so far, the hunt for its origins has turned into something akin to an inquest on a mass scale. Are we dealing essentially with a terribl
Julia Ducournau does not make movies that audiences are likely to see themselves in. Her knockout debut feature, Raw , follows a veterinary student who develops a craving for uncooked flesh , mostly of the human variety. Like so many horror films, the work is suffused with metaphors about hard-to-discuss topics—in this case, sexual maturity and peer pressure. But compared with Ducournau's follow-
The Computational Cosmology group of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics (DAA) of Valencia University (UV) has published an article in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, one of the international journals with the greatest impact in Astrophysics, which shows, with complex theoretical-computational models, that cosmic voids are constantly replenished with external matter.
The European Space Agency is playing a vital role in humankind's return to the moon. In a few months NASA will launch Artemis I from the Kennedy Space Center. The uncrewed mission will carry NASA's Orion spacecraft incorporating ESA's European Service Module (ESM-1), built and tested by Airbus Bremen, in Germany, with the help of 10 European nations. ESM-1's main engine and 32 thrusters will prope
The now-famous plant protein patty known as the Impossible Burger is designed to mimic the taste, texture, and even bloodiness of real meat. Raw, it looks just like red ground beef. Grilled medium rare, the soy-based burger firms up but keeps its soft, pink center. "We're replicating the entire sensory…
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox. Drew Angerer / Getty Exactly nine months ago today, the U.S. Capitol building experienced an unprecedented siege, spurred by an outgoing president's antidemocratic attempts to cling to power. This
A new study by a recent graduate of Southwest Research Institute's joint graduate program in physics with The University of Texas at San Antonio demonstrates the ability of the Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) to determine the composition of areas on the lunar surface by measuring the reflectance of far-ultraviolet (far-UV) light.
Researchers from Monash University and Hokkaido University have developed a method that converts carbon dioxide into a diesel-range fuel and has the potential to produce a net-zero liquid fuel alternative to power cars more sustainably.
Addressing the climate crisis will require cooperation on a massive scale, but to accomplish this, people need to know what specific challenges lie ahead and how to best move forward. Across the globe, people are facing the effects of the climate crisis, yet many are still unsure how and even if they can address it.
A team of researchers working at the University of Maryland has developed an electrolyte design strategy for making divalent metal batteries. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes solving problems associated with divalent rechargeable metal batteries and the strategy they developed to overcome them. Pengjian Zuo and Geping Yin with the Harbin Institute of Technology
Starting from available chemicals, a German team of researchers successfully completed the total synthesis of agarozizanol B, an interesting natural substance found in agarwood. As described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the key sequence in the relatively short synthetic pathway is a photochemical reaction cascade that involves a series of complex rearrangements of polycyclic intermediates.
A new kind of concrete could reduce emissions from the construction industry. Calcium carbonate concrete is made from waste concrete and carbon dioxide from the air or industrial exhaust gases. It shows promise as a future construction material, especially in places where natural resources are limited.
It's not just toilet paper anymore. Pandemic pressure on the global supply chain is causing disruptions and shortages of a diverse assortment of items, such as books, furniture, wood, and COVID tests. "Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy," my colleague Derek Thompson writes. "This is the Everything Shortage." The global supply chain is a disaster. And not just one part
Ardem Patapoutian shared the physiology or medicine prize for work on mechanisms crucial to everything from bladder control to knowing where our limbs are — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Researchers say their studies on air pollution and cognitive decline — one involving humans and one with mice — provide evidence that cleaner air may reduce risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias.
New research by a City College of New York team has uncovered a novel way to combine two different states of matter. For one of the first times, topological photons—light—has been combined with lattice vibrations, also known as phonons, to manipulate their propagation in a robust and controllable way.
The Arizona senator, who started in politics as an environmentalist, is one of two centrist Democrats who could make or break a spending bill at the center of President Biden's legislative agenda.
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake. Perseverance and the Mars 2020 mission are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and preparing a returnable cache of samples for later analyses on Earth.
Two thirds of all mammals vanished from Africa and the Arabian Peninsula around 30 million years ago, when the climate on Earth changed from swampy to icy. But we are only finding out about this mass extinction now. Researchers examined hundreds of fossils from multiple sites in Africa, built evolutionary trees, and pinpointed each species' first and last known appearances. The climate shift 'was
Daily cycles in virtually every aspect of our physiology are driven by biological clocks (also called circadian clocks) in our cells. The cyclical interactions of clock proteins keep the biological rhythms of life in tune with the daily cycle of night and day, and this happens not only in humans and other complex animals but even in simple, single-celled organisms such as cyanobacteria. A team of
Shadow Boxing Justin Bieber seems to have gotten tricked online, as he's been heckling a deepfake of Tom Cruise as though he were interacting with the real actor. Unless he's pulling a prank of his own, Bieber seems to have fallen for the trickery of "DeepTomCruise," a TikTok account that posts videos of a convincing deepfake version of Tom Cruise, the Daily Dot noticed . Bieber shared a video of
A new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers speaks to the importance of public awareness programs in keeping residents—and emergency management offices—informed about rare but potentially lethal natural events in their area.
Professor og overlæge Anders Perner og professor Ole Kiehn er dette års modtagere af KFJ-prisen, som gives for enestående præstationer inden for lægevidenskaben. Begge prismodtagere er glade for prisen og anerkendelsen af dem og deres respektive forskningsfelter.
In a paper published in Advances in Food Security and Sustainability, researchers found that farmers in East Africa (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) were able to better adapt to the impact of COVID-19 than those in the Southern African countries of Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
Since the 1970s, dams have been removed from the U.S. at an increasing rate, with the aim to improve the ecology of river ecosystems, fish migration pathways, water quality, and recreation spaces.
A Northwestern University research team has developed a versatile composite fabric that can deactivate both biological threats, such as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and chemical threats, such as those used in chemical warfare. A material that is effective against both classes of threats is rare.
The full magnitude of the impact of smoke from seasonal fires in Central Africa—and in particular, the potential climate warming from the absorption by the black carbon component of the aerosol—is underestimated by some climate models over the South-East Atlantic, new research has shown.
One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing but a Google Doc, a cellphone, and the Powers of the Internet™, wrest these terms from their academic hidey-holes and try to pin them down with some endearing yet accurate analogy. If I do my job we
Scientific Reports, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41598-021-00042-x Author Correction: Positron emission tomography imaging with 89 Zr-labeled anti-CD8 cys-diabody reveals CD8 + cell infiltration during oncolytic virus therapy in a glioma murine model
Many eukaryotic genes are expressed in randomly initiated bursts that are punctuated by periods of quiescence. Here, we show that the intermittent access of the promoters to transcription factors through relatively impervious chromatin contributes to this "noisy" transcription. We tethered a nuclease-deficient Cas9 fused to a histone acetyl transferase at…
Cellular ionic concentrations are a central factor orchestrating host innate immunity, but no pathogenic mechanism that perturbs host innate immunity by directly targeting metal ions has yet been described. Here, we report a unique virulence strategy of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis (Yptb) involving modulation of the availability of Mn2+, an immunostimulatory metal…
Work schedules in the service sector are routinely unstable and unpredictable, and this unpredictability may have harmful effects on health and economic insecurity. However, because schedule unpredictability often coincides with low wages and other dimensions of poor job quality, the causal effects of unpredictable work schedules are uncertain. Seattle's Secure…
The central dogma of bioenergetics is that photons energize electrons in molecules, those electrons push protons, and proton concentration gradients forge chemical bonds. An understanding of how this works—at the level of electrons and atoms—is elusive, especially in organisms that live life on the edge of survival. How do bacteria…
The ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has raised concerns about the effectiveness of current preventive pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical interventions (1). In addition, the upward global trends in the numbers of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, as evidenced…
The pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a global threat to human health and life. A useful pathological animal model accurately reflecting human pathology is needed to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. In the present study, COVID-19 cynomolgus monkey models including monkeys with underlying diseases causing severe…
Heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) chaperones bind many different sequences and discriminate between incompletely folded and folded clients. Most research into the origins of this "selective promiscuity" has relied on short peptides as substrates to dissect the binding, but much less is known about how Hsp70s bind full-length client proteins….
Highly resolved spatial data of complex systems encode rich and nonlinear information. Quantification of heterogeneous and noisy data—often with outliers, artifacts, and mislabeled points—such as those from tissues, remains a challenge. The mathematical field that extracts information from the shape of data, topological data analysis (TDA), has expanded its capability…
Group 3 innate lymphoid cells (ILC3s) control the formation of intestinal lymphoid tissues and play key roles in intestinal defense. They express neuropeptide vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) receptor 2 (VPAC2), through which VIP modulates their function, but whether VIP exerts other effects on ILC3 remains unclear. We show that VIP…
Strong light–matter coupling provides a promising path for the control of quantum matter where the latter is routinely described from first principles. However, combining the quantized nature of light with this ab initio tool set is challenging and merely developing as the coupled light–matter Hilbert space is conceptually different and…
In PNAS, Malonis et al. (1) isolate and characterize several human monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) that neutralize infection with arthritogenic alphaviruses. Alphaviruses represent a large group of positive-strand RNA viruses, some of which cause infections in humans. They are widely distributed, are transmitted by mosquitoes, and have been clinically classified as…
The aim of this commentary is to illuminate, for a wider audience, the essential features of the analysis described in the paper on "China's low fertility may not hinder future prosperity" (1), to place the paper in the context of the program of work on the role of education in…
NEUROSCIENCE Correction for "Genome-wide screen identifies curli amyloid fibril as a bacterial component promoting host neurodegeneration," by Chenyin Wang, Chun Yin Lau, Fuqiang Ma, and Chaogu Zheng, which published August 19, 2021; 10.1073/pnas.2106504118 (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2106504118). The authors note that two references were omitted from the…
Two men spent 29 days lost at sea, only to be rescued 250 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea. But the pandemic-ravaged civilization they were forced to return to was a bit of a bummer, despite their near-death experience. "I had no idea what was going on while I was out there," Livae Nanjikana, a man from the Solomon Islands who left the island on September 3 in a small motorboat, told The G
A modeling study estimates that by drastically reducing fish biomass over the past century, industrial fishing may be affecting ocean chemistry, nutrient fluxes, and carbon cycling as much as climate change.
Less Is More Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, is about to have to accomplish a whole lot more with a whole lot less in its pocket. Disappointed by a lack of results and faltering performance, Russian President Vladimir Putin will cut Roscosmos' budget by about 16 percent per year over the next three years, Ars Technica reports , citing multiple Russian publications . The disappointment stems fro
Space Sickness As pilot for the first all-tourist crew to orbit the Earth, Sian Proctor had the time of her life on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. But while the views out of the massive transparent cupola were breathtaking, the three day journey around the Earth wasn't always smooth sailing. "The first day, I wasn't feeling very good," Proctor told National Geographic . "Space sickness is
The life-support system called ECMO can rescue COVID-19 patients from the brink of death, but not at the rates seen early in the pandemic, a new study finds. Where once about 60% of such patients survived at least 90 days in spring 2020, by the end of the year just under half of COVID patients on ECMO survived that long. The decreased survival over time might be due to a combination of factors, i
Over time, concrete cracks and crumbles. Well, most concrete cracks and crumbles. Structures built in ancient Rome are still standing, exhibiting remarkable durability despite conditions that would devastate modern concrete. One of these structures is the large cylindrical tomb of first-century noblewoman Caecilia Metella. New research shows that the quality of the concrete of her tomb may exceed
A new discovery may settle the decades-long debate over whether a form of coral is one species or two. On a night dive off the coast of St. John in the US Virgin Islands in 2016, two coral reef researchers saw something unexpected: A coral colony with slender, waving branches was releasing larvae into the water. "While I had always wondered if the two forms were really two species, that was the m
Photo: Mike MacKenzie, Flickr As Moore's Law approaches its endgame, the technosphere has looked to different and more diverse approaches to computing. In order to continue to increase the computational power of our systems, we can't just depend on driving clock speeds higher and higher, nor can we continue making transistors increasingly smaller. To truly move forward, a new paradigm must be con
Italian Giorgio Parisi, winner of the 2021 Nobel Physics Prize, slammed Friday the lack of funding for research in Italy, saying it invested one of the lowest amounts in Europe.
A thorough review of the history of sage grouse hunting and populations across the Intermountain West shows that declines in the bird's numbers have prompted significant reductions in hunting opportunities in recent decades—with mixed results for grouse populations.
A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House's climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year. Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric … Continue reading
In the last two years, video calls and streaming have gone from useful tools and amusements to the centerpiece of our lives and how we stay connected. Yet it's also meant that we've had to upgrade the quality of our video as well. XSplit has two deals that help you polish any video, and support any stream. A Stronger Stream First, XSplit Broadcaster Premium offers a better stream. At the most bas
A team of researchers from Freiburg led by Prof. Dr. Frank Stienkemeier and Dr. Lukas Bruder has succeeded in developing a new measurement method for investigating ultrafast processes in matter. These are processes at the atomic and molecular level that occur within a billionth of a second (10-12 sec). The new method, which combines different spectroscopy techniques, enables, among other things, n
Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the "Out of Africa" scenario. The researchers claimed that the African dynamics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more complex than previously thought.
Nearly a week after a 13-inch tear in an undersea pipeline resulted in a massive oil spill off the Southern California coast, the clues keep piling up, but the mystery of what caused the rupture and who is ultimately responsible remains unsolved.
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02782-2 All seven winners of this year's science prizes were men. Some say this shows a disappointing lack of progress towards diversifying the awards.
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02733-x Xinge Yu hopes to patent a wearable device that measures tissue stiffness to detect serious illnesses.
Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American 's senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here .
The WHO-approved RTS,S vaccine has a modest efficacy and requires a complex regimen of doses, so ample funding and clear communication are crucial to success — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
A lunar probe recently brought back the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years. Now, researchers have determined the age of the moon rocks at close to 1.97 billion years old. "It is the perfect sample to close a 2-billion-year gap," says Brad Jolliff, professor of earth and planetary sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washin
Unknown Object According to a statement by the US Navy, the nuclear submarine USS Connecticut sustained damage and several injuries after colliding with an "unknown object" in the South China Sea, CBS News reports . The submarine is now making its way to Guam to assess the damage. It's a hair-raising incident given the location. China, the US, and its allies including the UK have repeatedly made
Researchers have found a way to make deep brain stimulation (DBS) more precise, resulting in therapeutic effects that outlast what is currently available. The work will significantly advance the study of Parkinson's disease.
States eased COVID-19 restrictions based on politics as much as death rates or case counts, a new study shows. In the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all 50 states announced restrictions on gatherings and businesses, and most issued stay-at-home orders, aiming to curb disease transmission and avoid overburdening health systems. States with Republican governors and a larger vote share
Doubling human life expectancy in a century is our greatest achievement, says author Steven Johnson. How did we make it happen — and can we keep it going? Backed by fascinating historical anecdotes, he shares some life-lengthening innovations and reminds us of three key things needed to make sure all of humanity enjoys these advancements in health.
Blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) spend their days being buffeted by crashing waves. They manage to stay tethered to the rocks or their fellow mussels thanks to a highly effective underwater glue they produce. Because achieving adhesion in the presence of water is so challenging, scientists who are interested in producing effective adhesives for use in wet environments (e.g., for surgical or dental tr
Trafiken är full av "irrationella" människor som ställer till det för de förarlösa fordonen. Därför kommer det att dröja innan självkörande bilar dominerar, menar professorn Barry Brown. – Det har pratats om självkörande bilar i tio års tid. Hela tiden får man höra att de kommer vara i bruk "om två år". Jag tror snarare att det rör sig om 30–40 år. Det sa professor Barry Brown , Institutionen för
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization recommended that children in areas with moderate to high transmission of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum receive the vaccine Mosquirix, initially called RTS,S, developed by the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline.
Researchers have found that a drug first developed to treat Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and sickle cell disease reduces obesity and fatty liver in mice and improves their heart function — without changes in food intake or daily activity.
Researchers analyzed the accumulated data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and depicted the motion of a young twin star system XZ Tauri over three years. This 'ALMA Animation' of twin stars sheds new light on the origins of the binary stars and the planets to be formed around them.
Researchers have discovered an individual Eleotris oxycephala in Akita Prefecture, Japan, which is the northernmost record of this species. The juvenile was discovered in the Yoneshiro River system and likely reached the river from the south via larval dispersal in the Tsushima Current. This possible range expansion of Eleotris oxycephala may be linked to increasing water temperatures.
Observation data analysis reveals a 90-fold increase in the frequency of monthly heat extremes, so-called 3-sigma-events that deviate strongly from what is normal in a given region, in the past ten years compared to 1951-1980. Record daily rainfall events also increased in a non-linear way — on average, 1 in 4 rainfall records in the last decade can be attributed to climate change. Seemingly smal
Researchers have deciphered a molecular mechanism with which a small RNA and a small protein regulate the metabolism of cholera bacteria and the production of the cholera toxin.
For the first time, researchers have been able capture images providing unprecedented details of how particles behave in a liquid suspension when the phenomenon known as shear thickening takes place. The work allows us to directly understand the processes behind shear thickening, which had previously only been understood based on inference and computational modeling.
New leaders may want to let trust build over time, rather than establishing lots of it right away, according to a new study with military cadets. Numerous studies have shown that trust in leadership is linked to higher individual and team performance. However, that might not be the best strategy for long-term success, according to the researchers. That's because trust is dynamic by nature, and it
A study in the journal Physica A leverages concepts from physics to model how campaign strategies influence the opinions of an electorate in a two-party system.
Adulting is pretty complicated. In addition to the day-to-day grind—going to work, taking care of your kids, cooking dinner, mowing the lawn—you also have to take care of a lot of big picture stuff. There are mortgages to refinance, insurance policies to update, retirement portfolios to manage, important documents to store. And all of it has to be kept in order and up to date so that, when you ne
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Canada has found that despite rising temperatures due to global warming, snowshoe hares with mismatched coats are experiencing reduced mortality rates. They have written a paper describing their findings and have posted it on the bioRxiv preprint server.
After decades of studying color vision in mice, new research in zebrafish has allowed experts to uncover how some animals regulate their ability to see blue light. The results allow researchers to better understand the evolutionary history and current control mechanisms of color vision.
Researchers have developed a new approach to autonomously fly quadrotors through unknown, complex environments at high speeds using only on-board sensing and computation. The new approach could be useful in emergencies, on construction sites or for security applications.
It seems like an esoteric question: What, exactly, is a species? Two corals were described as different species, then merged together, and then separated once again. A new study explores the question further.
Looking beyond the picky eating of childhood, researchers looked at this behavior in college students. Self-identified picky eaters ate significantly less fiber and vegetables and reported greater levels of social phobia than non-picky eaters, according to a new study. Social phobia is the fear of being evaluated during everyday activities by others.
Researchers report that pairing a newly developed fibrin gel with CAR-T immunotherapy that was delivered to post-surgical mouse brains with glioblastoma improved the immunotherapy's effectiveness. The gel aided CAR-T cell distribution in the brain by acclimating the T cells to the post-surgical wound environment while also stopping the tumor from recurring.
Stream Getaway Driver on discovery+ ► https://www.discoveryplus.com/show/getaway-driver-us About Getaway Driver: Michelle Rodriguez brings the ultimate driving fantasy to life as 24 elite drivers get behind the wheel in a real-life high-speed chase. Can the getaway drivers evade their pursuers, find an exit and escape, or will their cars pay the ultimate sacrifice? #GetawayDriver #MichelleRodrigu
Most animals are limited to either walking, flying, or swimming, with a handful of lucky species whose physiology allows them to cross over. A new robot took inspiration from them, and can fly like a bird just as well as it can walk like a (weirdly awkward, metallic, tiny) person. It also happens to be able to skateboard and slackline, two skills most humans will never pick up. Described in a pap
Pengar kan öka människors vilja att vaccinera sig. Forskarna bakom studien menar att det kan vara en kostnadseffektiv lösning. – Det är rimligt att förmoda att det blir en lägre kostnad för samhället, säger forskaren Pol Campos-Mercade. Vad kan få människor att i högre grad ta emot den vaccinering som erbjuds? Runt om i världen finns exempel på olika försök att belöna den som tvekar. Från 5 dolla
Solid oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) is promising in CO2 conversion and renewable clean electricity energy storage. It can convert CO2 and H2O simultaneously into syngas or hydrocarbon fuel at the cathode, and produce high purity O2 at the anode.
Intensified reactors are used in a variety of chemical processes. One such reactor is the rotating packed bed (RPB) reactor which uses high centrifugal forces to accelerate chemical reactions between constituents. However, the RPB reactor has a number of issues that affect its efficiency. With this in mind, for this Ph.D. research, Jasper Hacking designed a new reactor referred to as rotating liqu
The quantum behavior of atomic vibrations excited in a crystal using light pulses has much to do with the polarization of the pulses, say materials scientists from Tokyo Tech. The findings from their latest study offer a new control parameter for the manipulation of coherently excited vibrations in solid materials at the quantum level.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features two interacting galaxies that are so intertwined, they have a collective name—Arp 91. Their delicate galactic dance takes place more than 100 million light-years from Earth. The two galaxies comprising Arp 91 have their own names: the lower galaxy, which looks like a bright spot, is NGC 5953, and the oval-shaped galaxy to the upper right is NGC 5
Cholecystokinin (CCK) and gastrin are the earliest discovered gastrointestinal hormones. They are the most abundant peptides in gastrointestinal tract and central nervous system, acting as physiologically important hormones and neurotransmitters through two CCK receptor subtypes, CCKAR and CCKBR.
Excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in lake waters can easily cause eutrophication of water body, which in turn leads to cyanobacteria blooms and threatens aquatic biodiversity. As a measure of human interference, dredging can effectively alleviate cyanobacteria blooms, and thus plays an important role in improving lake water quality. Dredging can remove part of the nitrogen and phosphorus
A new permanent magnet design of quasi-axisymmetric stellarator was made by researchers led by Prof. Xu Guosheng from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Att ge priset till journalister som jobbar för demokrati i en utsatt situation gör frågan mer konkret, enligt freds- och konfliktforskaren Isak Svensson.
(Photo: Michael Podger/Unsplash) Spider silk has long been said to have antibacterial properties. The ancient Greeks and Romans supposedly used the silk when treating flesh wounds, and some recent studies report antimicrobial activity (AMA) on spider silk, leading many cultures and social circles today to believe the sticky substance is a worthwhile replacement for advanced antibacterial medicine
Southern white rhinos once made a meteoric comeback from the brink of extinction. But the species' future remains uncertain, following a surge in poaching for rare rhino horns.
Proteins drive nearly all biological functions and insight into their workings is essential for pharmaceutical developments. But now, a pair of scientists from Japan have found that our fundamental understanding of a characteristic of proteins that is key to their proper functioning — the mechanism by which their structures fold — has been flawed. These new findings call for a re-assessment of a
PLUS. Forkert indstillede beredskabsradioer ved Storebæltsulykken i 2019, har fået Region Syddanmark til at skrue op for uddannelse og træning i brugen af SINE-beredskabsradioer. De vil dog ikke tvangsstyre indstillinger fra centralt hold, som Rigspolitiet ellers har foreslået.
As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there's ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it's not clear on publishers' sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or … Continue reading
The pandemic has fundamentally altered every part of our lives, not least the time we spend on digital devices. For young people in particular, the blurred line between recreational and educational screen time presents new challenges we are only beginning to appreciate.
Scientists have synthesized tetrafluoride powders of four radioactive elements—thorium, uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. These four elements are actinides, a series of heavy and radioactive elements. Tetrafluoride powders are simply powders with four fluoride atoms per atom of actinide. In this new study, scientists probed the magnetic fields of these powders. This revealed remarkable variations
Shortcomings in the Baltimore region's public transit system disproportionately affect low-income and minority neighborhoods, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins University's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, which spans the schools of Public Health and Engineering, and the Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition.
Using responses from the LGBT survey conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, they compared the findings of over 28,000 people identifying as LGBT in Germany, Portugal and the UK.
En tidigare livskraftig sjö med mjukt meanderformade floddeltan har hittats på Mars, med hjälp av 150 000 bilder från rymdrovern Perseverance. Den nya upptäckten ger nycklar till vår grannplanets geologiska historia och intensifierar sökandet efter utomjordiskt organiskt liv. Ett moln av röd rök. Och ett par sekunder av ovisshet. Så skulle man kunna beskriva de visuellt kittlande realtidsbilderna
Oversygeplejerske Rikke Degn har de seneste to år stået alene med det ledelsesmæssige beslutningsansvar på afdelingen for Hjertesygdomme på AUH. I ryggen har hun haft et rådgivende udvalg, men i sidste ende har ansvaret været hendes. Nu gør hun klar til at dele ledelsesstafetten med to nye cheflæger.
I stedet for at konstituere en ny ledende overlæge blev oversygeplejersken bakket op af et rådgivende udvalg, der skulle give faglig sparring. Det har bragt personalet på Hjertesygdomme på AUH tættere sammen, men den lægefaglige repræsentation har betalt prisen.
New details about Facebook may prompt brands to reconsider the risks and ethics of working with the platform, say experts. This week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified about the tens of thousands of pages of internal documents she leaked exposing how Facebook prioritized profits over public safety and called on lawmakers to regulate the social media network. By bringing to light the
Efter at have sagt farvel til to ledende overlæger inden for kort tid på afdelingen for Hjertesygdomme indså ledelsen på AUH, at der skulle noget andet til for at dække afdelingens enorme ledelsesspænd. Derfor leder man nu efter to nye cheflæger. Netop skræddersyede løsninger er svaret på de ledelsesmæssige udfordringer i sundhedsvæsenet, mener overlægeformand.
A new study published in Nature looks at a closed loop implanted deep brain stimulator to treat severe and treatment resistant depression, with very encouraging results. This is a report of a single patient, with is a useful proof of concept. Severe depression can profoundly limit one's life, and increase risk for suicide ( affecting 300 million people worldwide and causing most of the 800,000 an
Microbiology researchers have shed new light on the mechanisms of carbon cycling in the ocean, using a novel approach to track which microbes are consuming different types of organic carbon produced by common phytoplankton species.
We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to 'tipping points': irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing. But the earth is much more resilient than previously thought. Researchers now show that the concept of tipping points is too simple.
Researchers uncover the evolution of the hepatitis B virus since the Early Holocene by analyzing the largest dataset of ancient viral genomes produced to date.
This week, Lauren Goode talks to the politician about his new political party, and how the US can get more bikes, scooters, and pedestrians on the streets.
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02743-9 Nature highlights three key infographics from the week in science and research.
TSMC has put out a statement, backed up by the Taiwanese government, emphasizing that it would leak no sensitive data in complying with a US request for greater transparency in the supply chain. The company's statement today emphasized its willingness to protect its customers, but did not say to what degree it would comply with the US request. "We definitely will not leak our company's sensitive
Marine heatwaves, driven by climate change, are becoming more frequent and intense worldwide. Although we know that heatwaves kill marine organisms and have devastating effects on ecosystems, there is currently no way to predict these effects or help ecosystems adapt.
As university and college semesters unfold, a small but increasing percentage of students will likely also be taking on a largely under-reported and overlooked form of part-time employment: sex work.
"It's worse than a plague," curses Pedro Antonio Sanchez, fuming over the volcanic grit coating his bananas, the main source of wealth on the Canaries' island of La Palma.
Fear is one of the central emotional responses during the pandemic. Every day brings a new level of stress: concerns about getting sick, the stigma of testing positive, financial difficulties due to not being able to work, separation from loved ones in lockdown (or being locked in an unsafe household). The list goes on.
The New South Wales government has released a draft plan to deal with feral horses roaming the fragile Kosciuszko National Park. While the plan offers some improvements, it remains seriously inadequate.
It's incredible that the Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus) can still be found on the island of Java, one of the world's most densely populated islands. It's even more remarkable that the rhino population in Indonesia has tripled since the 1960s.
Billions of years ago, lakes of lava on the surface of the moon eventually dried to form the vast dark patches—the lunar maria—visible today on the lunar nearside. Now, thanks to rock samples recently returned to Earth by China's Chang'e 5 mission, scientists have a new estimate for when one of the last of those lava flows ran dry.
PLUS. Forskere fra DTU har udviklet en ny metode til fangst af CO2, der fanger gassen i et fast stof frem for en væske. Nu skal teknologien prøves af på et svensk biogasanlæg.
Pro Evolution Soccer har rebrandet sig selv. FIFA-konkurrenten hedder nu eFootball og har forsøgt sig med en økonomisk model, der afspejler samtidens populære titler – men resultatet har været katastrofalt.
PLUS. De danske universiteter er gået i gang med at opbygge en 'sandkasse' af syntetiske patientdata, som studerende kan øve sig på uden at komme i konflikt med GDPR.
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02780-4 First real-world evidence that inexpensive air filters effectively remove SARS-CoV-2 virus particles from the air. Plus, a malaria vaccine will finally be rolled out across Africa and how the world's biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26076-3 Quantum spin liquid states are realized in systems with frustrated magnetic interactions. Here, the authors show that tunable frustrated spin-spin interactions can be induced by coupling a quantum antiferromagnet to the quantized light of a driven optical cavity, giving rise to robust quantum spin liquid stat
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26210-1 Phase Transition Curves (PTCs) describe phase shifts of circadian oscillations due to a stimulus and they are important for studying circadian clock resetting. Here, the authors present a method for high-throughput reconstruction of PTCs using fluorescent live imaging and single-cell analysis.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26224-9 The authors demonstrate a colourimetric imaging method using plasmonic nanoparticles for visualisation of heterochromatin histone markers. Based on the distance-dependent coupling effect, resulting in spectral shifts, they observe reorganisation of histone markers caused by oncogene-induced senescence.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26182-2 Calibrating both anomalous frequency and amplitude of biorhythm prevents physiological dysfunctions or diseases. Here, the authors propose a universal approach to design a frequency-amplitude coordinator rigorously via dynamical systems tools.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26090-5 The reaction mechanism of carbon dioxide to high-value hydrocarbons over metal-zeolite bifunctional catalysts remains ambiguous. Here, the authors demonstrate that active zeolite catalysts' topology and hybrid nature are descriptors; regulating the reaction mechanism and ultimate product selectivity.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26003-6 Oncolytic herpes simplex virus-1 lyses cancer cells while increases their immunogenicity. Blocking the CD47 "don't eat me" signal on cancer cells promotes their phagocytosis by macrophages. Authors here show that oncolytic viruses expressing anti-CD47 antibodies improve glioblastoma survival in mouse models.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26206-x Microglia remodel synapses and engulf apoptotic cells. The molecular program underlying these distinct functions are unclear. Here, the authors identify distinct microglial subsets associated with synaptic vs. neurogenic regions of the developing zebrafish brain.
Nature Communications, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25944-2 OTULIN is a deubiquitinase for linear ubiquitin chains. Here the authors show, using genetic mouse models and single-cell RNA-sequencing, that deficiency of OTULIN in keratinocytes causes skin inflammation and verrucous carcinoma via the induction of keratinocyte death, thereby implicating a function of OTULI
I den nye serie 'Sikkert og vist' sætter Ingeniørens videnskabsjournalist Jens Ramskov fokus på, hvad videnskaben fortæller os om universet og naturens orden og udvikling. Denne gang om, hvordan Jorden opstod, og hvordan den engang vil ende sin eksistens.
In "The Sleeping Beauties," neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan explores the world of unexplained comas and other mysterious "culture-bound" disorders. Culturally influenced reactions to trauma, O'Sullivan stresses, have nothing to do with fakery, but are very real, physical manifestations of distress.
PLUS. Tysk fysiker og videnskabsjournalist sætter spørgsmålstegn ved, om ITER overhovedet er i stand til at producere energi til elnettet. Dansk forsker understreger, at ITER ikke er en færdig reaktor, men et eksperiment til at lære mere om fusionsenergi.
Scientific Reports, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41598-021-99316-7 Design of a system for controlling a levitating sphere in superfluid 3 He at extremely low temperatures
Unusually powerful sandstorms have left at least six people dead in Sao Paulo in recent weeks, local media said, as southeastern Brazil grapples with severe drought.
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02772-4 Stefano Sandrone's Nobel Life features interviews with 24 prizewinners on everything from handling rejection to seizing the moment.
Pacific island leaders have urged industrialised nations to bring plans for real action, not good intentions, to upcoming climate talks, painting a grim picture of the environmental horrors they face.
The brick foundation of one of the nation's oldest Black churches has been unearthed at Colonial Williamsburg, a living history museum in Virginia that continues to reckon with its past storytelling about the country's origins and the role of Black Americans.
In a study of crayfish in the Current River in southeastern Missouri, researchers discovered—almost by chance—that the virile crayfish, Faxonius virilis, was interbreeding with a native crayfish, potentially altering the native's genetics, life history and ecology. Reported in the journal Aquatic Invasions, the study highlights the difficulty of detecting some of the consequences of biological inv
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02740-y Two studies from Israel quantify the risk of myocarditis following the Pfizer–BioNTech shot, with one suggesting the chance of developing the condition is about one in 50,000.
Schneider Shorts of 8 October 2021: greedy Big Pharma, killer kitties, fake Viking maps, fake clinical trials, fake CVs and fake grades, other tortured phrases, academic eugenics, updates on lab leak theory, and the scientific lessons for Christianity from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Nature, Published online: 08 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02755-5 The WHO-approved RTS,S vaccine has modest efficacy and requires a complex regimen of doses, so ample funding and clear communication will be crucial to success.
The harms we cause often lead to more grief than the harms we fail to prevent. Is this why some doctors are willing to leave young people vulnerable to a deadly virus? The post first appeared on Science-Based Medicine .
PLUS. 40 procent af beredskabsradioerne ved Storebæltsulykken i 2019 var indstillet forkert, viser en ny kortlægning. Årsagen er en ikke-intuitiv brugergrænseflade og begrænset uddannelse i SINE-radioer blandt det præhospitale personale.
Ancient Lakes New data from NASA's Perseverance rover confirms that Jezero Crater, the area on Mars that it's been exploring since it touched down back in February, is indeed the site of a gigantic ancient lake. The rover found geological structures that researchers from NASA and a long list of American and European universities say could have only been formed by a river flowing into a lake for a
Thirteen years after Vermont lost the ignominious distinction of being the only state in the continental United States without any breeding pairs of bald eagles, the state is moving to remove the iconic national symbol from its list of threatened and endangered species.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators have devised and tested a new, highly sensitive method of detecting and counting defects in transistors—a matter of urgent concern to the semiconductor industry as it develops new materials for next-generation devices. These defects limit transistor and circuit performance and can affect product reliability.
Zika virus (ZIKV) caused millions of infections during its rapid and expansive spread from Asia to the Americas from 2015 to 2017. Here, we compared the infectivity of ZIKV mutants with individual stable substitutions which emerged throughout the Asian ZIKV lineage and were responsible for the explosive outbreaks in the…
Leaves and flowers are colonized by diverse bacteria that impact plant fitness and evolution. Although the structure of these microbial communities is becoming well-characterized, various aspects of their environmental origin and selection by plants remain uncertain, such as the relative proportion of soilborne bacteria in phyllosphere communities. Here, to address…
Germ cells possess the Piwi-interacting RNA pathway to repress transposable elements and maintain genome stability across generations. Transposable element mobilization in somatic cells does not affect future generations, but nonetheless can lead to pathological outcomes in host tissues. We show here that loss of function of the conserved zinc-finger transcription…
Blooms of marine phytoplankton fix complex pools of dissolved organic matter (DOM) that are thought to be partitioned among hundreds of heterotrophic microbes at the base of the food web. While the relationship between microbial consumers and phytoplankton DOM is a key component of marine carbon cycling, microbial loop metabolism…
The atrophic form of age-related macular degeneration (dry AMD) affects nearly 200 million people worldwide. There is no Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved therapy for this disease, which is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among people over 50 y of age. Vision loss in dry AMD results from degeneration…
Wolbachia bacteria, inherited through the female germ line, infect a large fraction of arthropod species. Many Wolbachia strains manipulate host reproduction, most commonly through cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). CI, a conditional male sterility, results when Wolbachia-infected male insects mate with uninfected females; viability is restored if the female is similarly infected…
In the skin, tissue injury results in fibrosis in the form of scars composed of dense extracellular matrix deposited by fibroblasts. The therapeutic goal of regenerative wound healing has remained elusive, in part because principles of fibroblast programming and adaptive response to injury remain incompletely understood. Here, we present a…
It is a fundamental question in disease modeling how the initial seeding of an epidemic, spreading over a network, determines its final outcome. One important goal has been to find the seed configuration, which infects the most individuals. Although the identified optimal configurations give insight into how the initial state…
Genetic, molecular, and genomic analyses have revolutionized all the fields within the life sciences, revealing the intricate mechanisms underlying the functioning of living organisms, as well as the historical processes that continuously shape them. Among the myriad phenotypes whose physical (heritable) basis and evolutionary significance have been scrutinized with genetic…
We describe a general method that allows structure determination of small proteins by single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The method is based on the availability of a target-binding nanobody, which is then rigidly attached to two scaffolds: 1) a Fab fragment of an antibody directed against the nanobody and 2) a…
Evolutionary biologists find delight in tracing their study topics back to Charles Darwin, and ant researchers are no exception. The dulotic habit of many ant species was highlighted by Darwin as one of the most sophisticated adaptive outcomes of natural selection (1). Dulotic ants raid nests of other ant species…
A video of the sea floor off the Orange County coast this week shows damage to an oil pipeline that sent an estimated 144,000 gallons of crude into the ocean, fouling beaches and threatening ecologically sensitive wetlands.
Just 30 percent of cars on the road will be electric by 2050 under current policies, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
A lunar probe launched by the Chinese space agency recently brought back the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years. Now an international team of scientists has determined the age of these moon rocks at close to 1.97 billion years old.
Images from the Perseverance rover confirm that Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake, MIT researchers report. The team also detected signs of flash flooding strong enough to carry large boulders downstream into the ancient delta.
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02746-6 As countries prepare to negotiate over climate action at the COP26 summit, Nature takes readers' temperature and questions.
Hot Tub There's an overwhelming abundance of data showing how climate change will bring about disaster for humanity — but we have yet to see an urgent, global initiative to fight it. By ignoring the clear signs that climate change will devastate the planet , we as a species are acting like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of boiling water, astrophysicist Martin Rees wrote in a new op-ed in Th
A new report that could make it simpler to send spacecraft to some areas of Mars while still protecting the planet from Earth-based contamination was presented today at a press conference at the 53rd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Amanda Hendrix.
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02744-8 The Chang'e-5 mission returned the first lunar samples since the 1970s, with bits of lava dated at two billion years old.
The perception of being heard by a listener plays a key role in whether a person stutters, according to a new study. The "talk-alone-effect"—the phenomenon in which people who stutter don't stutter when they are alone—has been noted in anecdotal reports but until now, has not been supported by evidence. The new study in the Journal of Fluency Disorders explores the talk-alone-effect among people
It is commonly assumed that any important scientific knowledge would be available in English, and so scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents. But is this assumption correct? According to research publishing October 7th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Tatsuya Amano at the University of Queensland, Australia, the
A lunar probe launched by the Chinese space agency recently brought back the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years. Now an international team of scientists—including an expert from Washington University in St. Louis—has determined the age of these moon rocks at close to 1.97 billion years old.
Texas experienced one of its worst droughts ever in 2011. A new study shows the drought was even worse than previously thought. The dry, parched conditions caused over $7 billion in crop and livestock losses, sparked wildfires, pushed power grids to the limit, and reduced reservoirs to dangerously low levels. The new research in the Journal of Hydrology incorporated additional soil moisture-relat
Pasture-raised beef is the cornerstone of the New Zealand meat industry. But do we really understand the benefits we get from the meat when it is raised this way?
People will pay more for meal kits when they can recycle all the packaging, research finds. Meal kits getting even more popular; national sales are predicted to increase from $4.6 billion in 2017 to $11.6 billion in 2022. The kits include pre-cut raw foods and recipe cards to prepare a home-cooked meal, but they come with packaging waste. A new study in the journal Food Quality and Preference sho
Consuming sustainably sourced wild meat instead of domesticated livestock reduces greenhouse gas emissions and retains precious tropical forest systems, which in turn mitigates the effects of climate change.
It is no exaggeration to say that science has saved humanity on multiple occasions. The most recent has been through the development of vaccines for the current COVID-19 pandemic.
A much-touted cleanup of oil pollution in southern Nigeria has yet to start in parts of the hotspot Ogoniland, almost three years after contracts were handed out, and residents remain without proper drinking water, a report said Thursday.
Just 5% of employed people in the UK worked from home in 2019. The onset of the pandemic and the overnight shuttering of offices during the first lockdown meant 47% of employees were doing the same in April 2020.
Hi guys I would like to know how holograms work, and how profitable would it be to start a business in said field submitted by /u/aj200201 [link] [comments]
Terrified drivers climbed out of swamped cars and muddy floodwater flowed through neighborhoods after a stalled weather front drenched Alabama for hours, leaving entire communities under water Thursday and killing at least four people, with still more drenching storms to come.
Yellow warblers are hosts to brood parasitic brown-headed cowbirds, which rely on other species to raise their offspring. Warblers use referential "seet" calls to warn female warblers specifically of the brood parasitic brown-headed cowbirds that may try to lay eggs in their nests. When exposed to experimental playbacks of seet calls one day, female warblers were more vigilant the next morning, re
Carbon emissions from the internet are on a par with emissions from the aerospace industry, but at the same time digital technologies are crucial to winning the battle against climate change.
The experimental observations of high-velocity particle-laden flow interactions has been sparse, given the difficulty of generating high-velocity flows of many particles. These observations play an important role in understanding a wide range of natural phenomena, ranging from planetary formation to cloud interactions.
A team has developed and demonstrated a novel, fully functional quantum local area network, or QLAN, to enable real-time adjustments to information shared with geographically isolated systems using entangled photons passing through optical fiber.
The U.S. Coast Guard investigated a vessel in Oakland on Wednesday as part of its probe into whether a ship's anchor punctured an oil pipeline off the coast of Orange County and spilled 144,000 gallons of crude.
During the last 10 to 15 years, blue mussels in shallow waters on Sweden's west coast have largely disappeared. Observations and reviews of studies and reports indicate that climate change may be behind the change.
One in six of the world's poor (215 million) live in households where no female has completed six years of school, but at least one male has, according to new figures on global poverty released today by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Adding households where no one is educated brings this number up to 836 million, or two-thirds of p
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02754-6 Nobel prize insiders and observers say timing and politics meant vaccine technology was an unlikely winner — but science's most prestigious prize shouldn't be far off.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality is moving to restore several key environmental review requirements that were rolled back by the Trump administration.
Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river's largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam roughly a century ago. Arizona and Nevada are facing their first-ever mandated water cuts, while water is being released from other reservoirs to keep the Colorado River's hydropower plants running.
Of all the things teachers do on the job, we found that teachers enjoy interacting with students the most—and that the positive feelings when working with students intensified once schools shifted to remote learning during the pandemic.
There's been much—and rightful—scrutiny of prejudice towards accents in the north of England. For instance, research has highlighted teachers with northern accents being told to "posh up" and northern university students being ridiculed for their accent.
The space cemetery, named for the fictional captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is where the International Space Station is likely to end up. Deputy editor, David Munk, recommends this story about deep and dark spaces You can read the original article here: Continue reading…
The change of genetic information over time is a key factor for evolutionary adaptations with which living beings can adapt to changes in their environment. On the one hand, genetic variability arises in the course of reproduction, where genetic information is divided and recombined in the developing offspring. In addition, mutations are another important source of genetic variability. This geneti
After the second world war, many of Japan's smartest scientists found jobs in North American laboratories. Syukuro (Suki) Manabe, a 27-year-old physicist, was part of this brain drain. He was working on weather forecasting but left Japan in 1958 to join a new research project by the US Weather Service to develop a numerical model that could be used to study the climate.
Today, after spending ten years assessing the state of coral reefs around the world, the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF) has released a comprehensive report of its findings from the Global Reef Expedition. The Global Reef Expedition Final Report provides valuable baseline data on the status of the world's reefs at a critical point in time and offers key insights into how to save
In the Green Swamp of Polk County, Florida, Paul Sykes heard a sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. The sharp honk may have sounded, to a layperson, like a stepped-on squeaky toy. But to Sykes, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist then based in Delray Beach, it sounded like the recordings he'd heard of the spectral ivory-billed woodpecker.
In urban areas across the U.S., low-income neighborhoods and communities of color experience an average of 28% more nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution than higher-income and majority-white neighborhoods. The disparity is driven primarily by proximity to trucking routes on major roadways, where diesel trucks are emitters of NO2 and other air pollutants.
Amyloidosis is a multifaceted disease group caused by deposits of the misfolded "amyloid" protein in various tissues. Amyloid protein is very unique compared to other native proteins in that it has a cross-β-sheet structure, which gives it distinctive properties, such as resistance to digestive proteinases and transmissibility through ingestion.
NASA has made a rare change to its spaceflight roster. After initially being slated to go into space aboard the Boeing Starliner, two astronauts have been moved to an upcoming SpaceX Dragon launch . This will get the rookie astronauts into space sooner than if they waited on Starliner, which is still being retooled following an issue with fuel valves several months ago. This move does not bode we
Byer i hele verden er påvirket af store temperaturstigninger. Det gælder særligt i asiatiske og mellemøstlige byområder, hvor man forventer, at flere vil rammes af sygdom, samt at antallet af dødsfald vil stige.
Researchers have shown for the first time how mutations affecting a cellular process called RNA splicing alter cells to develop myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and other hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.
In 2013, the U.S. government began investing $100 million to decipher human brain anatomy in a large collaborative project called the BRAIN Initiative. Researchers built tools and set standards for describing all the cells in the brain. On October 7, 2021 the initiative reached a major milestone, publishing a comprehensive census of cell types in the mouse, monkey, and human primary motor cortex.
A mouse study reveals new insights into the wiring of a major circuit in the brain that is attacked by Parkinson's and Huntington's disease. The findings could hone scientists' understanding of how these disorders arise in the human brain and pinpoint new therapeutic targets.
While researchers have discovered numerous cell types in the brain, this atlas of all cell types in one area — the primary motor cortex — is the first comprehensive list and a starting point for tracing cellular networks to understand how they control our body and mind and how they are disrupted in mental and physical disorders.
It takes billions of cells to make a human brain, and scientists have long struggled to map this complex network of neurons. Now, dozens of research teams around the country have made inroads into creating an atlas of the mouse brain as a first step toward a human brain atlas. The results describe how different cell types are organized and connected throughout the mouse brain.
Building Spree SpaceX is doubling the size of its fleet of astronaut-carrying spacecraft — as well as doubling the number of cargo-carrying ones — according to officials who spoke during a briefing ahead of the space company's next crewed mission later this month. It's a significant expansion that will widen SpaceX's already sizeable head start over the competition. Mission Brief The mission, dub
Housing policies established more than eight decades ago that effectively trapped people of color in low income and segregated neighborhoods continue to affect the health of residents to this day, specifically resulting in poor obstetric outcomes such as pre-term birth, researchers report. "These findings suggest the potential influences of a system of profound structural inequity that ripple for
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02558-8 As pandemic restrictions ease, other respiratory viruses are returning in unexpected ways.
Researchers further refine the organization of cells within key regions of the mouse brain and the organization of transcriptomic, epigenomic and regulatory factors that provide these brain cells with function and purpose.
Approximately 10% of new coronary heart disease cases occurring within a decade of middle age could be avoided by preventing iron deficiency, suggests a new study.
Panic-buying fuel in large quantities will only cause further disruption to supply chains and production inefficiencies, say experts at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass).
In Dutch hospitals, over a million kilos of blue 'wrapping paper' is used each year to keep medical instruments sterile. After they have been used, they create an enormous mountain of waste. TU Delft researchers Tim Horeman and Bart van Straten, in collaboration with the Maasstad Hospital in Rotterdam among others, devised a method to melt down this blue polypropylene wrapping paper and turn it in
Transitioning to a circular economy and utilizing resources efficiently in cities is necessarily a collaborative effort. We interviewed two experts, Jaana Pelkonen and Heikki Sorasahi, to learn what they thought are the things to consider in addressing these urban challenges.
Young birds that eat insects with conspicuous warning colouration to advertise their toxicity to would-be predators quickly learn to avoid other prey that carry the same markings. Developing on this understanding, a University of Bristol team have shown for the very first time that birds don't just learn the colors of dangerous prey, they can also learn the appearance of the plants such insects li
Consuming sustainably sourced wild meat instead of domesticated livestock reduces greenhouse gas emissions and retains precious tropical forest systems, which in turn mitigates the effects of climate change.
A team led by Professor Dr. Bent Brachvogel, Head of Experimental Neonatology at the Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Cologne, has discovered previously unknown regulatory mechanisms of tissue organization. Together with other researchers in Brachvogel's team, first author of the new study and licensed pharmacist Kristina Bubb investigated changes in the so-called extracellular matrix (
Stories can play a role in shifting the importance of particular moral values in children, according to a new study. The findings suggest an important lesson in the moral education of children could be as close as the book in their hands. "Media can distinctly influence separate moral values and get kids to place more or less importance on those values depending on what is uniquely emphasized in
Professor Jim Hall, Professor of Climate and Environmental Risk, and Johannes Bednar, Oxford University Centre for the Environment and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, write:
Researchers from Indiana University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Texas A&M University published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on consumers' actual purchase behavior.
A new study suggests that Mylodon — a ground sloth that lived in South America until about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago — was not a strict vegetarian like all of its living relatives. Based on a chemical analysis of amino acids preserved in sloth hair, the researchers uncovered evidence that this gigantic extinct sloth was an omnivore, at times eating meat or other animal protein in addition to pl
Greenhouse gases are colorless, scentless and invisible, making them exceptionally hard to measure. Fortunately, some tools and techniques can help — one of the most powerful being artificial intelligence, says green technologist Charlotte Degot. By processing massive amounts of data on carbon emissions, she explains how AI makes it possible for corporations to set meaningful climate targets, mor
Alla celltyper i motorbarken, den del av hjärnan som styr våra rörelser, har nu kartlagts i en "cellatlas", i ett stort internationellt forskningsprojekt. Syftet är att öka kunskapen om hjärnans sjukdomar, som ALS, och bidra till bättre behandlingar. Rörelse är en mycket komplicerad process som omfattar miljontals nervceller i olika delar av hjärnan, där motorbarken har en central roll. Signalern
Researchers have analyzed ancient zeolite specimens collected from the edges of East Iceland to discover that zeolites separate calcium isotopes in a wholly unexpected way.
The medication naloxone is so effective at saving the lives of opioid overdose victims that some people worry that it might make drug users think heroin and related drugs are no longer risky. But a new study suggests that is not the case.
Flakes of paint could be one of the most abundant type of microplastic particles in the ocean, new research has suggested. Through a range of surveys conducted across the North Atlantic Ocean, scientists estimated that each cubic meter of seawater contained an average of 0.01 paint flakes.
Drop an ice cube into a glass of water. You can probably picture the way it starts to melt. You also know that no matter what shape it takes, you'll never see it melt into something like a snowflake, composed everywhere of sharp edges and fine cusps. Mathematicians model this melting process with equations. The equations work well, but it's taken 130 years to prove that they conform to obvious…
Researchers have created a new hydrogel tablet that can rapidly purify contaminated water. One tablet can disinfect a liter of river water and make it suitable for drinking in an hour or less. As much as a third of the world's population don't have access to clean drinking water , according to some estimates, and half of the population could live in water-stressed areas by 2025. Finding a solutio
Stream Naked and Afraid on discovery+ ► https://www.discoveryplus.com/show/naked-and-afraid About Naked and Afraid: What happens when you put two complete strangers – sans clothes – in some of the most extreme environments on Earth? Each male-female duo is left with no food, no water, no clothes, and only one survival item. #NakedAndAfraid #Discovery #NakedAndAfraidFanEdition Subscribe to Discove
Last year, if there was one thing most of us thought about a lot more than normal, it was survival . The pandemic turned out to be a wake-up call that everything can go south in a matter of days, if not hours. As a result, panic buying and hoarding began to frequently appear in the news. And now that things have calmed down (relatively speaking), more people than ever have learned that when it co
Traditionsenligt öppnades dörrarna i Börshuset i Gamla Stan i Stockholm prick klockan 13.00 och det tillkännagavs att årets Nobelpris i litteratur tilldelas Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Nature, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02690-5 The COVID-19 pandemic, a UNICEF report and a review of the latest research all highlight the urgent need for better prevention and treatment of youth anxiety and depression.
Valget er faldet på Jens Ringsmose som ny rektor på Syddansk Universitet. Han kommer fra stillingen som dekan på Det Samfundsvidenskabelige Fakultet på SDU.
Many of the most effective human medicines and therapies have had their origin in nature. Myriam Cotten says there's a good reason for researchers to look to flora and fauna when seeking new therapies.
Mænd skal tilbydes en screening for udposning på hovedpulsåren, når de fylder 65 år. Det mener Sundhedsstyrelsen, der vurderer, at en national screening på området kan halvere dødeligheden og redde 100-200 liv om året.
The Australian-made space weather satellite CUAVA-1 was deployed into orbit from the International Space Station on Wednesday night. Launched to the space station in August aboard a SpaceX rocket, a major focus of this shoebox-sized CubeSat is to study what radiation from the Sun does to Earth's atmosphere and electronic devices.
I nabobygningen til Nordsøen Oceanarium er der fyldt med alt tænkeligt udstyr til trawlfiskeri og dambrug. Men alle kæder, trawlskovle, flydere og net er bittesmå – for her tester ingeniører og fiskere de nyeste påfund inden for fiskeredskaber.
A thick slick of crude oil leaking from a loaded tanker stretched across the ocean toward Huntington Beach. It blackened miles of popular Orange County beaches, threatening wildlife and wetlands.
In a rural community in East Texas, a group of women decided to meet in secret to discuss politics, holding its first clandestine gathering in a secluded barn at the end of a dark road. Thereafter, they rotated meeting locations each month, ensuring that the drapes were tightly closed in members' houses before the meetings began. New members signed nondisclosure agreements, promising not to reveal
A century of managing the English countryside badly has led to collapsing ecosystems, growing threats from flooding, more farms going bust than ever before and a global climate crisis still lacking any coherent and practical approach to sorting it out.
A new study led by a research team from the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG; CSIC-IRTA-UAB-UB), with the participation of numerous Spanish scientific institutions, has evaluated the genetic diversity of the Iberian wild goat (Capra pyrenaica), a species with scarce genetic variability and highly differentiated populations. This research, published in the journal Evolutionary App
When we look at biological cells under a microscope, they're usually not very colorful. Normally, to visualize them we have to artificially add color—typically by staining. By doing so, we can see their shape and arrangement in a tissue and determine whether they're healthy or not.
Over recent years, England has faced a concerning rise in cyberbullying compared to other countries. This issue has been compounded by an increase in digital activity among teenagers during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Benjamin List and David MacMillan, respectively from Germany and the US, will share the 10 million Swedish kronor (£870,000) Nobel prize in chemistry 2021 for their development of "organocatalysis"—a precise tool for constructing molecules which has boosted pharmaceutical research and made chemistry greener and cheaper.
Long into the 19th century, seascapes were considered an expression of patriotism. Artists who painted in a 17th century style were valued more. This tradition stifled innovation in the genre, Cécile Bosman has concluded. She will defend her Ph.D. thesis on 13 October.
Two new species of venomous snakes were just added to Asia's fauna—the Nujiang pit viper (Gloydius lipipengi) from Zayu, Tibet, and the Glacier pit viper (G. swild) found west of the Nujiang River and Heishui, Sichuan, east of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
Earth's rapidly changing Arctic coastal regions have an outsized climatic effect that echoes around the globe. Tracking processes behind this evolution is a daunting task even for the best scientists.
Privathospitalet Progardia kan allerede inden for den første måned undersøge 120 mænd fra Region Midtjylland, som har indført regionale alderskriterier for adgang til MR-diagnostik for prostatakræft. Og det endda til en pris, der formentlig er lavere end det offentliges.
An international research team led by Professor Stephanie Grond from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Tübingen has found that the natural substance collinolactone reduces artificially-induced stress on nerve cells, protecting them from the kind of damage that occurs in neurodegenerative diseases. Collinolactone is isolated from soil bacteria, and its chemical structure is id
The choice of color to represent information in scientific images is a fundamental part of communicating findings. However, a number of color palettes that are widely used to display critical scientific results are not only dangerously misleading, but also unreadable to a proportion of the population.
The sweet, earthy fragrance of sandalwood oil has made it immensely popular in incense sticks, candles and perfumes. But its beautiful scent may also be its downfall—Australian sandalwood (Santalum spicatum) is facing extinction in the wild.
Black students are often subject to harsher discipline at school than white students, and those punishments can damage students' perceptions of their school and negatively impact their academic success years later, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
Martin Rostgaard-Knudsen tiltræder 1. november stillingen som præhospital lægefaglig direktør i Region Nordjylland. Han ønsker at udvikle det præhospitale område med patienten i fokus.
American households making less than $50,000 are more likely than higher-earning families to spend the expanded child tax credit on essential expenses and tutors for their children, a survey finds. Families are using the money from the credit in a variety of ways, depending on household income and job circumstance, the survey results show. "Even before the pandemic, low- and middle-income US fami
Enbart visselblåsare och grävande journalister kan kontrollera säkerhets- och underrättelsetjänster i västerländska demokratier. Varken parlament eller rättssystem har klarat av att upptäcka kränkningar av de egna medborgarnas rättigheter. Det visar en avhandling av Alexandra Franzén, nybliven doktor i sociologi vid Lunds universitet. – Det var först när Håkan Isacson berättade för Peter Bratt oc
Company directors, officers or major shareholders, worried that their personal share sales might trigger aggressive short selling from investors tracking their moves, are disguising their trades with a cautious, incremental approach often spread over several days, new research from the University of Bath shows.
If you're contemplating upgrading to Windows 11 on an AMD system, you may want to hold off just a bit. The semiconductor design firm has confirmed that Windows 11 performance is a bit lower on Ryzen CPUs than under Windows 10 right now. AMD has published a new support article, PA-400, detailing the problem. The company is suffering two regressions under Windows 11. First, "measured and functional
PLUS. Et helt nyt innovationscenter og mere end 30 mia. kroner investeret i udvikling af ny batteriteknologi, skal bringe General Motors tilbage på tronen som en af verdens største bilproducenter. Men måske er det allerede for sent.
By now, especially if you are a regular reader here, you have probably heard of the connectome project, an attempt to entirely map the cells and connections of the human brain. This goal is actually comprised of multiple initiatives, one of which is the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) funded by the NIH. They have now published in Nature their first major resu
Morten Sodemann, der er overlæge, professor og forskningsleder på Indvandrermedicinsk Klinik, Odense Universitetshospital og Syddansk Universitet, er dette års modtager af Folkesundhedsprisen.
The sleeper fish Eleotris oxycephala is found in freshwater streams and estuaries from tropical to temperate zones. The recent discovery of an individual of this species much further north than previously recorded suggests that the range of this species may be expanding in Japan.
With Artemis, NASA will establish a long-term presence at the Moon, opening more of the lunar surface to exploration than ever before. This growth of lunar activity will require new, more robust communications, navigation, and networking capabilities. NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program has developed the LunaNet architecture to meet these needs.
Lots of climate research focuses on averages over large areas—often the globe as a whole—but many decisions related to the environment and water availability are made by local authorities. Zooming in on these regional levels can be difficult. The water cycle is complex to begin with, and climate models often get conflicting results at the regional scale. Further, natural variability is "noisier" w
In August 2021, new testing equipment arrived at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in the form of a gravity offset table. NASA engineers will use the table to test robotic satellite servicing technologies that will one day operate in space.
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed seaweed-based inks and materials for developing colorful 2D and 3D shapes and models.
Researchers analyzed the accumulated data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and depicted the motion of a young twin star system XZ Tauri over three years. This first-ever "ALMA Animation" of twin stars sheds new light on the origins of the binary stars and the planets to be formed around them.
On Saturn's giant moon Titan, liquid methane and other hydrocarbons rain down, carving rivers, lakes and seas in a landscape of frozen water. The complex chemistry on this icy world could be analogous to the period when life first emerged on Earth, or it might yield an entirely new type of life. And even farther—light-years away in deep space, a black hole shreds the ultra-dense core of a dead sta
Standing on a boat bobbing gently in the Red Sea, Egyptian diving instructor Mohamed Abdelaziz looks on as tourists snorkel amid the brilliantly coloured corals, a natural wonder now under threat from climate change.
Just weeks before the crucial COP26 climate conference, another global UN summit—this one tasked with reversing the destruction of nature—officially kicks off next week in Kunming, China.
The Human Brain Project Summit 2021 provides an open forum for hundreds of researchers, plus policy makers, media and public, to discuss exciting scientific results, the latest developments in the project, and the cutting-edge services and tools available on the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure This year's event will take place in an on-site and online format, with the European Brain Summit being
Nature, Published online: 06 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02747-5 Tips and tools for making better colour choices in images and figures. Plus, 'elegant' catalysts win the chemistry Nobel, and the legacy of departing NIH director Francis Collins.
Overlæge og ph.d. Claus Bistrup er ny professor ved Klinisk Institut på SDU. Her skal han forske i konsekvenserne af proteinholdig urin med særligt fokus på, hvordan man kan forhindre de skadelige virkninger.
Nature, Published online: 06 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02701-5 Geochemical analysis suggests that an obsidian mirror owned by a confidant of the English Tudor queen was made in Mexico.
Nature, Published online: 06 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02716-y Hygromycin A doesn't work well against most bacteria, but it shines as a treatment for Lyme disease.
PLUS. Under coronapandemiens første bølge manglede der værnemidler. Med hjælp fra en 3D-print-virksomhed gik lægen Michael Mølmer fra løs idé til prototype på 48 timer.
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26194-y Catalytic addition of a carbon chain and a hydrogen across a double bond has often required an added hydride source. Here the authors show a method to add alkanes with an amino functionality to olefins, wherein a nickel catalyst uses the amine itself as the hydride source, obviating an external hydride reagen
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26057-6 Cilia, tiny outgrowths of cells, are essential for life. Here, the author's describe the scaffold protein TRIP6, which promotes the assembly of ciliary proteins required for ciliogenesis, and show that its absence results in hydrocephalus.
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26163-5 Sterylglucosidase 1 (Sgl1) is a virulence factor in Cryptococcus neoformans that modulates fungal pathogenesis and host response. Here, the authors characterize Sgl1 structurally, identify Sgl1 inhibitors, and demonstrate Sgl1 inhibition has efficacy in mouse models of infection.
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26083-4 The noncoding RNA RN7SK regulates RNA polymerase II pausing and splicing. Here the authors deplete RN7SK in mouse and human during epidermal stem cell differentiation and reveal a novel role in orchestrating bidirectional transcription of highly expressed gene pairs.
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26147-5 Phase separation has been suggested as a mechanism for heterochromatin formation through condensation of heterochromatin-associated factors. Here the authors show Polycomb complex PRC1 forms condensates on chromatin. Using optogenetic tools they nucleate local Polycomb condensates to show that this phase sepa
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26166-2 The Lake Malawi cichlid fishes are an example of extreme vertebrate radiation; however, there is very little sequence divergence among the species. Here the authors present a comparative genome-wide methylome study to suggest DNA methylation played a major role in the extensive phenotypic diversity amongst th
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25786-y Microtubule tracks are important for the transport of molecules within axons. Here, the authors show that ATAT1, the enzyme responsible for acetylating a-tubulin, receives acetyl groups from ATP citrate lyase whose stability is regulated by Elongator, a protein mutated in the neuronal disease Familial dysauto
Nature Communications, Published online: 07 October 2021; doi:10.1038/s41467-021-26173-3 The classical narrow bandgap donor-acceptor organic semiconductors show great application potential in organic electronics, bio-imaging and other fields. Here, the authors systematically and rigorously demonstrate their open-shell diradical character via experimental and theoretical investigation.
Increasingly, medical professionals are advising patients not to bother with annual physicals and checkups. But a recent review suggests that — while full-fledged physicals are mostly unnecessary — occasional, basic checkups confer real health benefits, including fostering healthy primary care relationships.
PLUS. En autonom bugserbåd fra Sea Machine viste, at den snildt kan manøvrere rundt i danske farvande uden hjælp. Nu er teknologien klar til større skibe, lyder det.
PLUS. Analyse: Organisationer presser på for flere penge til forskning. Men budgettet er låst fast til en procent af BNP – endda baseret på en tvivlsom beregning.
Professor Peter Zygmunt beskriver en av årets Nobelpristagare David Julius som en väldigt öppen och nyfiken person som själv visade ett stort intresse för arbetet i laboratoriet.
Byggeriet af havnemoler er en videnskab i et hjørne af Aalborg Universitet, der huser en bassin med 400.000 liter vand, 30 bølgegeneratorer – og en algoritme, som hele verden bruger, når virkelighedstro bølger skal slippes løs.
A powerful earthquake collapsed at least one coal mine and dozens of mud houses in southwest Pakistan early Thursday, killing at least 23 people as the death toll continued to creep higher. At least another 200 people were injured, an official said.
Chiropractors can still get state-approved continuing ed credit for anti-vaccination courses, with bonus COVID misinformation now added to the curriculum. Plandemic star Judy Mikovits joins the faculty. The post first appeared on Science-Based Medicine .
Last week the pharmaceutical company Merck released promising early data on a pill for Covid-19, which trials suggest halves hospitalisations and deaths. So what do we know about this experimental treatment? Madeleine Finlay talks to the Guardian's science correspondent Hannah Devlin about whether this antiviral could be a gamechanger. And as some UK experts warn ' there isn't much A&E capacity l
Last week the pharmaceutical company Merck released promising early data on a pill for Covid-19, which trials suggest halves hospitalisations and deaths. So what do we know about this experimental treatment? Madeleine Finlay talks to the Guardian's science correspondent Hannah Devlin about whether this antiviral could be a gamechanger. And as some UK experts warn ' there isn't much A&E capacity le
Nasa's Artemis mission to send a crewed vehicle to the moon set to further partnership between the two countries Get our free news app ; get our morning email briefing The Aukus agreement will boost collaboration between the United States and Australia in space, Australian space agency chief Enrico Palermo says. Palermo was speaking on a panel with Nasa administrator Bill Nelson which also discus
Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor drove much of United States foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. But it had the wrong name. From a physical point of view, it should have been called the "sandpile theory." Real-world political phase transitions tend to happen not in neat sequences, but i
John Jay Hopkins's visit to Japan in 1955, as an informal emissary of "Atoms for Peace," must have seemed surreal to everyone involved. Hopkins was the head of an old American shipbuilding firm based out of Groton, Connecticut. Electric Boat Company had struggled in the 1920s and 1930s with its reputation as a "merchant of death," having sold warships to all sides in major wars. During World War
At first, they trickle in: one bird here, a few birds there. Then, at dusk's cue, a dark smudge materializes on the horizon. Thousands of starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris ) slowly come into focus, etching flight paths across the winter sky as they stream toward their evening roost in north-central England. Suddenly, the flock dips and twists like a horse tossing its head. It swirls into a funnel, the
David McComas has a favorite "astrosphere," the environment created by a star's stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira. In an image from 2006, Mira is heading to the right, at 291,000 miles an hour, 10 times faster than the speed our sun ambles around the Milky Way. You can make out a "bow shock" forming ahead of the star, like one would ah
A new study of the genetic profiles of wild and hatchery coho salmon demonstrates important distinctions in how the two types of fish form mating pairs.
A study including more than 22,000 female nurses in Denmark evaluated exposure over 15-20 years to air pollution and road traffic noise to evaluate the impact on heart failure. Exposure to small particulate matter and road traffic noise over three years was associated with an increased risk for heart failure. The risks were greater among women who were former smokers or women who had high blood pr
The smarter the bird, the more unique welfare needs it has in captivity, according to a new study that helps to explain why many intelligent animals struggle in captivity. The findings are also important to owners of intelligent birds to ensure they provide them with naturalistic diets rather than processed foods.
PLUS. EU's reviderede drikkevandsdirektiv vil føre til flere ændringer i håndtering af legionella herhjemme. Blandt andet obligatoriske test i risikoejendomme.
The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent articles use data from meteorites derived from Vesta to resolve the 'missing mantle problem' and push back our knowledge of the solar system to just a couple of million years after it began to form.
Levels of eco-anxiety—the chronic fear of environmental doom—are growing, particularly among children and young people, and are likely to be significant and potentially damaging to individuals and society, warn experts in The BMJ today.
A large yellow bulldozer pushed a mound of sand toward the mouth of the Huntington Beach Channel, creating a barrier that would hopefully slow the amount of oil that was floating up to the nearby wetlands.
A new study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists looks at the causal relationship between outdoor air pollution levels on nationwide university entry examination day and students' cognitive performance in Brazil.
A new data source to help scientists better understand the ionosphere and its potential impact on communications and positioning, navigation, and timing—an essential utility for many critical operations—is now available to the public. The data, which was collected by sensors on GPS satellites in 2018, was released today through a collaborative effort by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Natio
(ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), ESO/Exeter/Kraus et al.) Since last year, astronomers have been peeking at a fascinating triple star system about 1,300 light-years away. The system, known as GW Orionis, is enshrouded in murky dust, indicating it's still very young. Scientists have struggled to explain the twisting and contortion of the dust rings. According to Bad Astronomy , a new analysis may have hit o
In 2011, Texas experienced one of its worst droughts ever. The dry, parched conditions caused over $7 billion in crop and livestock losses, sparked wildfires, pushed power grids to the limit, and reduced reservoirs to dangerously low levels. And according to a recent study led by geoscientists, the drought was worse than previously thought.
Metformin, a drug commonly prescribed against diabetes, holds promise against a rare type of childhood brain tumor in laboratory studies, an international team of researchers.
Using data from NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, scientists concluded that asteroids with highly porous rocks, such as Bennu, should lack fine-grained material on their surfaces.
Derelict Space Shuttle The Soviet Union's ambitious plans to get its Space Shuttle rival off the ground largely failed after the collapse of the communist state in the early 1990s. The USSR's second Buran-class shuttle, dubbed "Burya," is now rotting inside a derelict warehouse near the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It's been sitting there since at least 2002 , an important relic of the Sovi
Massages feel good, but do they actually speed muscle recovery? Turns out, they do. Scientists applied precise, repeated forces to injured mouse leg muscles and found that they recovered stronger and faster than untreated muscles, likely because the compression squeezed inflammation-causing cells out of the muscle tissue. This work offers a non-invasive, drug-free treatment that can help regenerat
Scientists provide promising new evidence that the 'planar cell polarity,' a powerful signaling pathway, is a widely used mechanism for the formation and maintenance of a large number of synapses.
Goss's bacterial wilt and leaf blight is one of the most damaging diseases affecting corn. The most effective way to control this disease is to plant corn varieties that are resistant to the disease. In other words, growers avoid the disease by growing certain varieties of corn. In part, this is the easiest method because scientists don't yet know much about Goss's wilt.
For millions of people living in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, accessing timely care during maternal and neonatal emergencies remains a complex problem.
A sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years shows the usual rules of body size evolution change during mass extinctions and their recoveries. The discovery is an early step toward predicting how evolution will play out on the other side of the current extinction crisis.
Nature, Published online: 06 October 2021; doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02669-2 An inexpensive type of portable filter efficiently screened SARS-CoV-2 and other disease-causing organisms from hospital air.
Infection by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) involves the attachment of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of its spike proteins to the ACE2 receptors on the peripheral membrane of host cells. Binding is initiated by a down-to-up conformational change in the spike protein, the change that presents the RBD…
ECOLOGY, SUSTAINABILITY SCIENCE Retraction for "A global network of marine protected areas for food," by Reniel B. Cabral, Darcy Bradley, Juan Mayorga, Whitney Goodell, Alan M. Friedlander, Enric Sala, Christopher Costello, and Steven D. Gaines, which was first published October 26, 2020; 10.1073/pnas.2000174117 (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 28134–28139)….
Rotavirus genomes are distributed between 11 distinct RNA molecules, all of which must be selectively copackaged during virus assembly. This likely occurs through sequence-specific RNA interactions facilitated by the RNA chaperone NSP2. Here, we report that NSP2 autoregulates its chaperone activity through its C-terminal region (CTR) that promotes RNA–RNA interactions…
Understanding kinetic control of biological processes is as important as identifying components that constitute pathways. Insulin signaling is central for almost all metazoans, and its perturbations are associated with various developmental disorders, metabolic diseases, and aging. While temporal phosphorylation changes and kinetic constants have provided some insights, constant or variable…
Thermodynamics tells us to expect underwater contact between two hydrophobic surfaces to result in stronger adhesion compared to two hydrophilic surfaces. However, the presence of water changes not only energetics but also the dynamic process of reaching a final state, which couples solid deformation and liquid evacuation. These dynamics can…
Lymphocyte-rich classic Hodgkin lymphoma (LR-CHL) is a rare subtype of Hodgkin lymphoma. Recent technical advances have allowed for the characterization of specific cross-talk mechanisms between malignant Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells and different normal immune cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) of CHL. However, the TME of LR-CHL has not yet…
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer in women worldwide in terms of both incidence and mortality. Persistent infection with high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV), namely 16, 18, 31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, and 68, constitute a necessary cause for the…
Zoonotic spillover and hybridization of parasites are major emerging public and veterinary health concerns at the interface of infectious disease biology, evolution, and control. Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease of global importance caused by parasites of the Schistosoma genus, and the Schistosoma spp. system within Africa represents a key…
Electrification of chemical reactions is crucial to fundamentally transform our society that is still heavily dependent on fossil resources and unsustainable practices. In addition, electrochemistry-based approaches offer a unique way of catalyzing reactions by the fast and continuous alteration of applied potentials, unlike traditional thermal processes. Here, we show how…
The availability of prey and the ability to adapt to changing environments played key roles in the evolution of sharks. A new study, in which over 3,000 shark teeth were analyzed, provides new insight into how modern shark communities were established.
Oil and gas emissions vary widely throughout the supply chain, making mitigation of both super-emitters and emissions sources near populations top priorities for public health and climate, according to findings from a literature review by the nonprofit energy science and policy institute Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy. "Methane and Health-Damaging Air Pollutants Fro
Two NAU astronomers presented groundbreaking research at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, a branch of the American Academy of Sciences.
Women with undiagnosed endometriosis will have difficulty getting pregnant without IVF, according to a new study. Women whose endometriosis went undiagnosed until after they began fertility treatment ended up doing more cycles, used treatments that aren't recommended, and were less likely to have a baby, says Katrina Moss, a researcher at the University of Queensland School of Public Health. "By
Scientists hope that tiny sacs of material excreted by cells — so-called extracellular vesicles — can be used to deliver drugs inside the body. Researchers now show that these nano-bubbles can transport protein drugs that reduce inflammation caused by different diseases. The technique shows promising results in animal models.
A new study showed a link between an individual's sense of purpose and their ability to recall vivid details. The researchers found that while both a sense of purpose and cognitive function made memories easier to recall, only a sense of purpose bestowed the benefits of vividness and coherence.
A team of researchers assembled a sulfonated polyaniline (SPAN) organic electrochemical network device (OEND) for use in reservoir computing. SPAN was deposited on gold electrodes which formed a disordered network providing humidity-dependent electrical properties. The SPAN OEND was tested for reservoir computing using benchmark tasks and spoken-digit classification, which showed 70% accuracy. The
Researchers have developed a new way to determine whether individual patients will respond to a specific cancer drug or not. This kind of test could help doctors to choose alternative therapies for patients who don't respond to the therapies normally used to treat their cancer.
Cells that normally nourish healthy brain cells called neurons release toxic fatty acids after neurons are damaged, a new study in rodents shows. This phenomenon is likely the driving factor behind most, if not all, diseases that affect brain function, as well as the natural breakdown of brain cells seen in aging, researchers say.
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